Conor Lamb had an immaculate political resume, but Democrats say his campaign team underplayed their race.
U.S. Senate candidate Rep. Conor Lamb, D-Pa., speaks during a Pennsylvania Democratic Party state committee meeting in Harrisburg, Pa., Saturday, Jan. 29, 2022.
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As early as 2020, Pennsylvania Democrats were portraying the anticipated U.S. Senate primary between Conor Lamb and John Fetterman as an epic clash between two titans: the clean-lined moderate “beauty” versus the goateed populist “beast.”
What they got instead was an old-school hit that ended on Tuesday night with Fetterman routing Lamb – a result hardly in doubt for many months. The lieutenant governor beat the House member for the second term by a double-digit margin.
The primary which started with two lions ended as a lamb.
Interviews with more than a dozen Democrats in Pennsylvania and those involved in the race from afar largely boiled over Lamb’s failure to engage in a single weakness: his campaign hubris.
It was hubris that severely underestimated Fetterman and his resources from the start, misinterpreted the wishes of the Democratic base, and refused to allow outside allies and even internal voices to break through their campaign’s island hierarchy. .
“This is one of the worst campaigns I’ve ever seen,” said Mike Mikus, a Pittsburgh-based Democratic strategist. “Strategically, it’s been mind-blowing to watch. They completely missed an opportunity…Conor should be the nominee and it’s the campaign’s fault.
Team Lamb – led by Abby Nassif-Murphy and Coleman Lamb, the candidate’s brother – settled an eligibility argument early on, casting Lamb’s three wins in a red congressional district in southwestern Pennsylvania as irrefutable proof that he would be the superior candidate in the general election.
But Fetterman, who entered the race six months before Lamb and is now in his third statewide campaign, knew Commonwealth voters better. A group of progressives consider him a cult figure for his support of Bernie Sanders in 2016, providing him with a national pool of small donors.
Pittsburgh-based Lamb had to play catch-up in a primary in which half of the vote would come from the Philadelphia area.
“[Fetterman’s] elected statewide. How can I argue that this guy is not eligible? Of course he is eligible, he was elected,” said Doc Sweitzer, a Philadelphia-based Democratic media consultant. “Hubris is the right word. I don’t know what they were thinking.
Neither Murphy nor Coleman Lamb responded to emails requesting a response.
“A classic super PAC mistake”
Meanwhile, a poll two weeks before the primary showed 39% of Democrats still had no opinion on Lamb, whose cautious centrism left some activists feeling he would capitulate to Republicans in when they want to fight.
“Conor Lamb is the corporate democrat. He’s a very attractive young man and he’s conservative in his outlook and he just doesn’t resonate with the individual voter the way John Fetterman does. said Marcia Wilson, chairwoman of the Adams County Democratic Committee at Gettysburg. “I think it was a bit cheeky, if you will, going up against John Fetterman.”
When Lamb launched his Senate bid last summer, he was immediately forced to financially catch up with Fetterman, who ended up spending nearly $10 million more than Lamb over the course of the primary.
Penn Progress, a super PAC created to help Lamb with the cash flow shortfall, failed to bring in the receipts many expected and only spent about $1.7 million. The entity is likely remembered for an attack that went awry. His ad which incorrectly portrayed Fetterman as a “self-proclaimed democratic socialist” was taken off the air by at least one television station and sparked considerable backlash that became counterproductive for Lamb.
“These early super PAC attacks, it turned so many people off,” said Adam Bonin, a Philadelphia attorney who has worked with Fetterman in the past but was not affiliated with this contest. “A classic super PAC mistake attacking the guy on something the guys who fund the super PAC care about, rather than the voters.”
The super PAC halted its run of ads in early May, according to Medium Buying, a political ad tracker.
While the Fetterman campaign spent $1.3 million on Facebook ads, Lamb’s team allocated roughly $40,000 to the platform, according to data reviewed by McClatchyDC.
Kyle Tharp, CEO of FWIW Media, a company that tracks digital trends in politics, said the Lamb campaign’s neglect of paid advertising on sites like Facebook, Instagram and YouTube was a major red flag.
“It’s 2022, and ‘eligibility’ means having the right foundation in online fundraising, persuasion and grassroots engagement. Lamb’s campaign has chosen to take a different path,” Tharp said.
Because Lamb was starting from such a large polling deficit, outside observers believed he needed to fight Fetterman earlier and more consistently.
“I never fought against Fetterman”
A 2013 incident in which Fetterman confronted a black jogger with a shotgun was seen as a huge potential liability for the frontrunner, especially among Democratic primary voters who are more sensitive to racial injustice.
Mikus said he reviewed polls on the episode which showed how damaging it was to Fetterman’s image, but noted that the controversy was never argued in a sustained publicity campaign.
“It’s political malpractice that they never realized they were behind it. And two…they never fought Fetterman,” Mikus said of Lamb’s campaign.
Instead, the campaign appeared more concerned with gaining and promoting endorsements from elected officials, which critics see as an outdated campaign model.
Lamb, a telegenic military veteran and former federal prosecutor with family political roots, embodied the definite resume of someone from Washington. Despite his Harvard degree, Fetterman is more like someone you’d meet outside a biker bar in Berwick.
“John connects like no other I’ve seen,” said Terry Noble, who chairs the Pennsylvania Democratic Party’s rural caucus. “Conor needed to show off a lot more and probably needed a blunder from John that never happened.”
Rich Fitzgerald, an Allegheny County leader who backed Lamb, complained that the current political atmosphere rewards media figures rather than the people most qualified to get results.
“A lot of times the electorate goes to the weird stuff: Donald Trump, AOC, Bernie Sanders. People who do nothing, but the media loves them and the media gives them great content,” Fitzgerald said. is only a microcosm of what is happening nationally.
“You end up with the lesser of the two candidates and that’s unfortunate,” he added, noting that he would support the Democratic candidate in November.
But the Lamb team may also have miscalculated the ideological evolution of a party that voted for Joe Biden in 2020 but is now frustrated by the lack of progress on its agenda in Washington.
While Fetterman repeatedly issued statements expressing his displeasure with moderate Sen. Joe Manchin, many Pennsylvania Democrats viewed Lamb as a potential replica of the West Virginian who has become a thorn in the side of the administration. Biden.
Fetterman’s early advocacy for marijuana legalization and criminal justice reforms during his unsuccessful 2016 Senate bid also laid an early milestone toward where the party was moving before it was popular.
Meanwhile, in the final days of the race during a national television interview, Lamb delivered his main message to protect Social Security and Medicare, which is hardly a galvanizing issue for the primary voters.
Still, many Democrats don’t think Tuesday’s result necessarily spells the end of Lamb’s political career. At just 37 years old, he has plenty of time ahead of him to rethink the strategic decisions of this campaign and imagine a future candidacy for the Senate or the post of American governor.
There is a long list of politicians who have lost their first statewide race. Ask Fetterman.
This story was originally published May 17, 2022 10:39 p.m.