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Since winning the May primary by just 13,769 votes of 1,151,951 cast, the former Congresswoman has struggled to create a statewide campaign from scratch. The staff running Thompson's Indianapolis headquarters is working against the clock to create a new Democratic organization that, in comparison to Governor Mitch Daniels's operation, is in its mere infancy. And even measured against former Governor Joe Kernan's losing 2004 campaign, Thompson's operation shrinks.
Indeed, comparisons with Kernan's campaign aren't friendly ones for Thompson. At this point in 2004, Kernan had raised $3,808,561. The campaign's eager to point out that Kernan didn't have a primary, and was the sitting governor—both significant advantages of which Thompson is deprived—but alas for the Democrat's campaign, elections have no handicap. The Daniels campaign, which had raised $4,198,300 at this point in 2004, is likely to report at least as much at next week's reporting deadline. And he's already spent, according to Thompson campaign estimates, between two and three million dollars on television advertising this year. (Daniels has prepaid for airtime on most broadcast stations through September 7, according to stations' FCC reporting.)
Thompson's campaign manager, Travis Lowe, says that the campaign will have enough resources to compete against Daniels, and dismisses talk about fundraising numbers.
"We have a great campaign plan which has a lot of paid advertising, an aggressive field program, a lot of political outreach," Lowe told HPI. "We've got a plan for what that costs and we've got a plan for how to raise it…I think any comparison of dollar-to-dollar is a waste of your time and my time. I don't think that's relevant to anything."
The campaign is signaling that it will report fundraising of less than two million dollars in the second quarter, more than $800,000 of which has come in donations of ten thousand dollars or more and has already been reported, per Indiana campaign finance law. Two organizations, EMILY'S List and the Service Employees Union International, have contributed $700,000 of that amount—a point that has garnered fire from the state GOP, which sent a July 7 press release titled "Hoosiers for Jill? Apparently not." Chairman Murray Clark taunted, "Jill Long Thompson's reliance on her friends in Washington D.C. to fund her campaign raises serious questions about her plan for Indiana. Why are these special interests playing such a big role in her campaign?"
Yet beyond those charges—Daniels's campaign is as steeped in PAC money as Thompson's—is a real threat to Thompson in that her finance structure raises her own stakes. If the campaign is unable to demonstrate its capacity to win, national interest groups will quickly abandon her, cutting her bank account in half or worse.
Already, we're seeing signs of movement in that direction. The Rothenberg Political Report rates the race as "narrow advantage Daniels," and more damagingly, Larry Sabato's influential "Crystal Ball" has downgraded the race post-primary to "Likely Republican." It wrote, "At the end of the day, it is always an uphill battle facing a popular incumbent with deep pockets. The 2008 gubernatorial race in Indiana will be no different." Only the Cook Political Report continues to call Indiana's race a tossup, and even activist Democratic blogs have directed their readerships' attention elsewhere. "Three polls taken in the past two months find Daniels settling in a narrow but consistent lead — leading me to downgrade the race to lean retention for the first time," the blog MyDD wrote in June.
Thompson's campaign sidesteps these questions by pleading for a focus on "the issues." Yet it's facing frustration in its inability to drive the debate. Daniels, while running an aggressive advertising campaign to improve his own image, seems intent to smother Thompson with silence, baiting the cash-strapped Democrat to the airwaves early. (It may be working: Campaign manager Lowe tells HPI that the campaign will be on television "very soon," and camera crews have recently followed Thompson and Oxley to county fairs in Spencer and Vigo counties.)
Meanwhile, as months slipped away, Thompson has gotten little traction with issue statements and earned media because Governor Daniels has refused to engage her campaign.
"We believe in positive campaigning, and I have a job to do, so the time that's left over for campaigning I tend to devote to talking about how we build a better state," Daniels told HPI. "I think I have a really positive agenda to propose and we'll be spending much more time on that," he said.
Thompson's two-month-long honeymoon has thus been plodding. Time has been sapped mostly by fundraising after the campaign emerged broke from the primary, the prolonged search for and selection of a Lieutenant Governor candidate, and preparation for the state convention. The latter, while distracting staff for weeks, was given only scant media coverage, and just one Indianapolis television station covered the production.
Yet the rest remains something of a mystery. The campaign hasn't finished hiring staff, ballooning from six during the primary to twenty now, and a state field director hired last week has just begun the process of coordinating regional staff and rounding up phone banking lines. A political director won't come aboard until next week. Thompson has held fewer than twenty post-primary formal fundraising events and only recently began an aggressive public schedule. And Thompson's campaign still hasn't
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finished signing leases for office space across the state, though many of its offices will consist essentially of desks in local county party headquarters.
The internal scrambling has forced the campaign to let other opportunities pass. The Daniels campaign remains convinced that Thompson blew a chance to cut into Daniels's base with the candidacy of State Senator John Waterman, who briefly but unsuccessfully mounted an independent bid for governor before falling short of the ballot signature requirement. ("It wasn't our responsibility," Lowe explained.) The campaign isn't expecting an endorsement from her opponent in the primary, architect Jim Schellinger, anytime soon. And Thompson is content to cede the history her candidacy is making as the first female gubernatorial nominee since Indiana became a state. ("The fact that I happen to be a woman I think is much, much less significant than the credentials I bring to this campaign," Thompson says.)
The campaign can still win, but it's become beholden to a clutch of externalities.
There are, no doubt, makings of an upset. Thompson's likely to be a beneficiary of an enthusiastic Democratic base, which turned out nearly 1.3 million voters for the May primary—an especially worrisome number for the governor's campaign. In comparison, Daniels won 1,302,912 votes in 2004's general election, and only 350,390 voters bothered to cast a ballot for him last May.
Thompson must hope that Democratic Presidential nominee Barack Obama continues to invest in Indiana on the heels of the beginning of his unprecedented television and field campaigns here. Obama's camp will almost certainly open more offices, between twenty-five and thirty, than Thompson does, and Emily Parcell, Obama's state director, is conveniently married to Thompson's campaign manager Lowe. Yet Lowe is mum about just how coordinated the campaigns will be, refusing to say whether Obama's volunteers would go door-to-door with Thompson literature or mention Thompson in phone banking scripts.
"I don't think there are Obama volunteers and Jill Long Thompson volunteers," Lowe said. "There are Democratic volunteers, and those volunteers are going to be out electing the ticket up and down. The desire for change isn't a change in the White House and status quo in the state…They want to see Democrats in charge and these volunteers are going to be out talking about everybody up and down the ticket."
Perhaps Thompson's dream scenario is the selection of Senator Evan Bayh as Obama's Vice Presidential nominee, a move which is almost certain to energize Hoosier Democrats further and make the state more likely to turn blue in November. (Though Dan Quayle's presence on the national ticket in 1988 didn't put John Mutz instead of Evan Bayh in the Governor's office that year.)
Daniels, however, anticipates running better than Republican Presidential nominee John McCain and points to polling his campaign has conducted showing crossover support from Obama voters.
"This state's going to vote for John McCain…evidence indicates that we're going to run, at least right now, well ahead of him, but I think he'll win," Daniels said. "I think people make independent judgments, and I can tell you from all kinds of evidence that there's an enormous number of people who today—I don't know what they'll do in November—say they'll vote for Obama who are voting for us. Maybe they're interested in change and they've seen some. It's a different set of issues…we're not involved in issues of left and right and ideology. I think people will make very separate and independent judgments. My best guess is that John McCain still carries Indiana. The question is can we do better than that?"
Thompson is adamant that the campaign will win Fort Wayne's Allen County, which Kernan lost by twelve points (19,790 votes) in 2004, and Thompson won multiple times in her campaigns for Congress. The campaign envisions a swath of blue counties extending all the way from Lake to Allen counties, past the traditional Democratic Lake-to-St. Joseph northern corridor.
The decision to add Dennie Oxley to the ticket was for geographic balance to the extreme; Thompson's campaign is premised on winning the state-as-a-puzzle's edge pieces. The border counties from Ohio to Steuben, wrapping around the southern, western, and northern edges of the state, comprised a third of Indiana's entire Gubernatorial vote in 2004, and Kernan largely won them. But he lost northeastern Indiana badly.
If Thompson could add a modest ten points to Kernan's totals in Whitley, Allen, DeKalb, Elkhart, LaGrange, Kosciusko, and Noble counties, she would yield approximately 60,000 additional votes in an election Kernan lost by just 190,000. (Yet she would still lose every county except Allen.) Thompson will have to vastly outperform Kernan—by upwards of twenty or thirty points in each county—to win her old district and to reverse the 2004 result. It's possible: Kernan lost Kosciusko county by forty-three points, thirteen points worse than O'Bannon in 2000.
Perhaps that's the fundamental problem plaguing Thompson's campaign: the question isn't yet whether she will win—but can she?
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