StopLouBarletta.com

Going into this race, everyone knew it would be close.  Mayor Barletta was, for quite a while, running ahead in most polls.  In September and October, Paul Kanjorski was able to close the gap, some.  Still, Barletta and his supporters all thought that he would be the one Republican candidate that would be able to go against the grain and actually unseat a Democratic congressman.  In the end, that hope evaporated into nothingness.

The way I see it, there were several factors that led to Mayor Barletta loosing a race that many (most?) people thought he should be able to win.  They are:

• Record voter turnout.  All across the nation, voter turnout was at all time highs.  Many of these voters were first time voters and, for the most part, they were not coming out to support the Republican ticket.  I believe that the polls leading up to this election, which showed Barletta slightly ahead, failed to take this into consideration.  The sample sizes they used to generate the results were probably too small.
• Anti-Republican sentiment.  It’s no secret that having a (R) listed next to your name on the ballot was a kiss of death, this election cycle.  While Barletta had been hoping that his popular anti-illegal immigration policies would be enough to counter this, that was simply not the case at all.  Barletta is a Republican (much to my dismay) and that, no doubt, cost him more than a few votes (to my elation).
• Huge financial shortcoming.  According to the Federal Election Commission (FEC), Barletta was always at a huge disadvantage, in terms of money.  According to the FEC: Paul Kanjorski spent over $2 million and still has almost a million dollars in cash and zero debt.  Compare that with Mayor Barletta, who spent less than a million dollars, has just over $100,000 cash and has racked up over $300,000 in debt.  With numbers like that, even in a pro-Republican environment, it would have been hard for Barletta to mount a successful attack on Kanjorski.
• Poor campaign management.  Barletta’s campaign manager was Vince Galko, a Republican operative who has a long history of loosing races for Republican candidates.  Mr. Galko worked on President Bush’s 2004 PA campaign (Bush lost PA that year), Senator Rick Santorum’s last election (Santorum lost to Bob Casey, Jr.), and Rudy Giulliani’s presidential campaign (which was one of the worst run campaigns in the history of American politics).  With help like that, Barletta really didn’t even need to be running against anyone to still pull out a loss.
• Poor understanding of the economy.  Many analysts credit the economic crisis for helping put Barack Obama over the top.  People believed that Obama was better able to deal with the crisis compared with McCain.  Similarly, Lou Barletta did nothing to prove to voters that he knew anything about the economy.  The city that he governs, Hazleton, is wracked with debt (most of which a direct result of Lou Barletta) and Barletta tried to blame the entire financial crisis on Paul Kanjorski, implying that by electing Barletta, the whole situation would simply reverse course.

All of this, I think, resulted in Mayor Barletta loosing the race.  Some of these factors were outside his sphere of control, but many of them were not.  As I’ve said since I put this site online in April, Lou Barletta is a poor candidate.  His flaws are many and his upside is almost non-existent.  If the Republican Party wants to have a shot in Hell at retaking the US Congress, we need to produce candidates who are electable.  In other words, the exact opposite of Mayor Lou Barletta.

-Dan Cheek
www.StopLouBarletta.com
StopLouBarletta@gmail.com

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 6th, 2008 at 12:07 pm and is filed under The Election . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.