The Political Dogfight received this report this morning by email at 6:46AM PACIFIC. SSP is down for the moment due to bandwidth issues. With that in mind I'm reposting here.
With the Election on August 2nd, Tim Tagaris, who has been the prime mover and reporter on the race between Republican Jean Schmidt and Democat and Iraq Veteran Paul Hackett, was called home on family business. Taking his place is his able reporting partner Bob Brigham of Swing State Project,
Here's his first report:
Bob Brigham: I swear, I have landed in the middle of a Normal Rockwell painting. I'm at a Democratic Party storefront on the most quintessential Main Street -- directly across the street from the GOP HQ. Quaint backdrop for a cut-throat political
race.
Here's the story, things are hopping. At nine in the morning, the office was abuzz with people working the phones. The voter ID numbers have been
great, Hackett isn't that buried on TV, and the vibe is very, very positive with
Hackett having the momentum.
I think we could actually pull this off. No matter what, we can beat the spread and claim momentum going into 2006. And we've proven the power of the blogosphere in this race.
The Hackett Campaign needs two things: Money and People.
The campaign workers LOVE the blogs -- the cover we're giving them is keeping them in the game. And it is making the Press.
The Cincinnati Enquirer reported Friday July 29,2005
In a sign that the 2nd Congressional District race might be tight,
the National Republican Congressional Committee has dumped more than $500,000 into a TV ad campaign attacking Democrat Paul Hackett.
The ad buy was estimated at $265,000 in the Cincinnati media market, along
with another $250,000 on Huntington, W.Va., stations that cover the eastern end
of the seven-county district.
[...]
Democrats, though, believe the TV ad blitz is the result of Hackett's success in raising his own campaign funds through online contributions.
Hackett has benefited from a surge of online support in the last week that has brought in, as of Thursday, an estimated $303,000 from more than 5,000 small campaign contributors through a Democratic group called ActBlue.com.
The online buzz for Hackett started last week when Democracy for America, the group founded by Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean endorsed Hackett's campaign in an e-mail to supporters, calling on them to contribute.
Several other liberal-leaning political Web logs, called blogs, urged their readers to contribute to Hackett on July 19, in honor or Blogosphere Day. On that date in 2004, online campaign contributions for Ginny Schrader, a
Democratic congressional candidate in Pennsylvania, raised $25,000.
Hackett's online contributions, which increase each minute, surpassed the money raised for Schrader in the first day and continue to grow.
"This has never been done for a congressional candidate before at this
level," said Tim Tagaris, a blogger who writes for Ohio Rep. Sherrod Brown's
GrowOhio.org blog and, separately, SwingStateProject.com, one of the Web sites
that urged online readers to support Hackett.
Hackett's on-line contributions have enabled him to spend far more money than
any Democratic candidate in the historically Republican district. [emphasis by The Political Dogfight]