Joe Sonka has some initial data on the returns from last night, but his take is that the GOTV effort didn't work. According to Sonka, she underperformed in Democratic strongholds, and the big suprise for me was the difference between Democratic Congressman John Yarmuth's votes and her's in the Louisville area. Yarmuth scored 12,000 more votes than Grimes did. Grimes only won ten out of 120 counties in Kentucky. She did even worse than Jack Conway in 2010 and Bruce Lunsford in 2008.
While there will be debate on what strategy might have worked better for Grimes, we know for sure that her chasing the redneck vote did NOT work. In fact, it was a big failure. And she did concentrate on the redneck vote.
Others will say, "Well, Kentucky is a redneck state, so who the hell else are you going to get the votes from?" Yes, it is a redneck state, and you cannot win without some redneck votes. But it appears that Grimes focused her efforts primarily on gaining redneck votes at the expense of urban voters, at least this is what the initial findings are saying.
Yes, there is an insane, stupid balancing act required in Kentucky for any Democrat running for federal office. And it appears the last person who knew how to do it was Wendell Ford. Since him, it seems that Democratic attempts to gain white voters with a chip on their shoulders are written by someone who has never visited a rural area in their lives.
I don't know how to do that balancing act, but it appears that Grimes erred on the side of going whole hog on chasing the redneck vote. And it simply did not work.