Did Steve Israel Send Lox With The Bagels And Cream Cheese To Sean Eldridge's Campaign?

Yesterday there was all kinds of commotion on the right from a hum drum post about Sean Eldridge firing his campaign manager and the quality of assistance his campaign gets from Steve Israel. One person in the campaign seems angry that I mentioned Israel sent widely unappreciated bagels and cream cheese every week and another told me the story lacked credibility because I didn't mention the lox (while another refused to even confirm that there ever even was lox).

On the other hand, my suspicions about why Eldridge dumped campaign manager Mike Reid were partially confirmed. Ever hear of a Beltway outfit called Global Strategy? They do expensive "internal polls" for Blue Dogs and New Dems that the DCCC backs. Their polls are generally kept away from the press or just released in bits and pieces to help whomever is paying for the poll. Bad results are buried. Reid got the blame from some especially bad results, I'm being told.

We mentioned yesterday that Eldridge raised and self-funded $2,448,887 so far. But as of the June 4 FEC filing deadline he only had $1,564,418 cash on hand. That's because he-- Reid-- had already spent $884,469. That's not an inordinate amount to introduce a well-heeled challenger in a contest against an incumbent. But many critics thought a great deal of the money was wasted on nonsense that did him no good. I'm told that the secret Global Strategy poll confirmed that and that for all that money spent-- $965,000 from his own checkbook-- "poor" Sean was losing miserably-- in the vicinity of just 25% of the vote to Gibson's 60%.

NY-19 has a PVI of D+1 and last year's DCCC candidate, Julian Schreibman, spent a total of $1,331,223 for the whole campaign (against Gibson's $2,153,689). On top of that, the DCCC put in $1,685,047 and their House Majority PAC put in another $352,665, mostly in negative ads about Gibson. The end result was a 53-47% victory for Gibson-- even as Obama beat Romney 52-46% on the same day. Schriebman lost 9 of the 11 counties:

• Broome- Gibson 70%
• Columbia- Gibson- 56%
• Delaware- Gibson- 61%
• Dutchess- Gibson- 54%
• Greene- Gibson- 64%
• Montgomery- Gibson- 68%
• Otsego- Gibson- 53%
• Rensselaer- Gibson- 63%
• Schoharie- Gibson- 67%
• Sullivan- Schreibman- 52%
• Ulster- Schreibman- 58%

There are 7 full counties in the district and parts of 4 other. Bolded are the full counties that were won by Obama. For Sean to win in November he needs to do better in these counties and he needs to discourage GOP participation in the counties where Gibson and Romney did best, especially Schoharie, Delaware, Sullivan and in the heavily Republican precincts in the other counties.

But Eldridge is playing right from a losing DCCC playbook, calling Gibson, the single least right-wing Republican in Congress-- less right-wing than a dozen Democrats, including New Dem-next-door Sean Patrick Maloney-- a Tea Party candidate and a conservative. Voters know better and aren't buying Steve Israel's failed, moronic messaging. What Gibson should be having done by a third party-- is informing core Republican voters in the reddest precincts that Gibson votes with the Democrats on key GOP values issues and that he's not worth voting for. If Eldridge ignored Steve Israel's proven failure of a strategy and failed, hackish strategists, he could actually turn this thing around and win. But that isn't what he's doing. He's following Israel's idiotic, cookie-cutter campaign-in-a-box precepts and… well, a 25% polling result speaks for itself.

As long as we're talking about polls, by the way, Lynn Vavreck had a fascinating piece in the NY Times this morning, Why Polls Can Sometimes Get Things So Wrong. "The science of polling is sound," she asserts, "but if you ask the wrong group of people your poll questions, you can get the wrong answers."

The pre-election poll that generated so much attention was done by McLaughlin & Associates just ahead of the Virginia primary. It showed Mr. Cantor ahead with 62 percent of the vote. Of course, Mr. Cantor did not win with 62 percent of the vote. He lost, winning only 44.5 percent. In a memo detailing the results of a postelection survey, McLaughlin & Associates explained that a different set of voters turned up at the polls than those they had expected.

This is an error in judgment, not a failure of polling as a science. Right after that election, some people said Mr. Cantor’s poll demonstrated that polls cannot predict elections. But that glosses over the important point that it is nearly impossible for a well-executed poll to produce an estimate as far off base as the one in Mr. Cantor’s race.

…It’s getting harder for pollsters to identify the right set of people from which to draw a sample as campaigns in low-turnout elections become better at mobilizing voters, many of whom pollsters hadn’t anticipated voting. It’s a bigger challenge in primaries and midterm elections as far fewer people participate in these contests relative to presidential races. Using lists of registered voters and their turnout histories may have been a way for pollsters to gain efficiency in identifying potential primary voters in the past, but that efficiency is now looking like a liability.

This morning, Beltway mouthpiece Politico succinctly laid out Gibson's winning strategy against Eldridge: "Eldridge, a 27-year-old Democrat, has been beset by perceptions that he is an inexperienced, wealthy, out-of-touch transplant in New York's 19th District, where he is taking on Republican incumbent Chris Gibson, a war veteran with four Bronze Stars and a Purple Heart." Polling isn't going to save Sean Eldridge's campaign any more than bagels and cream cheese (with or without lox) will. Ignoring Steve Israel, ignoring the foolish, incompetent operatives he sends around the country to make sure money is spent "properly," and ignoring his failed DCCC could. But Eldridge doesn't have the intestinal fortitude or the vision to do any such thing. So… who will be the Democratic candidate against Gibson in 2016 when Hillary is on the top of the ticket?