Democratic challenger Mike Callaghan
(campaign website) has closed to a four-point deficit against the GOP incumbent Shelley Moore Capito among the most likely voters in a soon-to-be-released poll conducted for the WV State Democratic Party.
Consider this takeover opportunity the best chance to get the biggest bang for your buck. West Virginia media rates are dirt cheap. A $20 contribution will buy a 30-second spot on a cable system. A $1000 contribution buys 55 radio spots on the highest rated station in the district.
Despite being outspent 50-to-1 on campaign advertizing, Mike Callaghan is snapping at the Queen of Corruption's heels because of his energetic grassroots campaign. That's why Callaghan-Capito has been added to the DCCC's emerging races list
OK, Capito's feat in getting herself implicated in EVERY GOP corruption scandal (from DeLay/ARMPAC through her asleep-at-the-switch performance on the Page Board) has helped. A lot.
We need to donate to this guy! NOW! There isn't a district in this country where our donations will go farther than low-cost WV-02.
THE WVDP POLL
OK, numbers-crunching OCD folks, here's what the poll ( a statewide dip oversampled to give crunchable numbers in each of the 3 Congressional districts) said among the most likely voters (defined as those who rated their interest in voting at 7 or above on a ten point scale) among this sampling of 402 registered voters in WV's Second District:
Capito 47
Callagahn 43
Und/Ref 10
5.49% margin of error
It's a pretty solid read. In low-turnout off-years like this, turnout tends to run low. And folks are loathe to admit to pollsters they just aren't going to vote. Anyone who says five or below tends not to bother to show up on election day. The sixes are a 50/50 proposition at best.
Among the folks who are going to show up on election day, this race is darned near a dead heat. It is in the margin, anyway. A little help from us and Mike will get over the top.
The district has twenty points more Democrats than Republicans. The crossover Dems who have provided Capito's margin in the past have been mainly fundamentalists, who are most disappointed in Capito on Foley and her straddling on social issues... giving them lip service when speaking to them and then trying to sound like she is on both sides in front of the general public.
Their lack of enthusiasm to turn out hands us a chance to win back this historically Democratic district. And they are right not to want to back Shelley. She takes their votes then badmouths them behind their backs. Capito is another Washington Republican elitist who couldn't give a rat's hindquarters for Faith voters except in November of even-numbered years.
WHY YOU SHOULD SUPPORT MIKE CALLAGHAN
The DCCC isn't doing jack to help Callaghan out, so we have to carry the ball ourselves. Putting Mike on the emerging race list was very nice of them, but what he needs is money.
Mike Callaghan is a pro-choice Democrat who advocates universal health care and getting out of Iraq.
Got it? Good. Give him money. You can read his positions on his site at mikewv.com.
Shelley Moore Capito is singularly corrupt and ruthlessly ambitous about moving up in the GOP House leadership, as her abandoning a post on House Transportation (where she could have helped her district) in favor on one on House Rules (where she rigs debate rules for the venal GOP leadership and their K Street lobbyist paymasters). She's adamantly pro-war and anti-civil liberties. The closest thing to a liberal position is she votes for full funding of the NEA. Odd, she's for spending money on Piss Christ but not $1500 bonuses for the troops.
WHAT HAPPENED TO THIS SUPPOSEDLY SAFE GOP SEAT? MARK FOLEY
Callaghan internal polling conducted by Schroth Eldon & Associates had him running 11 points down prior to Foleygate. So, it is clear that Capito's failure to provide responsible oversight as a member of the Page Board and lame effort to evade responsibility for her inaction by whining she was out of the loop (wasn't it her job to make sure she was?) have damaged her greatly.
The direct hit Capito took as a member of the Page Board reenforced the peripheral damage to her image from her other ethical scandals.
Capito was the largest single GOP House recipient of Tom DeLay's ARMPAC funds. She did Tommy Boy yeowoman's service by voting to change the ethics rules so DeLay could keep his job as majority leader after indictment.
Capito was implicated to the Safavian GSA aspect of the Abramoff scandals. Her aide testified in the trial and claimed Capito was out of the loop on this one as well. Capito seems to consistently and conveniently manage not to be informed by her own staff what they are doing in her name. Even if this is true, it is an indictment of her managerial competence.
Capito had to be shamed into donating her contributions from
convicted felon Randy "Duke" Cunningham. Capito may have spent her time on the Hill shilling for the out-of-state corporate interests who fill her campaign coffers, but her having to donate so much of her tainted campaign money to charitable organizations is the one notable benefit she has managed to deliver for her constituents.
Same for Bob Ney, another of her allies. Being a close associate of Shelley Moore Capito seems to inevitably result in disgrace. It must be the karma rubbing off from her dad: three-time Governor and two-time resident of federal prison Arch Moore. Get close to Shelley and you go to jail.
As Vice-Chair of the GOP House Conference on Prescription Drugs, Capito played a lead role along with PHARMA pimp Billy Tauzin in writing the legislation that prevented the federal government from using its massive negotiating leverage to secure lower prices on medicine for our Seniors. Instead, Capito banned the feds from haggling on behalf of Seniors and wrote into the law a requirement that the Big Drug Companies get paid full-pop retail for their products. It's like writing a law saying you have to pay sticker price for a new car and making dickering over the price illegal.
Since she also opposes reimportation of prescription drugs from Canada, toss passing a law that makes it illegal to bring in a Toyota to compete with a Chrysler on top of the pile of favors she does for Big Drug.
No wonder the pharmaceutical industry has rewarded Capito with hundreds of thousands of dollars since she came to Congress six years ago. It was great deal for them. They spent hundreds of thousands in return for a guaranteed stream of multi-billion dollar profits...all at the expense of taxpayers and Seniors.
Then there is her close ally from their joint effort on the GOP PROM committee, Mark Foley.
We are supposed to believe that despite working with Foley on this PROM outfit that Capito was SHOCKED and DISGUSTED and SURPRISED by the hideous behavior of Mark Foley.
Everyone in Washington knew about Foley, yet we are supposed to believe that Capito, despite having Foley as her PROM date and serving on the Page Board, never had a clue.
I have a really hard time believing this...but let's concede the point.
Even if she didn't know, she should have. Just like she should have known her aide was using her clout to get favors done for Safavian and Abramoff. I thought conservatives were supposed to believe in personal responsibility and accountability for their actions. Capito seems to have missed that part of her ideological orientation program.
CAPITO's PRE-FOLEY STRATEGY
Capito started her media campaign in August with soft focus positive spots. They were 30-second spots in which she had people from the district singing her praises. Outside of having one miner make a stupid joke that there wasn't much difference betwen a miner and a mule (and what does that say that Capito thought that was cute?), they were pretty good. And she managed to avoid saying the word "Republican" in this 20 point-plus Democratic-majority district.
BTW Capito STILL hasn't used the word "Republican" in any ad yet.
After this, Capito started trying to distance herself from Bush despite her record of voting with him 86 percent of the time (cq link). Suddenly this ultaconservative member of the Republican Study Group statred reinventing herself as a McCainiac independent voice and rebel.
Amusingly, after years of an ultrasoft positon on immigration, Capito started citing differences between Bush on herself on immigration, desperately embracing the border fence she opposed for years at the behest of her campaign contributors. She made a big noise on the useless election year gesture of building a 700-mile fence on a 2000-mile border but remained adamant on refusing to increase or even impose meaningful penalties on the business owners who knowingly hire illegal aliens.
In addition to being in PHARMA's pocket, Capito is also in the pocket of the Big Fruit companies whose operations in the Eastern Panhandle of the district depend on low-cost illegal alien labor to pick the apples. In addition to the corporate-owned orchards, Capito is also in the pocket of the developers throwing up golf course communities all over the Panhandle. When you throw in her support from the non-union coal operators who have started hiring illegal aliens to mine coal, you see the pattern.
In the rankest and most transparent of politically calculated moves, Capito tried to pull off a slight-of-hand move on immigration: pretending to be tough with supporting the fence while opposing the criminal sanctions for employers who want to exploit cheap immigrant labor.
Capito is back to pushing immigration again today. Callaghan ripped her to shreds in the newspaper coverage (Gazz imm story).
So, she was trying to distance from Bush and rally the conservative base while keeping her paymasters happy. Then Foley hit.
CAPITO POST-FOLEY MOVES
She went on a relentless negative attack on Mike Callaghan. Still playing to the base, she started a rather poorly shot ad on taxes, hitting Callaghan for wanting to repeal the Bush tax cuts on the top 1 percent of earners and just flat-out lying with a claim that Callaghahn wanted to raise payroll taxes and the retirement age for Social Security. It was a ballsy move for someone who has supported privatization for six years (and now is pretending she did not despite her volunteer response on her Project Vote Smart NPAT form) and has a husband who is an exec with a financial services firm which stands to benefit from privatization.
Capito pounded on these tax-themed ads for three weeks, just flooding the airwaves. I guess her tracking polls must have told her these weren't arresting her fall, so last week she shifted to a very personal attack on Democrat Mike Callaghan.
THE STUPID VOTE-BUYING AD
Capito came up with this ridiculous ad accusing Callaghan of being asleep at the switch as a federal prosecutor during what Capito falsely claims is the biggest vote-buying scandal in state history.
It starts out with a grainy picture of Mike and saying Mike Callaghan says he wants to clean up Congress but...
Here's the rub. The vote-buying case came up after Callaghan has moved on from the US Attorney's office and become Secretary of the Department of Environmental Protection. Capito is cirticizing Callaghan for not prosecuting a case that dropped in the USA office AFTER he was heading the state version of EPA.
By the same logic, Mike should be running an ad against Shelley for not voting for the Civil Rights Act, Social Security Act, or the freaking creation of the First Bank of the United States. Hell, he might as well say she opposed the Magna Carta.
Outside of having an utterly illogical timeline, which even the state GOP mouthpiece Charleston Daily Mail mocked roundly (daily mail story), Capito's decision to spend her money inflating Callaghan's name recognition figures and stating that he wants to clean up Congress were tactical errors that have strategic implications. Capito spent half a million dollars running ads that let people know they had a choice, the name of this choice, and his primary issue defined justb the way he wants it.
And, Good Lord, calling this the biggest vote-buying scandal in state history is moronic. We've had two governors (including Capito's father) and several Senate Presidents go to jail. We had the infamous 1960 Primary where you could not get a $5 bill at a bank or a pint of whiskey anywhere in the state.
Mike Callaghan was right. Capito's as is a "laughable reach".
THE BACKLASH
Capito went negative too early and too often. She already had a turnout problem with the GOP base demoralized. Now she has driven turnout down even further with her relentlessly savage and poorly targeted negative campaigning.
Capito has abandoned any pretense of a ground game in this district which traditionally rewards retail (check my past posts here and at Our Congress). She is now totally dependent on her TV and radio money advantage to carry her home against the spirited but underfunded challenge from Mike Callaghan.
And she doesn't have much of that left. She's spent 2.25 million of her 2.5 driving up her own negatives and boosting Callaghan name recognition. And in the time she has spent this money she has dopped from an 11 point lead to four. Of the 250K she has left according the FEC filings, a big chunk of that is going to be eaten up with staff costs and other unreported expenditures. Even if she switches to a positive focus for the last week, she doesn't have enough money to overcome the damage she's done herself with the negative barrage.
In short, she has blown this race. The best thing she had going for her in this Democratic majority district was her image as a likable and gentle lady. She wrecked that herself driving up her own negatives viciously and pettily savaging Callaghan.
Does anyone believe the 10 percent undecided are going to anyone but Callaghan? Folks have known Shelley since she was a little girl growing up in the Governor's Mansion. She's dropped two million on this race so far plus six more on her previous three Congrssional races. If folks were going to vote for her, they'd already be in her column.
WHAT WE NEED TO DO
Get Callaghan enough money to put out his positive message over this final week of the campaign. Shelley has poisoned the well, If Mike offers them some sugar, folks are going to flock to him.
We can smash the illusion of GOP invincibility in rural districts. We can remove the sole GOP federal officeholder in a key swing state for the 2008 election. We can derail the career of rising star in the GOP House leadership (which is desperate for female faces to trot out on TV).
Capito is desperate now. Heck, she's even sending out emails ((link) to her folks begging them to vote in website polls. Callaghan was beating her in web polls on the sites of the Charleston Gazette and WSAZ TV. The WSAZ site wasn't set up properly to screen out folks who voted multiple times so they were able to shift that one. In the Gazz they were able to knock Mike down from 59 percent to 53.
Capito's last newsletter consisted entirely of begging for folks to log on and vote. You're telling me she didn;t have anything better for her folks to do the last ten days before the election?
We can elect a pro-choice, pro-working man Democrat in place of a pro-life Washington Republican corporate shill.
Act now. Go to the Callaghan campaign site and donate now.