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Thursday, November 5, 2009

Maine Marriage Supporters Targeted

From Bangor Daily News:

"In a defiant speech to several hundred lingering supporters, No on 1 campaign manager Jesse Connolly pledged that his side “will not quit until we know where every single one of these votes lives.”

“We’re not short-timers; we are here for the long haul,” Connolly told the crowd, some of whom wiped away tears as he spoke. “Whether it’s just all night and into the morning, or next week or next month or next year, we will be here. We’ll be fighting, we’ll be working. We will regroup.'"

[Hat Tip: Michelle Malkin]

12 comments:

  1. Let me guess--they want to find out where each Yes on 1 supporter lives so they can bring them flowers and balloons, right?

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  2. Hey geniuses,

    Jesse was talking about ID'ing marriage equality supporter votes. Because, even as good as the No side's GOTV was, it obviously wasn't good enough, and Jesse is speaking to the need to ID even more No voters in order to be able to get them to the polls and vote.

    Good grief. Have any of you ever run a campaign? It's pretty hard to canvass as part of GOTV unless you know where your support lives. And just like your side, we all have voter lists to work from, and both sides spend lots of time ID'ing their supporters from those lists.

    Here's a Tip for Michelle Malkin: You blew it big-time and now your commenters are frothing about a non-story. Way to go!

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  3. Chino Blanco posted the same tirade on Beetle Blogger. This was my response, still unanswered:

    Actually Chino Blanco, I didn’t read Michelle’s piece until much later, but we all knew it was coming. I got this tip from an opposition poster who was threatening those on the Maine facebook site. He left a link to some rant page highlighting Jesse’s quote. I researched it and got the original quote from the Bangor Daily News. Jesse Connolly’s entire comments are not quoted, so you may be correct or not. Certainly the news reports treat his quote as if he said it in the heat of the moment,

    “In a defiant speech to several hundred lingering supporters, No on 1 campaign manager Jesse Connolly pledged that his side “will not quit until we know where every single one of these votes lives.” —Bangor Daily News

    You are welcome to follow the source link and read the article yourself. If what you say is true and he was only talking about the get out the vote effort, there’s no hint of it in the article. Not having been there, I have no idea what the true insinuations were. However, this commenter was one of several on the board I was debating that had the same take on it. Has Jesse come out to explain his nationally reported comment? To clarify that he meant no harm to those who exercised their constitutional right to vote?

    Commenters on the boards I frequent certainly interpreted it to mean that the NO campaign was going to seek out the names and addresses of those on the donor lists for NOM, and the voter lists for Maine, and through the likes of knowthyneighbor and h8 maps, expose the personal identities of individual voters for intimidation and harassment like they did in California. You cannot deny the bloodthirsty element out there, who feel completely justified in every act of intimidation perpetuated against family advocates. If there is some statement out there from Jesse Connolly expressing his true intentions and denying his involvement in the effort to expose individual voters and donors to harassment, by all means, bring it forward—because if there was clarification put out there, I have yet to see it.

    Do not be upset if there is this idea floating out there that gay activists are going to hunt down the voters for revenge. It’s part and par for the course with you guys. It happened here in California already, and last I heard, those behind the NO campaign were just as adamant for that personal information to be made public in Maine as well……..Jesse Connolly included.

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  4. BB, please point me to anyone else besides you and Michelle Malkin who are reading Jesse's statement the way you're reading it. And no, anonymous commenters on some online chatroom somewhere don't count.

    I know you have a revenge narrative to defend, but I'm not arguing with that narrative right now. I'm simply telling you that you're misreading Jesse's statement.

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  5. And yet, Chino offers no evidence to support his opposing interpretation, while beetlebabee quotes from the news article. I echo beetlebabee's reasonable invitation, "If there is some statement out there from Jesse Connolly expressing his true intentions and denying his involvement in the effort to expose individual voters and donors to harassment, by all means, bring it forward—because if there was clarification put out there, I have yet to see it."

    No, Chino, I don't think beetlebabee is the only person who took Jesse's own statement at face value. It makes no sense that he would be talking about his own supporters. Why would he care to know where they live if they are already voting in accord with his beliefs? No, history (Prop 8) has proven that retaliation against and intimidation of natural marriage voters is the MO of same-sex marriage supporters. Too bad Connelly appears to have erroneously decided that consolation would best be offered in the form of avowed retaliation and intimidation. *sigh*

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  6. Pearl,

    I can quote from the news article, too:

    "In a defiant speech to several hundred lingering supporters, No on 1 campaign manager Jesse Connolly pledged that his side 'will not quit until we know where every single one of these votes lives.'"

    Did you notice how Jesse said "votes" not "voters" ?

    You're not going to find a clarification because you're the only folks pushing this upside-down reading of Jesse's statement and nobody else is going to bother with correcting you except me.

    Pearl - winning elections, especially off-year elections, is mostly about getting your supporters to the polls. It's no use persuading people that you're right with messaging (ads) if those same people don't get out and vote on election day. You can ask the folks on your side who were calling and canvassing for Yes on 1 and they can explain to you the work they did and why it's necessary to ID supporters.

    *sigh*

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  7. Chino said: "Jesse is speaking to the need to ID even more No voters in order to be able to get them to the polls and vote."

    Then Chino said: "Did you notice how Jesse said "votes" not 'voters'?"

    I dunno, Chino, did you notice that distinction before you made your first comment here? Apparently not.

    According to SSMers in Maine, their GOTV efforts were efficient and effective. They came up short.

    Here is something to chew on: GOTV efforts can bring individuals to the polling booths, but GOTV efforts cannot dictate what those individuals do once they are casting their ballots. Indeed, the underestimation of pro-marriage support in Main opinion surveys indicates that getting ore people to the polls can, and has, undermined the pro-SSM side's campaign.

    The Yes side's (i.e. the pro-marriage side's) efforts were highly dedicated but not as efficient and not as effective as the NO side's (i.e. the pro-SSM side's) efforts: the Yes vote tally was lower than it might have been if more people -- of either side -- had shown-up to cast ballots.

    More votes on the marriage measure would have led to an even larger victory for the pro-marriage side.

    Even if your reinterpretation of the quote is taken at face value, Chino, it would make for lousy tactics. The pro-SSM side suffered from the same thing in California.

    But your reinterpretation is an attempt, by you, to distance the SSM campaign in Maine from the brazen effort to find the Yes voters and to find the financial supporters of the Yes side. The purpose of that is to embark on a campaign of intimidation and reprisals. Something you have excused before.

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  8. Well, Chairm, I suppose you could always go back and read the first line in my first comment to find your answer.

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  9. Chino, so your answer is that you don't have an answer to reconcile the two quotes from you.

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  10. There's nothing to reconcile. After all your typical obfuscation, we remain exactly where we started. You want to keep imagining that Jesse was talking about Yes voters, and I'm telling you that he was talking about ID'ing potential No voters that we missed this time around.

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  11. As I said, you don't have an answer to reconcile the quotes. We agree. Your snarkiness about votes vs voters has backfired on you.

    Of course, you try to muddle by claiming there is nothing to reconcile. That's a nifty way of conceding the point.

    And, based on your remarks, I really doubt you have run anything of much consequence electorally, much less a GOTV effort.

    Getting out the vote does not mean you control how people vote. When it comes to marriage measures, the more people who vote, the more Yes ballots are submitted.

    The losing side, in Maine, needs better arguments because they put forth their best efforts, to-date, based on all the lessons supposedly learned during 30 prior defeats. So I doubt the arguments will convert more votes into more No votes.

    In fact, the No side generally has an advantage when it comes to direct votes on single issues. With the favorably polling and the theme of "inevitability" and the backing of the legislature, you still lost. Maybe you find it hard to believe that your own GOTV delivered Yes voters to the voting booth. Oh well. Somehow your side lost ground and what was supposed to be a fairly assured No victory was squandered.

    Stack the deck any which way you want, but getting out more votes is not going to win you an SSM merger in Maine or anyplace else.

    I understand that Connolly was speaking off-the-cuff and in an unguarded moment, appealing to the losers who had done their best, he had to grasp at something to improve morale.

    You can choose to believe that he meant to find out where more No voters live, but that's just your spin on what the poor-loser behaivor and attitude exhibited after other state marriage campaigns.

    Readers can decide for themselves if your spin obfuscates or enlightens.

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  12. Mehul, you are right, he has had lots of time to put forth a clarification. If he has done so, it hasn't been circulated far and wide, if at all.

    * * *

    Earlier I had said:

    "Getting out the vote does not mean you control how people vote. When it comes to marriage measures, the more people who vote, the more Yes ballots are submitted."

    Jesse Connolly agrees:

    "It’s clear that polling research, both ours and others’, did not capture the intensity of Yes on 1 support…. We weren’t alone: our opponents, political observers, and field operatives all believed a high turnout benefited the No on 1 vote. With voting approaching 60 percent in Maine, it’s clear that wasn’t true."

    Connolly is wrong to say that the winning side had underestimated its support, but he is right that the GOTV efforts meant more Yes votes were delivered. The losing side misunderestimated the disfavor in which Maine voters looked upon the SSM merger and the pro-SSM campaign's argumentation.

    They had put their best foot forward, with loads of advantages, after almost a decade of intense political preparation, with out fundraising by a ratio of 2 to 1, a big slick GOTV effort, in an election cycle they favored and selected strategically, and they lost anyway.

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