For Candidates, Effort is Everything

Two weeks ago, the nation witnessed the election of Scott Brown over Martha Coakley in the race for the Massachusetts Senate seat previously held by Ted Kennedy for like 57 years.  With this result still fresh on my mind, over the last few days I have attempted an impossible undertaking.

My mission?  Figure out exactly why Scott Brown won, how he won, and the lessons normal Americans can learn from his monumental and historic victory.

In short, I was going to do what seemingly no other human being could (minus, amazingly enough, the MSNBC talking heads):  I was going to pin down the exact reasons that a state senator with a truck beat the pants off of a popular and established (and seemingly insurmountable) opponent in Martha Coakley, herself the current Attorney General of the state.

Yep, I was going to crack this code and find out exactly what went on in this bluest of blue states that led to this political Armageddon.

I began by scouring the internet, newspapers, cable news channels, and even Twitter for days on end.  I chewed up every bit of information I could find and tossed about in a sea of political theories as if I were a gung-ho poly-sci major during the first week of a new school year.

However, what I quickly figured out through all of this information was that theses simple questions of “how” and “why” were going to be a lot harder to answer than I had initially thought.  In stark reality, I found out is that that there is not a consensus on the reasons for Scott Brown’s victory – actually there was not even anything close to what anyone could consider a consensus.

What I did find was spin (oh, there was lots of spin), but there were also literally hundreds of theories and conjectures about what exactly had transpired to make his win possible.  Along these lines, I read the word “populism” a lot.  I saw the word “anger” a bunch. Likewise, there were multiple readings about “incumbent”, “excitement”, “bad candidate”, “momentum”, “establishment”, “Obama”, “healthcare”, and “gaffes”.

But still, it seems to me that literally no one agrees on the why or the how of Scott Brown’s victory.

So my next step was to cut through all of this garbage, look at the campaigns and candidates, and see what the glaring differences were.  In my continued search, one word kept popping off of the pages and into my head over and over and over.  The ads the candidates ran spelled this out, the gaffes that were made spelled this out, and the desperation toward the end of the campaign spelled this word out.

In one word, why and how did Scott Brown defeat Martha Coakley?

EFFORT… Six letters, one word, and the most damaging weapon in Scott Brown’s holster.

With that word in mind, rewind with me to just before the Massachusetts election.  I am sitting in the living room of a school board candidate of a small suburb of Oklahoma City.  This particular candidate has never been involved in politics, never ran for office, and has never even volunteered for a campaign.  He is the very definition of a green candidate, and no, I don’t mean the save-the-earth kind of green.

Anyway, this guy knew two things about being a candidate for public office: yard signs and election day. That’s it.   He didn’t have a clue about micro-targeting, GOTV, financial reporting, grassroots, or new media applications. He wasn’t aware he needed to do a little fundraising, knock on doors, use both earned and free media, or even simply announce his candidacy to the local press.

But you know what he wanted to do? Work.  He wanted to find folks to vote for him, speak wherever there was a microphone, explain to people what needed to be fixed in the school district, and tell them his ideas on how to fix it.  He burned with a desire to beat the 15 year incumbent who also happened to be the president of the school board…who was also rich…and who had never drawn an opponent.

So for three hours in his living room that night, we talked about effort, messaging, and overcoming the lack of name recognition.  By the end of the night, this completely overwhelmed challenger was convinced that if he could out-work, out-effort, and out-campaign the incumbent, he could win.  Would it take a lot of sacrifice and time?  Yes, but effort always demands those things.

Effort is an action but it is also an attitude; obviously there is always a physically active element that comes with effort but there is also a mentally active element as well.  In short, there must be the desire to put out effort before there can be the action of effort.

Scott Brown illustrates this point in a variety of ways.  He obviously wanted to win or he would not have run for the United State Senate in the first place.  But more than that, he showed how badly he wanted to win by the actions he undertook as he crisscrossed the state to meet voters in every corner of the state.  He even had television ads about how many miles his truck had accrued because of his travels.  Genius!  Couple that by the excitement he fostered in his vast army of volunteers, who then did their best to match his level of effort in their phone calls, canvassing , and GOTV efforts, and you have an atomic bomb of many people working as hard as they could to deliver victory to Scott Brown on election day.  Again, it is all about effort.

However, Martha Coakley’s lack of effort and seemingly dispassionate campaign can easily be seen in her now famous answer about how hard she was working in comparison to Scott Brown: “As opposed to standing outside Fenway Park?  In the cold?  Shaking hands?”

By this quote we can see that Martha Coakley apparently didn’t put out enough of effort or perhaps even have the desire to do so.  In fact, even earlier in the campaign, this very telling quote was made by state Rep. Bill Bowles of Attleboro in the article Sluggish Coakley Effort Irks Dems in the Sun Chronicle of Attleboro, MA:  “I’m not happy with the level of campaign effort I’ve seen.”

Oh boy.

In a related quote, one voter in Massachusetts (and a Coakley supporter) said this in another local paper:  “The Democrats, specifically, expected it not to be close so they sat back.  I mean, I get three calls a day from Scott Brown’s daughters.”

Holy crap.

Notice the difference in the amounts of effort – in this case it relates to what one campaign expected to happen versus what the other campaign made happen.

It is because of these very stark contrasts in effort that I believe shows that you can strip away all of the issues, the anger, the voter turnout, and the memory of Ted Kennedy to very easily see that effort played perhaps the biggest role in Scott Brown’s win.

Furthermore, this is yet another example of a candidate’s willingness to work and put out the effort to win as a major reason for victory.  And granted, this is not always the case – effort is not always the determining factor, and there are probably thousands of examples of both national and local races where this was not true.

However, the flipside of that coin is that a lack of effort can be a major reason for insuring a loss.

In the end the greatest thing for a candidate is no matter how big or how small your election is, effort has a real chance to overcome any hurdles you may face on the campaign trail.

Along these lines, take a look at the school board candidate from earlier.  As we ended our conversation, a few of the tactics he said he was going to employ leading up to election day was to spend time every morning with the vast amount of folks at the coffee shop downtown, walk his town’s neighborhoods with his wife and a few volunteers on a nightly basis, and go to high school basketball games with campaign business cards he created at home with his message and election day information on them.  For him, this was a simple way to get his message out there and encouraged people to vote for him.

But the consistent thread in all of these activities?  Yep, effort.

This gentleman knows that he has a mighty hill to climb, but his plan is to work his tail off and use his effort to make up the ground of experience, name recognition, and money.  These are the lessons we talked about that night after we had briefly discussed the Massachusetts election.

In conclusion, the issue of effort makes complete sense in the context of running for public office.  Whatever office you desire, just be determined to go after it with all of your might.  And think about it: if effort can help a free market and limited government conservative win in Massachusetts, effort can definitely help you win, too.