Hullabaloo

Sunday, November 02, 2008

 
Blue America Down To The Wire

by digby

Howie is doing all the heavy lifting, gathering information and putting together the pre-election round up over at his place. If you're a Blue America donor this cycle and want to know how it's going for our candidates, be sure to check in with him over the next couple of days and after the election for the full round up.

Yesterday, he wrote about Blue America's media work in this cycle:

As I mentioned on Thursday at a story on how the Inside the Beltway Democratic Establishment is cynically using the "free trade" issue to win votes while already plotting to betray the voters they are wooing, Larry Kissell is not a man that will ever be brow-beaten by some corrupt corporate shill like Rahm Emanuel into selling out his constituents' interests. For North Carolina voters, dramatically hurt by the job-killing trade policies of Bush and Emanuel, "fair trade" is a do-or-die issue.

Blue America decided to run a few thousand TV ads in North Carolina that addresses the issue head on. Take a look at the ad which, I'm told, has been hard to avoid for anyone in the district who watches cable TV:

While Jacquie was busily buying up every single available spot that Elizabeth Dole hadn't already grabbed for her ad accusing Kay Hagan of being "godless," she came up with another idea. "Why not run the ad on broadcast TV?" she suggested. She managed to get us a great deal for a few Sunday NASCAR and college football spots on ABC-TV. I hear a lot of people in NC-08 watch those programs.

Blue America also bought TV spots-- different ads-- to remind people what awful representatives Dave Reichert, Mean Jean Schmidt, Dana Rohrabacher, David Dreier, Charlie Dent, Joe Knollenberg and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen have been. We were depressed when we looked at the pricing of ads for NJ-05, where Dennis Shulman is in a close battle with one of the most heinous members of Congress, Scott Garrett. Look at the confirmation we got in the mail for a few of the spots we ran in Mean Jean Schmidt's district just east of Cincinnati:

A 30 second spot on CNN costs $20 between 7pm and midnight and between 9am and 4pm, it's $13. NJ-05 is in the most expensive media market in the country. A single 30 second spot for Dennis on CNN between 6pm and midnight costs $2,167 (and between 10AM and 6pm, $1,084).

This came through the Blue America SayMe campaign, which is the innovation of the future in online organization. It's so good, I'm sure there will be many people clamoring to take credit for it down the road, but it was Howie Klein and Blue America --- and all of you --- who pioneered it in this election.

Stay tuned for more at Howie's place. We are poised to bring some better Democrats to congress this time and all of you who donated to Blue America and our candidates over the past year or so can take a look in the mirror and be proud that you helped elect some real progressives to Washington. It's not as sexy s Obamamania, but it's important.


.
digby 11/02/2008 04:30:00 PM |