Commissioner Sara Baxter and Sid Dinerstein Highlight December Lunch
What is a winning campaign strategy? Candidates who are newcomers to the political process will tell you they can win against the odds because of their particular background. They may have run businesses, or are professionals of one kind or another, or plan to identify with “the working man”. These newbies for the most part lose their elections because they underestimated the difficulty of raising money, reaching voters and crafting a coherent message. Political insiders, particularly incumbents, have overwhelming advantages in doing these things.
So how did Commissioner Sara Baxter overcome the odds? Winning by 5% while running as a Republican in a D+7 district against a well funded Democrat insider should make us all sit up and take notice. Clearly she knows how it is done, and at our December lunch, she told us.
With a war chest of about $100K (considerably less than her opponent), she didn’t waste it on a bunch of consultants to tell her what to do (a typical rookie mistake). As a small business owner, she already had the skills needed to identify her market and get her message out in an efficient way. She drew on a lot of free advice from the best minds, while taking advantage of a decade of experience in social media marketing. She also started early and worked very hard. Using video to tell her story, she was able to achieve the “touch every voter 7 times” principle so effectively that voters were asking her for new videos to watch.
Unlike the typical newcomer who may say they have the business skills to win but ultimately fall short, Sara actually managed her campaign as a business – with a budget and marketing plan to achieve a business objective – winning the race.
With that kind of skill on the dais, the other six commissioners better pay attention. I expect we will see a seismic shift at the county in the next couple of years.
Our other speaker was Sid Dinerstein who gave us a sobering assessment of the election just past on the national level.
With all the bad things that the Biden administration has done to the country, this was supposed to be our chance to reverse course. An overwhelming win – 50 house seats for example, would have put us on the road to recovery. Instead we barely limped across the finish line. Unless we can achieve a level playing field in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Arizona (which should be red states but are now dominated by Democrat electioneers) we will never again win a national election.
There is a lot of blame to go around – some of the candidates were not suited for their races, and the national Republican leadership (particularly Mitch McConnell) seemed to be working against our candidates in a number of ways. Sid believes McConnell, Kevin McCarthy and Ronna McDaniel are decent people, but they are not “warriors” and not suited to lead in these times.
Sid also opined about the presidential primary – he believes Ron DeSantis will definitely be in the race. The stars are aligned for him now and it will be impossible to pass that up. In a straw poll around the room on “who do you think will be the nominee”, the members picked DeSantis over Trump by a 3 to 1 margin.
We also had some holiday music at the event, with entertainer Bobby Fonseca.