You Read It Here First!
Two weeks ago, I talked to independent Republican groups and people working on the special congressional election in New York’s 20th Congressional District and found that hundreds of thousands of dollars in negative ads directed at Democrat Scott Murphy were backfiring. Today, Fred LeBrun of the Albany Times Union makes the same case.
“„While both parties threw the mud, the national Republican effort behind Tedisco’s ads has been looser with the truth and has taken a more deeply negative cast from the beginning, and that’s how the general electorate is seeing the campaign. That was quite clear in the Siena poll results: Voters see Tedisco as more negative than Murphy, and they don’t like it.
If I may beat a dead horse: Tedisco’s problem is that he responded to the backlash by denouncing negative ads and pledging to run a positive campaign. First, the national GOP committees ignored Tedisco and kept running their ads. Second, once the AIG bonuses outrage blew up, Tedisco changed gears and started attacking Murphy over a scandal voters simply didn’t connect him to.
