John McCain, Dead-ender?

Here is more evidence that Saint John may be going down. I must say that I have spent a lot of time looking at John McCain's campaign and wondering what the Hell they are thinking, apparently I am not the only one...

UPDATE --> This account is also intesting...

Clean Elections: Good or bad

I think about the Clean Elections System in Arizona a lot. I know, I know, I am geeky. This article in the Republic got me to thinking... My personal opinion is that public policy, all public policy is imperfect and generates trade-offs. I think it is nearly impossible for policy to be neutral. It always creates winners and losers. The AZ Clean Elections law is no exception.

Winners: People that want to run for the legislature, but are not well connected. Both state party committees are winners because candidates raise money for them instead of candidate committees. People who want to limit money in campaigns.

Losers: Traditional candidates. Interest groups with sufficient resources to influence elections. Challengers (especially state-wide challengers).

Now this is just my view of winners and losers. I am sure there is more to add to list and some of this is arguable, but I worry about the affect of the law especially when it comes to incumbency. I maybe in the minority, but I don't believe the Governor or AG are as popular as their election margins. They are popular in my house, but I would argue that their popularity is a mixture of incumbency (and they are both really competent public servants) and lightly funded challengers. This is all really great when your party controls two out of three constitutional offices, but what happens when we don't?

Here is my fear. In 2010, we have an open governors race. There is more than an outside chance that a Republican will be elected to both the Govenor and AG offices. Imagine the terrifying possibilities for Governor (John Huppenthal, Russel Pierce, Matt Salmon, any Republican from our congressional delegation) or for AG (Andrew Thomas). I fear that we will have an extreme marginally popular Republican in office (a la George Bush) who skates by with 50.1% of the vote. Why? Because Clean Election ties the hands of the people who could pour in the money to defeat them. I think Clean Election needs to dramitically restructure their funding mechinism for state-wide office.

Having said all of that, we are much better (in my opinion) with the law than without it. It has help elect a lot of good legislators and spread power around.

Do not call list, for politics

There is a bill pending before the state legislature to create a do not call list for political calls. There is an article explaining the ins and outs further here. The bill would maintain a list, but compliance would be voluntary. This is probably the best possible solution since it would be unconstitutional to force campaigns to not call.

The real problem here is not political calling, but irresponsible political calls. My thoughts on the matter are below:

1. Robo calls for the purpose of annoyance. The Republicans used this tactic a lot during the last cycle. They would call multiple times and make it seem as though the call was from the Democrat. If you listened long enough, you would figure out who the call really came from, but most hung up before then. This practice should be outlawed or curtailed. Perhaps the best solution is to state up front who paid for the calls and not the front-group, but who coughed up the cash.
2. Robo calls in general: Candidates, don't use robo calls. They serve no real purpose, they do not work and they cost money. Bad consultants will try to convince you that this is the best use of your money. After all, you can pay 5 cents per call and reach 10x more people than you can at 50 cents for a live call. Don't believe the hype. There are only a few studies on this topic, but they showed that the effectiveness was within the margin of error. This means that they could actually be marginally negative.
3. Short-sighted campaign consultants: This is true of live and robo calls. People running campaigns only look short-term and don't care about the long-term affect of calling people over and over trying to increase contact rates. Candidates should be very concerned about this because it gives them a bad name.

What this comes down to is that you have to have a message that sticks with voters and a good plan for contacting them. Be efficient, not annoying.