A colleague of mine said that people like Judy Feder lose  because they are "too nice" for the politics game.  Judy is very nice, but I did not hear much from her strongly attacking Frank Wolf and attaching him to the President.
How about..."Frank Wolf...like the Wolves in 2004 Presidential campaign...is trying to trick you into believing he isn't a Bush sidekick...etc", or something like that.

--Wolf has never come across as a nasty person

--He's not been linked to scandal

--The Washington Post endorsement may have had some effect; the paper certainly downplayed the race

--I did some simple math during the campaign and found that federal salaries have done well the last few years; federal workers had no reason to feel slighted

--suggestion: Andy Hurst should move further out and run in two years against Wolf;

Great Heath Shuler joke on Fark.com:  Pundits predict that theere'll be a recall election in six weeks with voters wanting to replace him with Gus Frerotte

It's interesting that Andy HUrst came significantly closer than Judy Feder with just a fraction of her money.  I wish the Democratic Party had declard his race "on the fringe" enough to give him ANY money at all. A local chapter did give him about $5k, I think, but he received nothing from the national DCC or from "Red to Blue." It's too bad they didn't see what we saw in Andy.  I went down to the Democratic HQ on his behalf a few times but they seemed sure the Dems in the 11th didn't justify any money. I hope Webb's win and Andy's great showing convinces them otherwise for next time.

Now that Wolf and Davis are in the minority, they will not have nearly as much punch. I would think that since  Davis was part of the "K Street Project," revenge will be tempting...

Got alittle bit of blow back - no disrespect to the campaign at all.  But Andy was a great candidate - And we had the momentum against corruption of which Tom Davis could be very easily been put smack dap in the middle of the circle with ties to the K-street, RNCC, etc, etc.

What we did not have was an organized approach to the campaign.  We had over 170 volunteers ready to lit drop, etc and no material.  That is a function of money sure -
but considering we had no candidates in two congressional districts in the state - where was the State Party?

 

for a close battle and even thought she might be able to pull it off. 

In hind sight it's not that much of a surprise that she lost.  Wolf, like Davis, is seen as being a moderate and fairly productive for the NOVA region.  Whether or not that's true for either doesn't matter, enough people have that general feeling.  Plus both are long term congressmen and unseating a long time incumbent is always difficult, even in this Democratic friendly election.

The bigger surprise to me is that Wolf outperformed Davis.  The financial situation was near even for Wolf vs Feder (I think, I don't have the numbers in front of me) while the Davis vs Hurst was massively skewed toward Davis.

Given how much emphasis is placed on money, I thought that Feder would have been much closer in the results because she was able to go toe-to-toe with Wolf spending wise.  Hurst, massively outspent, ended up closer.

Which leads me to believe the simple answer is that the old party affiliations are holding stronger in the 10th than the 11th.  While the general party preference for both districts are turning bluer, the 11th has pulled ahead of the 10th in that respect.

All of the above are valid points but also consider how Judy's district is configured.  I would bet that name recognition was a real problem the further west you traveled in her district.  Frank Wolf is a known quantity and has low negatives.  Looking ahead two years from now, I think we could make a much better showing (always factoring in what is going on in the country at that point and how well the Democratic majority is playing out in both houses)and if we start earlier and get even better organized and if we have a strong candidate.  If Judy decides to make another run for it, she would have the benefit of accrued name recognition and wouldn't start so far behind.  But that's for the future.  Right now let's just rejoice in the race we did win.

I agree completely.  I'm in Fauquier, and unless a person was tuned into the campaign via the internet, Judy had little recognition beyond being on yard signs.  I too would strongly encourage another run; name recognition is a factor and she could spend more time out this way at the county fairs and such in the summer--which is where people gather.

I think people just happen to like Wolf, just as they like Davis.  They do not seem like reactionaries or fundamentalists, but rather common sense politicians trying hard to work for the people in their district.  Hard to unseat incumbent candidates like that. 

Frank Wolf is a good man and well respected in the 10th District.  He does a lot of good work that most people never hear about and his isn't one of the Repubs. right wingnuts.  I was glad to see him re-elected.  Being endorsed by the Post and running a clean and positive campaign convinced me we need him as our Congressman.

Judy is fantastic, but from a foot soldier's perspective Wolf did what he had to do to win.  Nothing.

As a long term incumbent with pretty good name recognition he just stayed in the bunker.  did some negative ads at the end, and rode ammendment #1 to the finish.  every once in a while he told about consitiuient services.

the numbers are indicative of gerrymandering.  judy was solid around 45% in FX, 40% in PW-Loudoun-Manassas and MP, and low to upper 30% in the west Clarke-Fredrick-Faquier-Warren and Winchester.  you can see the blue trend, but compared to Socas in '04 generally a 5% bump up.

a lot comes down to ground game and what kind of bench you got.  the Dems in the 10th are starting to get a ground game going but most of the effort from existing troops goes to the top of the ticket.

there's still a pretty good R ground game and since Wolf anever came out of the cave - well you see.

i really hope judy runs again.  she's awesome.  gotta build on the name recognition.

"judy, call me..."

b

Judy has proven that she can level the playing field and has built her name recogition, with our changing demographics she will be very well positioned to run again next time (BTW, these same dynamics apply equally to Bruce).

Perhaps Wolf will start thinking of retirement in the meantime, without incumbency/name recognition the repubs will have a much harder time holding this seat.

I really must confess to being one of the foot soldiers that dedicated a much higher percentage of my time/effort/money resources to Webb than Judy but Mrs. LCD worked exclusively for Feder so we balanced out a bit.

She probably won't want to think about it much this week.  But 
Judy really should run again.  She ran an awesome race. 

I think most people understood that gas prices were manipulated.  And think I voters do appreciate a nice and qualified person.  Many may not yet know how great (and nice) Judy is. 

My impression as an outsider who has visited up there many times, is that Wolf sponsors Little Leage and other sports teams.  If his name is on the backs of kids, he's got name recognition and appreciation that takes time to equalize.

And don't forget gerrymandering.  But even that can be overcome. 

It seems that great teams are in place for elections then they fall apart and often we are re-creating the teams each year. I would like to help find ways to keep these great people in place for the following years.

I agree totally.  It makes a lot of sense to not have to rebuild each election cycle.  I think blogs like RK will help to keep us together with a sense of community and if more of us grassroots folks get active in our local Dem organizations we can spread out like Bermuda  grass and really start to hold territory.  I personally have started to go to the Sully Dems monthly meetings to make connections.  I can't say enough about how fantastic Mary Lee is and how much she did for the campaigns.  My personal feeling was that FCDC central dragged its feet over supporting Webb at first because they were still in snit about Harris Miller's loss...and folks, if Miller had won the primary we SURE wouldn't be celebrating a new Virginia Senator and George Allen would still be thinking about running for president. (Shudder) Sully and Hunter Mill Dems are fantastic and have a good volunteer network.  Look at Sully's record in the last two elections...we're turning a heavily Republican demographic purple and towards a full bright blue.  Let's keep growing and building.

For my own part I spent a lot of time canvassing/working the VoteNO campaign.  I personally felt that was critical.  Perhaps I was wrong; it kept me from working more on the Webb/Feder/Pandak/Rishell races (though I did work a little on all of those except Pandak, and I contributed to her race).

With Feder vs Wolf it's harder to say - though I think a huge portion of the 14% delta is the coat-tails of that damned redundant and bigoted amendment.  It clearly shored up the wing-nut's determination to vote despite their congress and president screwing them for 6 years.  In Tom Davis's case I strongly feel that Hurst would have won if there was no amendment fight; and he should run again because next election there will be no amendment and he'll win.  For the 10th there is more going on though; the amendment is not the whole story.

As has been mentioned, unlike Davis/Drake, Wolf has been clear of any scandal (except for voting against habeus corpus).  The Post endorsements also hurt (though that didn't hurt Hurst as much because Davis was clearly involved in scandal).  Name recognition is huge too, and Judy's message was only beginning to gain ground in the middle of the 10th district.  She'd pick up as much as 5% more just by continuing the message for a few more months, or having a noisy attention-getting primary election to fight next time.

Some of this is Judy's campaign's issue too though.  I think they over-targeted women voters (women voters are key, I will readily agree, but you can't skip men entirely), and the price of gas thing was effectively deflated when gas prices dropped; so the early momentum she had fizzled and had to be re-established (which she clearly did do - huge kudos for that).

Gas prices... I predicted they'd drop through early November back in June.  Next election cycle will be tougher to predict with a bi-partisan government; but it is clear that they go up for an election when oil companies want change, and go down for an election when oil companies want things to stay the same.  It's obvious.  Campaign managers should make note of it and work with those expectations.

The really big thing I think anyone running for office needs to do from this point going forward, unless their entire district is geographically tiny, is to set up as many satellite offices as early as they can afford to.  Get volunteers to run satellite offices from their homes if money is tight.

The Webb campaign finally figured this out just in time.  The Feder campaign did not until a few short weeks ago, probably too late.  I could have done more if I could have conveniently gotten into an office and connected more, even with the amendment distraction.

Politicians, if you are running in an area with bad traffic and that is many miles across; consider running the campaign with a remote site or several, all connected by conference calls.  Travel time seriously impacts your volunteers and the coordination of all your efforts.

Web sites to coordinate efforts are AWESOME.  Judy's website became awesome by the end of summer, but if it had that info earlier - we could have reached more.  An active blog (Roemmelt/Hurst/RaisingKaine style) really helps keep people connected.  Judy's site was frequently visited for news updates, but never put it in my RSS agregator and daily read tabs because it did not have active discussions going on.  Ditto the Webb site until the very end.

Early in the race I read RaisingKaine and Hurst's sites daily because there were interesting things going on the web site/blog every day.  It's a very cheap channel to advertise on (at least compared to television).

Judy's TV ads were fantastic!  A stronger web presence would have helped too and been affordable.  We can't ignore TV; but it needs to be augmented, especially for remote areas or areas where traffic keeps people in their cars so long they don't watch much TV.

Long winded post above, sorry.

Forgot most important point:  Judy is a terrific candidate and I'd work for her again if she decided to try again.

Hurst should absolutely try again - frankly I think he's the man to beat now that the wing-nuts have their gay-bashing in the constitution.

Of course we have to be careful about the try again campaigns; I don't want to see Allen, Gilmore, or Davis try again once their are defeated.

There were so many races that appeared for a while to be in play.  I think we have to figure out not only a fifty state strategy, but also a whole-state strategy.  No race should be labeled with low expectations, by anyone.  Bringing new people in to do the worker bee activism will help us truly run a whole-state strategy.  I do see many new folks who were brought into activism by the Webb campaign.  And that's a start.

Kathy you rock, taking a page from the 50 state strategy to work the whole state is an awesome idea.

I like the thought of coupling it with staying active and getting to know other blogger/activists from around the state and learning to understanding each other better too.

Now that the election is over we should do some fun things, but things together and that are culturally or politically engageing, as well as socially fun.

Fauquier County has the Sunday Supper Club - what an awesome venue.  More stuff like that would help enormously.

I plan to visit SouthWest Virginia at least once a quarter from now on, and try to connect with people there because some one called me out on the fact that many of us in NOVA were writing off that part of the state - and she (or he) was correct.  We need to connect with each other.

Judy brought lots of fresh energy and intelligence to the race.  She nailed Frank Wolf on plenty of his positions that no one had challenged before and she did it in a very intelligent manner. 

However, I thought Judy's own positions needed a lot more depth and detail.  She knew what she was against but needed more construction to her own proposals. 

I also thought her website could have been better.  The calendar was rarely updated.  A few times, her campaign was too aggressive.  (Showing up outside Wolf's office was not Virginia like.)

Overall she was a quality candidate. But there's plenty to be learned from her first campaign.  I do thank her for running against Frank Wolf.  It was a daunting task. 

Andy's campaign did a fabulous job in the "sign war" with Davis.  Everywhere I drove in the 11th a Davis sign was matched with a Hurst sign.  The only thing they botched "sign wise" was not making those "Supports Bush 90%" signs that were stuck buy Davis's signs large enough to read!

Maybe this seems trivial to some, but I think stuff like that matters down ticket.  Hell, even how your name "sounds" and how your signs "look" matters (Feder's signs with those stars looked like something off a birthday card). 

And even if you can afford to buy some airtime (as Judy did) with great ads in a Congressional race, I'm not sure there's enough money to saturate the airwaves and thus penetrate your message and name to the constiuency. 

I think these two races show that direct mail & signage may still play a bigger role than tv ad buys in Congressional and local races.  Thoughts? 

Both were great candidates.  The energy and money was directed to Webb, and Virginia doesn't change easily.  Look at how many votes Allen got even after shooting himself, displaying his bigotry publicly on more than one occasion.

I think the Democratic Party is getting a lot of kudos (Emanuel especially), but did not really understand the mood of the country.  Howard Dean's organizing in 50 states has proven to be the genius of this election.

I think the Democratic leadership still may not understand how fed up the country is with CORRUPTION.  Both parties take money and other goodlies from special interests.  Look at Joe Lieberman, for example. 

If the chummy relationship with K Street and the revolving door from congress to lobbyist is not prohibited in the next two years, more of the bums will be thrown out.

Davis is corrupt and the party could have won Hurst's race if they had focussed on the right stuff.  Corruption MUST BE FACED this time.

The Washington Post made a strong case for Frank Wolf's re-election.  Frank Wolf also helped his own cause by occassionally walking out of step with the Bush administration.  Gas prices likely played a role as well. 

Lowell wants to know what happened to Judy Feder...at the risk of drawing brickbats and flames, one must be realistic in assessing this district and this campaign, so let me give it a shot.

The first is that Ms Feder lost 57.3%-40.95%, almost 16.5 points (the two independent candidates drew off votes), despite raising more money than he in the time she was running (and ultimately perhaps overall) plus $75K from the DCCC.  I think the 10th might be more competitive, but I don't think the results of the last two years prove that this district is as democratic leaning as the pundits like to make it out to be.

Second, she kept on grabbing issues that didn't hold.  Gas prices are mentioned above.  She tried to hit him on "big oil", until it was noticed that the 71K she said he had received was over 26 years and included small town oil jobbers, employees of oil companies, and the like.  She tried to yell about his earmark vote, except he voted with the democrats against a bill that created limited earmark identification, and then only as a rule-not a law-that will end with this congress.  So her issues attacks got no traction.

The outlying counties of the 10th are solidly GOP, regardless of the current state of Loudoun and Fairfax, so one would have to at least carry those localities to offset the 60% numbers in warren/clarke/frederick, etc., and Ms. Feder came no where near doing that despite Webb carrying Loudoun and Fairfax.  I read somewhere that in the 10th there were 40,000 voters who split their ticket webb/wolf.

Mr. Wolf was endorsed by about every newspaper in the district plus the Wash Post and Times, and that has to help.

Finally it just might be that Frank Wolf is what that district wants right now.  maybe they are happy with him.  He has done a lot of good things for the folks in his district, and for many years.

Let me offer a story to illustrate...I was talking to a co-worker (we work in McLean), a woman who lives in Loudoun and who is by no means a GOP backer.  We were talking politics and she made it clear over the course of the converation she is fed up the the BOS in Loudoun and had no intention of voting for Allen.  I mention Wolf, and she said "oh, he has my vote every time".

This caught me off guard-I asked why.

Seems that her husband had once been in the military.  They were living in Amissville, he was stationed at Vint Hill.  He was transferred to Korea, and she and the children stayed stateside, ...but because he went to Korea their housing allowance was slashed.

My friend wrote a letter to Congressman Wolf's office, and they went to work.  I will spare you the administrative details, but in short order the steps were taken to ensure her housing allowance was not slashed.

Result-my coworker, a moderate to liberal type of voter, is with Frank Wolf whenever he runs.

You take that type of constituent service, faithfully rendered, and multiply it by tens of thousands of constituents over more than two decades in office, and without even the faintest smear of scandal, and you have a pretty hard incumbent to take out-even with massive national trends running against his party.

I do not know that it gets any easier for Ms. Feder to run against Mr. Wolf in 2008.  The Democrats have the Congress, there will be other more endangered seats and then a presidential race to send money to, and after this year the 10th will not be seen as competitive by democratic $$ folks.  Plus there is the fact that a GOP candidate has the above mentioned edge in the outlying counties.

For whatever it is worth, I am betting Frank Wolf is safe in 2008 and 2010, and then retires prior to the 2012 election.  He will be 73 by then, and the redistricting following the 2010 census will likely need to shrink the 10th geographically, which will cause the loss of the outlying counties.

That's the view from my neck of the woods, and I don't think it is an unreasonable one...even though it may be disagreeable to many in this string.

So go on, have at me!

Bwana is right on here. In reality, the hardest part of the entire campaign is finding something to hang around Frank Wolf. He's been in the district for 5 Presidents, he's got great constituent services, and he's got name recognition. This is one of those districts where Frank Wolf will probably retire before being beaten. The redistricting will change the district a lot, but Wolf will probably retire before then.

Good assessment Bwana.

Bwana, I agree with you about the gas price issue.  We moved here over the summer and as I started following her campaign I thought she'd be in trouble if the gas prices started falling, which they did.  She never really seemed to have an issue or issues that stuck - like Iraq and economic justice did for Webb.

Judy Feder seems like a good person, and frankly, so does Frank Wolf.  He's not a Tom DeLay type Republican you could demonize and attack for being a right wing reactionary.  He also doesn't seem like a publicity hound, constantly on Fox or CNN touting his own horn.  And constituent services go a long way, that probably helps him as well. 

I continue to be suprised that Andy Hurst did so well against Tom Davis - maybe we'll see a rematch in 2008?

I still don't like Wolf because of many of his votes and he has not responded to me when I wrote to him as my congressman about Tauzin-Dingell nor Network-Neutrality.

I like Judy Feder better, but you are correct, this is a tough district to effect change in.  sigh...

That being said I would absolutely hate to see no one challenge any incumbent in any race.  Having no choice is pretty disturbing.

Many of the people that Jim Webb brought to the polls also voted for Frank Wolf. Webb wasn't the best for down ticket, simply because he pulled a lot of Republican voters for the Senate, but they stayed Republican for the house. There is no way around that, and we have to remember, we didn't lose anything (no Dem lost a seat), we only gained, just not as much as we wanted.

Lowell, Josh, way to go. You guys did an amazing job.

Paradigm shift, as with Miller.

House member than a Senator, especially in a huge metro area like Washington, D.C. Why? Because Senate campaigns get tons of press coverage, while a campaign like the Wolf-Feder race gets virtually none. There are a lot of other stories to cover in the DC area. And paid advertising costs a bundle here.
  Judy Feder ran a terrific campaign, and she's a great candidate--albeit one in need of a new style of glasses. Her district is difficult, and Frank Wolf has been great at keeping up with his constituents. She wasn't too nice to win. Her ads were as biting as they needed to be. Optimistic candidates like Judy Feder win elections.
  Bottom line: Watch for Wolf to retire after this next term or for Feder to beat him the second time around. She's gotten the name recognition and the political base she needs to win next time.
  Steve