Mayday PAC, Lawrence Lessig's "ironic" crusade to drive fundamental campaign finance reform by fighting fire (SuperPACs) with fire (his own anti-PAC), faced its first major test - and humiliating defeat - in the New Hampshire Republican primary yesterday. It was an expensive mistake, costing Mayday roughly $1.6 million (or more than a quarter of Mayday's entire budget for this cycle) plus a reputational hit to both its own and its founder's valuable brand names.
In medical practice, an after-action review of a case whose poor outcome is thought to have been avoidable is called an 'M&M' (morbidity and mortality). Below the fold, I offer Mayday PAC a bag of granite (state) M&Ms to chew on.
Mayday swung for the fences in its first at-bat in the major leagues by going all-in on the candidacy of little-known Republican, Jim Rubens, against his high-profile opponent Scott Brown - a carpetbagger with a whole lot of luggage - in the Republican primary contest to anoint a champion to unseat incumbent Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D). This was a controversial decision to say the least, and a controversy in which your humble diarist was happy to lead the charge (motivated not by some personal agenda, but rather by deep concern that Lessig's considerable popularity among progressives and the digerati was suppressing a healthy debate regarding a highly questionable strategy).
In Mayday's own words, the PAC sought to
select districts where a victory would be both surprising, and understood to be tied to this [campaign finance] reform. We are not looking for easy victories; nor are we looking for races in which different issues compete, and would make identifying the reason for victory difficult. We are looking for districts in which a victory would signal that conventional wisdom was wrong: that voters, that is, could be mobilized on the basis of this issue enough to dislodge even dominant incumbents.
The PAC found what it was looking for (or thought it did) in the New Hampshire Republican senate race, where little-known ex-state senator Jim Rubens was tilting at the notorious and front-running Scott Brown. To be fair, Rubens (unlike Brown) did have a long history of championing campaign finance reform (even pre-Mayday) plus a record free of Dark Money. And a Rubens win in the primary would indeed have been "surprising" to say the least: prior to Mayday's endorsement Rubens was polling in the single digits, far behind Scott Brown, with name recognition scoring no better than about 15% in several polls of Republicans. In Tuesday's primary Rubens scored 23% of the vote versus Brown's 50%. So, yes, it turns out that dumping a whole lot of money into a small race can indeed move the numbers somewhat. But unfortunately for Mayday, that lesson alone surprises no one.
Lesson 1: You Can Put Lipstick On a Pig, But He's Still a Pig
Lessig/Mayday's working hypothesis was that the critical need for campaign finance reform (CFR) was becoming so top-of-mind throughout the electorate that Mayday could persuade Republicans and even moderate independents to hold their noses and turn out in droves to vote for a candidate whose every other position they either hate, don't agree with, or simply don't know...in short, that lots of New Hampshire voters could be converted into single-issue voters. That thesis was resoundingly proven wrong yesterday. Rubens was an utterly gawd-awful candidate on so many fronts, both philosophical (a dedicated xenophobe and unreconstructed wummin-blamer and homophobe) and technical (Rubens' idea of campaigning included a weeks-long "2nd Amendment Protection Tour" of New Hampshire gun shops).
Hopefully, Rubens' well-deserved landslide loss yesterday finally lays to rest the notion that otherwise batshit crazy Republicans who happen to say something nice about CFR are candidates whom liberals and progressives (e.g., Mayday supporters) can and should set aside their differences with and blindly support. Ain't gonna happen. Never. Fuggedabadit. Aside from a few diehard CFR true believers, the rest of us vote on character, history, and the balance of a whole grab-bag full of a candidate's positions. If the need for CFR happens to be one of those positions then, heck yes, that counts for something...but emphasis on something. As in 'not everything.'
Lesson 2: Technology is Just Another Tool, Not a Magic Silver Bullet
In the run-up to Mayday's first campaign intervention (in AZ-07's primary contest between Democrats Ruben Gallego and Mary Rose Wilcox) I gently chided Mayday for mounting absolutely zero GOTV effort for its endorsee, Gallego. With its mailing list of 50,000 devoted fans and donors, surely the PAC could have easily put some volunteers' feet on the street talking to likely voters, registering new ones, arranging rides to the polls -- in short, doing what wins elections.
Mayday must have heard my criticism, because in the final days leading up to the Rubens/Brown match in New Hampshire it mounted what looks to have been a fairly expensive and hellishly complicated effort to corral its supporters nationwide to make pro-Rubens phone calls to "every undecided voter in New Hampshire." Technologically speaking it was a pretty slick system: supporters logged into an app on the Mayday site and entered their home phone numbers, then the system did the rest (dialing NH voters' phone numbers, transferring those calls to the volunteers' phones, presenting the volunteers with a script to read, and collecting data on the outcomes of the calls and how their recipients intended to vote. Wow...just, wow.
But while that high-tech New Age system was certainly slicker than deer guts on a doorknob, it was also pretty much a fiasco.
First, Mayday's masters of strategy completely underestimated the considerable difficulty of recruiting kids in California to volunteer to cold-call grumpy old strangers in New Hampshire to tell them how to vote. Witness these two screenshots I grabbed of the progress meter displayed on Mayday's home page during this event:
Note the shrinking 'Goal,' as it sinks into the techies' heads that people are a lot harder to program than are computers.
Second (and as every propellor-head well knows), if you put garbage into the system then all you get is garbage out. We can't know for sure where Mayday purchased its list of 'undecided' New Hampshire voters and their phone numbers (and at what cost), but judging from exchanges like those below (screengrabbed from the callers' support chatroom, which was publicly accessible and around which I lurked for a while) the list was simply crap:
Volunteer telemarketers complain (highlighted) that the "terrible" list of undecided voters contains a high percentage of phone numbers resulting in 'not in service' recordings.
Third, Mayday's calling system was publicly accessible; neither the app nor its supporting chatroom appeared to have any meaningful security measures in place. It looked to me as though a Scott Brown supporter might easily have taken advantage of it to try to sway undecided voters toward Brown...on Mayday's dime.
Fourth, judging from reactions like the tweet below, even when callers got through to real people the end result was likely to be counterproductive:
Oops.
I sure hope Mayday PAC got its money back (correction: its
donors' money back) from that list provider.
Lesson 3: If You Sleep With the Devil, You're Gonna Get Burned
As I've discussed in a previous diary, in a particularly bizarre twist Mayday got caught in the final days of the campaign bankrolling (to the tune of $105K) a crazy New Hampshire anarchist gun-nut 'libertarian' PAC (Stark360) that certainly looks as though it might have been set up for no other purpose than to lighten Mayday's wallet. As Lessig has explained, Mayday's intent was benign:
We are supporting Stark360 to help advance our common goal — to have Rubens win the Republican primary. We are not supporting Stark to help it advance a goal we don’t share — to elect other candidates, including those who don’t support corruption reform. I’ve seen no actual evidence that what’s happening on the ground is different from what has been decided by me and agreed to by our manager on the ground — Ryan Clayton — and the people at Stark360. If there is, I’m eager to hear about it.
But as the Irregular Times' Jim Cook has
documented, the money Mayday paid Stark360 appears to have paid for the promotion of Stark's pro-gun, anti-Obamacare, anti-Dodd-Frank, climate-denying message as much as...if not more than...it did to promote Rubens or oppose Brown. Considering that Mayday's donors are mostly Democrats and liberals, that's a kick in the head to a lot of naive well-meaning folks who entrusted their hard-earned dollars to Mayday.
Maybe even worse, it was also a slap in the face for New Hampshire residents who have been struggling with the libertarian invasion of their state known as the Free State Project (whose chairman is also the co-founder of Stark360 PAC):
Ouch. That's a massive self-inflicted wound, and an unforced error likely to go down in electoral history.
Lesson 4: Pride Goeth Before a Fall
This morning, Mayday PAC's reputation is pretty much in tatters, and Lessig's is certainly muddied as well - which deeply pains all of his friends to witness. None of this needed to happen, if Mayday had provided Lessig with better advisors than Republican political operative Mark McKinnon (who must be having a hard time keeping a straight face today) and professional Republican yes-man Kahlil Byrd (previously CEO of the equally disastrous Americans Elect scam). This needs to stop, and now. At least in T-ball there's a 15-run rule, because watching innocent kids suffering the humiliation of a runaway blow-out is just cruel and completely needless.
What's that, you say? No worries? The New Hampshire debacle is now behind it, and from this point on it's Morning In America for Mayday? No, it's not. The next disaster-in-waiting for the Keystone Kops PAC is in North Carolina, where ten-term incumbent Republican congresscritter Walter Jones (NC-03) is also a nutcase Republican embarrassment about to happen and a Mayday endorsee.
For chrissake, somebody please call this game. This is agony. Lessig, please: learn, grow, and adapt. Abandon this "Buy Republicans First" strategy before it's too late.
Oh...wait; it's already too late. OK, never mind.
BREAKING UPDATE (Thu Sep 11, 2014 at 6:59 AM PT): Well, here's a bombshell: as FEC filings for the final days of the NH primary campaign begin to be processed and appear on the commission's web site, we now learn that shortly after receiving $103K from Mayday PAC (ostensibly to campaign for Jim Rubens), Stark360 PAC paid $20,000 to ARD Ventures (evidence here). Who, I hear you ask, is ARD Ventures, and what does it do? You won't find out from its web site (which, as of the time of writing, has been taken down...but here's the cached version), but Business Week's corporate database says of it: "ARD Ventures is a private company that provides buyout financing to distressed technology companies." And guess who ARD's CEO is? That's right: none other than Aaron Day, the founder and chairman of Stark360 PAC.
Mayday PAC: A fool and your money. Fix some popcorn, because this should get interesting as Mayday sues Stark360 and donors sue Mayday.