There are a couple new ads from candidates for Governor released this week.
Coakley’s first ad “For Us” seems like a victory lap ad. It’s a good ad and plays it pretty safe. The line about “The political insiders, the big money SuperPACs, the “Old Boys Club,” they’re all against her” irked me, however, because it’s such utter bullshit. Clearly this ad is hitting hard for the EMILY’s List set, which is smart for her campaign.
Berwick released a very different ad with a “Commonwealth of Firsts” that pushes hard for single-payer. I’ve never really seen an ad this up front about a policy like that. I love it, but I’m not sure how well it plays with the greater Dem primary voters.
Please share widely!
Takes the Grossman superpac ad, and the ones to come, and makes them a plus for her. “The old boys” and the evil “superpacs” are against her because she is fighting for you! That’s what you want voters thinking whenever they see an ad attacking Coakley. Good move on her part.
Here’s what I heard:
I had the same thought.
I started laughing because I heard it that way, too.
Maybe that’s because that’s what she was thinking. I find Berwick’s ad very surprising. I support the concept but he is reinforcing the view amoung primary voters that he’s a single issue candidate. He should be touting his progressive bona fides aside from single payer. A missed opportunity in my view.
I sounds odd coming from the overwhelming frontrunner.
But that’s why it works, too.
for most voters it’s great positioning. Also the only ad I’ve seen that aims beyond the primary.
Of the three Democratic candidates, Martha Coakley is far and away the insider’s insider. In my view, her loud trumpeting of her “taking on the big banks” greatly overstates what she did and what she accomplished. Her ad is, to me, empty puffery accompanied by claims unsupported by the facts — or, in the matter of “old boys”, simply untrue.
Meanwhile, I find Don Berwick’s ad disappointingly irrelevant. His focus on single payer was a great introductory pitch. It’s now mid-August, and nobody cares.
Neither candidate even comes close to touching the issues that matter to me — the obscene and growing wealth and income concentration in this state, the collapse of our public transportation system, and the utterly irresponsible refusal of BOTH parties to face the urgent need for a significant and immediate increase in tax revenue.
In this election, our political system is failing to address the pressing and immediate needs of our state. I fear things will get MUCH worse before they get any better.
Berwick’s was totally irrelevant. Single payer got him past the convention, it was never getting him past the primary. Opposition to casinos was his greatest asset that he fails to promote. Now that polling is showing casino support eroding fast, he should seize that as his main point of attack against his Democratic rivals. This ad was sadly out of touch, Coakley, as false as some elements of it were, had a great ad.
They work. The best ad of the year (was it last year?) is still Sciortino’s ad with his father. That seemed like a real game-changer at the time. These ads will please their bases, but not convert anyone.
That said, Martha’s ad shows a bit of feist; that is is refreshing to see.
was last year. It aired in September, if I recall correctly. It was for the October special primary.
On MSNBC, and when I shared it with an old poli sci professor, he called it the best ad of the year. Sadly, didn’t win him the race.
I was in advertising a long, long time ago. No, I am no expert and did not go to school for it, all self taught but I ran a lot of successful ad campaigns for retail sales and special events. In short, if the ad was well liked by the experts in the studio (and me) but did not bring people through the doors, the ad was no good. Sciortino’s ad was original but it failed to meet its objective. I had my share of “artsy failures” early on and learned to get overt it. It’s like when people tell me about a neat ad they saw and I ask the product name and they can’t recall. Woops. That’s not to say that I did not like Sciortino’s ad, I just don’t think it changed people’s minds.
As to the Coakley and Berwick ads, it’s hard for me to be objective, as I clearly prefer one candidate over the other. I think Coakley’s ad is polished and takes a few jabs at her closets competitor, but it does not seem new. Berwick’s ad is a little choppy but maybe that works to the “I’m an outsider” image.
If all five candidates started at 20%, and had comparable organizations, that ad would have won the race. But he started low and had a small organization, so it had too much to overcome.
Sciortino was polling below 5% before the add hit and ended at 16.1%. It was worth about 10 points in the polls. Not enough, but it moved him from last place to third.
Can anybody remember another ad from that race? I can’t.
very good direct mail, although the Emily’s List piece overshadowed her in house stuff.
No surprise, but I view Berwick’s spot as another missed opportunity. Health care is so central he could have made direct connections to jobs (SP makes Mass. a better place to do business) and opportunity. He could have mentioned spending and taxation (SP frees up resources to fix roads and bridges, cut the bloated property tax, etc.).
I completely get that the strategy is to run a one-issue campaign the very big deal of medicare for all. This solid spot delivers that message well. I strongly suspect, however, that other themes more traditionally associated with the office will prove more decisive both in the primary and the general.
If you don’t think he’ll win, you still really, really want that message out there. So it does suggest that contributing to Berwick is good idea.
… All ads show the candidate talking to people and gesturing with their hands and such, yet very few ads seem to take such great care to frame and include the people to whom the candidate is talking in the way Coakley’s ads do. Further, the candidate herself is, actually, not doing all the speaking. She’s clearly doing some listening to the people. There’s a subtle ‘you, also, are included,” form to Coakley’s ads which are impressive. “John’s story”, Berwicks previous effort had a few shots of the candidate gesturing to people, most of whom are offscreen… they were there but the interaction was missing. I don’t think this is particular to Berwicks ads, so don’t think I’m picking on him alone, but rather by way of example.
I’ve never been a fan of pronouns in political ads: “she’ and “us” invite divisions and distinctions by a process of inviting voters to fill in their own prejudices. I thought Scott Browns “He’s for us,” slogan and resulting ads were pretty sexist in the race against EW. I don’t think that kind of sexism would work in favor of Coakley so I don’t see how it could benefit. It just muddies the water. I get the dig at Grossman but I think it’s a little blunted, more unfocused, than it could be…
So, for the Coakley ad, I guess I give the visuals an A and the aurals a C+
The Berwick ad is a sort of one-two punch of Mass pride and technocratic fiddling, which I’m not sure works: The idea that we were the first, ok, is nice but then sunshine and good times will rain down once we magically invoke ‘single payer’ doesn’t quite flow. I get it and I want single payer as much as any… and props to Berwick for doubling down on it… but there’s no switch to flip and nothing to say Berwick understands that being first is oftentimes a rough road… i give his ad a B-
Policy can be pointed out but not defined in the time frames of such short ads. They will either turn people off or make them more curious about the candidate. Given that the Primary comes first, and the most partisan voters show up, the emphasis on Single Payer makes sense. Cripes, it is even in the Massachusetts Democratic Party Platform. This is real moxie. The other two candidates define safe issues that nibble around the edges of widespread reform instead of tackling more pervasive problems at their roots. You can do all the grading and commentary you want, but as Democrats your real job is deciding who should be governor because he or she embodies what will make this state an even better place for everyone.
… I have already made my decision. So I fulfilled your criteria for my ‘real job’ as Democrat. I’m left to wonder what is your point.
It’s a problem of politics all over, but particular to Massachusetts is the dichotomy of public/private persona. Between Mike Dukakis, John Kerry and now Martha Coakley, we’ve seen a progression of warm, bright and engaging people filtered through the media into something they are not: grasping, overly-ambitious but clutzy and clumsy goofballs. It works the other way also, I suppose, as first Bill Weld, Mitt Rmoney and then Scott Brown, personally rather flinty, thin-skinned autocrats each, were turned into backslapping gladhanders you’d want ‘to have a beer with.’
To the extent that ads occur at the interstices of the private person and the public persona, I think it’s fascinating. From my point of view grades and commentary are ways at looking at how well they have, or have not, let there truest selves be displayed. Which, if you don’t mind, could help to form the basis of any “deciding who should be governor because he or she embodies what…” … ?
The ad did not sway you to vote for one person or another. If you like the exercise of seeing if a square peg is fitting into a round hole, so be it. I’m just saying that Single Payer is a driving issue for a substantial number of those who will vote in September. The November vote will be a different story and I’m sure the ad content will change when it has to reach a broader audience. Of course it is not the ideal way to pick a candidate, but the tradition remains with us.
I think casino gambling is more likely to motivate likely September voters than Single Payer. I love single payer, I love Don Berwick, I’ll vote for him in the primary.
I still see ZERO evidence that single-payer, and therefore this ad, has any traction at all between now and the primary.
As a Berwick supporter who strongly opposes Coakley is that her ad is really good and his ad sorta sucks. It’s not as atrocious as any of Grossman’s ads, but looks like he is lecturing the camera and delivering a soliloquy on an issue that obviously has not caught traction for his campaign.
I’d have emphasized that he is the only Democrat to oppose casinos, haven’t heard that yet in any of his ads, and that he is the only candidate not funded by dirty money, haven’t heard that either. Single payer is important, my dad had a terrible time getting services after a recent injury and it’s making my brother reconsider Berwick, whom he didn’t realize was running or for single payer. But, it’s an issue that should be framed as an emotional one. His last two ads stand in contrast to this one, they were powerful in my view, particularly the Republican who fell on hard times and realized how great the safety net is. I think that could win over some Herald reading folks. The ad where he fixes the car on the side of the road, emphasizes all of his policy stances in a memorable analogy. This one falls flat.
One of the reasons I was asking who who who Berwick’s campaign manager and political director were was because the ads he puts out this week could catapult him high enough to stand a chance or keep him mired in single digits.
Professionals who make these decisions are, hopefully, as good at reading polls as any of us here — polls that include solid data on issues that do and do not have traction with likely primary voters. Either somebody badly misread those polls, or had no other options.
I suggest that the latter is the case for this under-funded campaign. Ads like this are expensive. I speculate that this ad has been in the pipeline for months. I also suspect that the campaign simply could not afford any others.
It appears to me that the campaign had one shot. Sadly, that shot was badly aimed. The few of us who know and care about single-payer are already voting for Mr. Berwick. This ad is utterly wasted on the rest.
Getting Single Payer into the public consciousness seems a very good thing. An ad like this, even if cryptic to some, puts out the idea that single payer offers a lot of benefits.
I certainly hope that a campaign, managed by a professional, places winning the election at a higher priority than advancing some noble long-term change in “public consciousness”.
Yes, I’d share that hope about a professionally managed campaign but, as the weeks slip by, the needle points more and more to the “noble” side of the dial.
The latest Globe poll features Dr. Berwick’s first ever appearance in double digits.
then it’s (maybe) a trend. With 2 data points its just noise.
Gotta say the calendar is stacked in favor of Coakley.
more about paying for the air time and less about production? It shouldn’t cost much more to cut a similar-looking ad where Don Berwick talks about casinos or whatever else than it cost to cut this one.
Production is expensive. A campaign with more resources can shoot several in parallel, each focused on a different issue or talking point. With multiple ads in the pipeline, the campaign has much more ability to keep its advertising aligned with its audience.
I suspect that when this ad was shot, the campaign contemplated doing a similar one about casino gambling. I suspect they had to pick one and let the other go.
They’d know they have a very tight budget and pick one focus at the outset. It just seems they chose poorly. I’d have hit multiple issues in one ad: “I am the only candidate in this race who A, B, C…”
Combine that with the one note message in the ad and it makes Berwick look like he’s not ready for primetime. I’m firmly on the fence as far as the race goes. Notionally I like Berwick’s politics, but I’m unconvinced he’s more than a well-intentioned administrator. Single payer needs to be part of a bigger picture, which Berwick struggles to define (let alone make a strong case that he can deliver it). Single payer seems to be Berwick’s #1-with-a-bullet priority and, if so, then I think I’d rather see him working on that as part of the next governor’s team.
As for Coakley, the ad is standard political horse manure. It’s designed to make her look sympathetic enough that people feel comfortable voting for her as the best-known candidate in the race and the runaway favorite.
When diaries get frontpaged, could videos be put below the fold? I think all the ads and the ice bucket challenge are contributing to the exteme slowness of BMG’s loading time over the past few days.
Do most voters actually know what that means? I highly doubt it, and Berwick never defines the term.
He briefly calls it medicare for all, but, yeah, at the end of the day, this won’t resonate with voters. Interesting to get canvassers take on what the voters are talking about they encounter, at any level and for any candidate. I feel most are tuned out, more so than usual.
I’ve been over a half dozen “turfs” and can tell you this: Most people are away on vacation or out on a nice summer weekend. The ones that get to talk to are learning about Don Berwick for the first time and they are receptive. I’ve been invited into a few homes to speak at length (those are the best) and the concerns are health care for the folks I speak with (most are in the 45-60 demo) along with jobs for their kids who are out of or soon to be out of college. Some have voiced a good deal of disapproval over negative ads.
I’ve been canvassing in Boston. Most people I’ve encountered just haven’t been paying attention yet (for some, my knocking on their door was the first time they even knew there was a race). When I’ve talked with people about Don, they tend to be very receptive to the idea of a single payer system. It’s something that speaks to people’s experiences very well (the high cost of health insurance as well as the cuts made to other valuable programs as health care costs continue to rise). The connection to people’s lived experiences is a very important one.
I don’t know what to do about (except in the longer term per my most recent diary), I realize I’m not the average voter, and I can’t honestly pretend I’m surprised, but it’s still amazing and frustrating to me that people don’t know four weeks out that there is a contested primary for the highest office in the state coming up.
Perhaps not.
Democratic primary voters in Massachusetts in 2014? I would think most do.
So it needs to be cut not expanded.
…and are just playing out the string. That’s what I take away from these ads. Grossman seems to think he won’t catch Coakley so is going to go out playing nice. Berwick seems to know all he can do is speak to his small, but very passionate, choir. Coakley lamely casts herself as the underdog in an attempt to make sure her voters show up for the primary instead of getting complacent.
Thankfully the down ballot statewide races have become rather interesting and I can’t say for sure who will win any of them. We have two great candidates running for AG, Mike Lake is turning the LG race competitive and one can at least make an argument that any of the three Treasurer candidates can win it.
As far as the “contest” for Governor? September 9th can’t come soon enough!
…at least the one’s I’m supporting, but I have to say for so many open races I have never seen such a ho-hum campaign season.
About Coakley the underdog fighting the man
Berwick’s pushing single payer, which I’d like to see happen in Massachusetts. Still, we already have a better healthcare system than the rest of the country. Single payer is a next step, but it wouldn’t be fixing a glaring problem.
Meanwhile our transportation system is reeling from decades of neglect. We had a 16-year run of Republican governors who clearly had no interest in transportation issues, who spectacularly mismanaged the Big Dig and who left transportation in the Commonwealth in a state of disrepair. It’s no mistake that the last governor to give us T expansion and a major overhaul of our highway system was Mike Dukakis.
This is a bread and butter issue. It’s how you get to work, how well commerce operates and a primary deciding factor in whether businesses want to locate in Massachusetts. Gov. Patrick has been working to whittle down the number of roadways and bridges in disrepair and to get to items that have been on to-do list since the Dukakis administration. We’re going to get some T expansion. Yet no one has laid out a big picture for where we need to be in 20 years. It’s also Charlie Baker’s glass jaw. Every time transportation comes up, he’s defenseless against the Big Dig. Biggest issue he had to tackle in government and he botched it.
Unfortunately we have three Dems who have yet to come up with one original thought when it comes to transportation. That and education (including an affordable college education) are the two biggest puzzles the next governor needs to solve. I’m not seeing anything close to the kind of leadership we need on transportation.
I’ve long argued that the person who runs on transit, schools, and jobs is the person that wins. And too often that person has been Baker, even if the solutions are awful, he is at least identifying the problems the voters seem to want addressed. Haven’t heard much from any of the campaigns on the issues really, other than who can out buffer zone the other or who can out gun control the other, issues that while important, matter very little to our economic future.
Baker has two solid educational ideas: having vo-tech high schools offer post-HS professional certification and looking to shave a bachelor’s degree down to 3 years. He hasn’t quite figured out how to knock out the cost of the 4th year of college yet (turning the standard senior year of HS into a full year of college credits is the answer), but he’s on the right track.
When I read those my reaction was, “Wow, those are actual ideas and not aspirational pablum.” The dems are going to need better than “I like schools” to trump that.
IBM acquired a large facility from the former Digital Equipment Corporation in Littleton, MA.
The absence of viable “reverse” commuter rail service, so that IBM employees could take commuter rail outbound from Boston to work in the morning and inbound to return home in the evening, was a major impediment to that transaction.
Talking about infrastructure is the mark of someone who is ready to be gov. It’s part of why Patrick clicked. (He talked about other Governor stuff too.)
No democrat has won the corner office without addressing these sorts of issues since before I could vote, if then.
… these things would be more important.
I think Coakley is playing well with likely primary voters and tailoring her message to them at the moment. From the Social Sphere crosstabs we can see that they are more likely to be (1) older (2) richer (3) more educated. Half of the samples are made up of people 55+ years old.
The key question for her supporters seems to be that “right direction/wrong track” and they mostly think things are good the way they are. It stands to reason that they would like a familiar candidate.
Anecdotally–by targeting faithful primary voters, the campaigns are sending us out to generally older and more financially stable people who tend to be homeowners. They have benefited by the recent runups in real estate prices and many from stock or mutual fund holdings. Their kids are out of school so they don’t much care about education. They are retired or have tended to move closer to their jobs, so they don’t care about transportation. They may be generally liberal or moderate, but “life is good” and they don’t want the next Governor to rock the boat too much.
Coakley’s messaging may change if she advances to the general and faces off with Baker.
When Deval Patrick first ran in 2006, he really did talk about all the things governors do, and that was a big part of building support for someone few had heard of in 2005.
Dr. Berwick is in the position of trying to be that candidate that wins in September 2014 that few have heard of in August 2014. A steeper climb that’ll require a whole lot of media.
And it doesn’t help that his ads reinforce the perception that he is a single issue candidate, rather than one who has great ideas and stances on a plethora of issues-which he does! And which many voters would want to learn! The canvassers are optimistic, but I wonder if they didn’t go all in on a good convention showing leaving themselves with few chips to play with during the final round of play.
this is a mistake that Coakley and Grossman are making too. It will hurt the nominee in the general, whoever she is (generic “she,” there, not a prediction).
But it’s probably especially important for a relative unknown like Berwick.
So, Martha Coakley’s ad is attacking the “old boys club” who pay for super PACs. I assume that she is referring to those old guys who paid for Steve Grossman’s ad (which includes his 92 year old mother). At any rate, if Martha wins, except for Steve’s mother, Matha will be calling those very same old guys and ask them to pay for ads in opposition to Charlie Baker. She’s called them before, and she will call them again. But, she just attacked them!
That strategy really backfired on Elizabeth Warren.
What strategy are you referring to there Striker? (Might have been an embedding issue).
To the silly idea that AG Coakley’s ad somehow attacks “people she will need to go back to for funding”.
Senator Warren was correctly viewed as a candidate who would stand up to the financial industry, banks and the other big money interests.She was vocal in her campaign and in her ads about her positions. I Didn’t notice Senator Warren having trouble raising funds. I seriously doubt Martha Coakley will have any problem raising money (except from MRs. Grossman).
But the person making that charge would argue that unlike Senator Warren, Coakley’s primary funding sources come from the people she is attacking. That is an important distinction. Whether the facts substantiate that claim-I don’t know.
I did do some digging on her funding and found that she gets a lot of funding from the healthcare industry (problematic), Big Pharma (ditto), and unions (a positive for me, but not for folks like David Bernstein). Funding from any kind of industry the AG would regulate is very problematic to me. That said, I don’t see any big banking or housing funds going her way, so the ad is not directly dishonest, but healthcare and pharma are big players and ‘old boys’ in Massachusetts so to speak.
… sorta sucks.
The underlying assumption to bluewatch’s original comment relies upon a complete lack of distinction between ‘solicitiing’ funds and ‘accepting’ funds: insinuating that Martha Coakley got off the phone to the ‘old boys network’ soliciting green immediately prior to spewing invective at them and that she’s in for a shock ten minutes from now when she calls them again and asks for more…. I’m sure that might happen, but equally certain that it isn’t required to happen.
An interesting exercise but not particularly telling if we don’t know some important details:
— you stated clearly (above) that “Coakley’s primary funding source comes from the people she is attacking.” This might be true. It also might be true that they represent the largest single contributor (by category), but are not the “primary funding source”. Or it might not be true at all and you mistated their impact (I do not assert that you did this deliberately).
— The extent to which pharma, healthcare, unions and whomever else is donating funds to Grossman and Berwick is not known. It’s possible that the healthcare industry is donating equally to everyone in the race to hedge. It’s also possible that both healthcare and pharma are donating orders of magnitude more to Grossman and/or Berwick
— To what extent (if any) is there reporting overlap between the ‘healthcare industry’ and the very active nurses unions in Mass? Are they ‘double counting’ or counting one for the other…’? If, prior to your comment, I had been asked to guess whom it was providing the ‘primary funding source’ for Coakley I would have said unions.
Rather than come up with dueling stats, perhaps you can tell us where you did the digging on her funding and we can see if this presents stats on all the candidates.
We’ve been watching Martha Coakley in public office for more than fifteen years. It’s true that “dueling stats” will strengthen the case. It’s also true that the evidence is already in for anybody who chooses to see it.
Ms. Coakley is a master at political double-speak, speaking the progressive line to burnish her “liberal” credentials while using “nuance” to make sure she retains the wiggle-room to do what she actually intends.
For example, she proudly trumpets her efforts to “protect children”. Yet when it came time to indict Somerville police officer Keith Winfield for raping a two year old with a hot curling iron, she found not enough evidence to indict. It was only AFTER the attorney for the victim’s mother (and opponent in the 2006 race for AG) pursued the allegations that Ms. Coakley chose to indict Mr. Winfield, who was subsequently convicted (by her successor) and given two life sentences.
As in so many of her other public actions, her personal agenda trumped the public interest. She likes cops. Kieth Winfield was a cop. So no indictment. But then … her opponent in a campaign is asking politically embarrassing questions. Then … and only then … the indictment is forthcoming.
This is a long-standing and all-too-familiar pattern with Ms. Coakley. I don’t need additional statistics to conclude that the same person follows the same pattern (acting from the same personal values) when it comes to securing her campaign funding.