The final campaign finance reports have been filed, and Kevin Brown spent $23,484 over the last two weeks for the Escambia County Commission District 2 post. Chance Walsh spent nothing, and Mike Kohler write checks for $6,804.
Check out the reports:
Well said Melissa.
Joan, when anybody tells me they are thinking of running and asks for input on my campaign experiences for a few do’s and don’ts, I tell them the number one thing is
DON’T WASTE MONEY ON OUTSIDE CONSULTANTS.
The other thing I tell them is BE VERY CAREFUL ON ANY *LOCAL* CONSULTING, because you never know if you’re going to get ahold of one who is a mole batting for the other team.
No Tallahassee, no Jacksonville, no Tampa–they will all bleed your campaign coffers dry and give you the same horrible advice they give everybody else.
I once spent a worthless hour on the phone with a Jacksonville consultant who wanted to argue with me that Escambia County has a poverty problem, and I needed to offer him a white paper or some such nonsense to prove it. (I made what they considered a hair-brained suggestion that there needed a back to school message when families couldn’t afford to buy the school supplies on their mandated lists.)
Here is a short list of the dumb stuff they tell local candidates:
–Don’t put your signs out too early. People will get sick of them.
–Rely solely on four star republican voter rolls. Don’t worry about knocking anywhere else. (Then half the time, they provide outdated republican lists.)
–Well-done neighborhood-centric communication isn’t important. Keep all messaging general.
–Stick to big block items, and don’t get down into the nitty gritty on local issues.
–Don’t use the word “infrastructure” as nobody knows what that means and it’s not sexy.
–Do release this or that negative crap, even if it didn’t work the first time, because it’s a public service to the community on top of being effective strategy.
–Don’t worry about TV–waste of money (that you could be paying us for more flyers).
–Don’t worry about billboards. Gonna do a billboard? Oh okay then just go electronic (because they’re cheaper and you can continue to pay us for more flyers).
–Don’t worry about NPAs. Hell, don’t worry much about dems. You’ll win this on republicans alone.
–Social media? Don’t worry about it. Not important.
–Geofencing? Haven’t heard of it.
–Website? Sure…we’ll set one up. Then we won’t pay any attention to it from the day we unveil it, and over the course of your campaign it will become a buggy, neglected mess with tired content turned dead space.
–Don’t bother with a campaign manager. A campaign manager might just get in the way of how much money we can suck off you towards ineffective ends. And we can provide all the support you need with logging your campaign finances.
That’s not representative of any one campaign; it’s just the cumulative nonsense during *many* campaigns I’ve heard over the years coming from consultants in far-flung places who have NO clue about anything locally. And like all consultants, they get paid no matter what the outcome. They typically build in a 50-50 (or some other ratio) structure, but it’s often based on every deliverable under the sun other than whether the candidate wins. (The *really* good ones, which are rare, aren’t afraid to write contracts on a win.)
I haven’t been inside on the Kevin Brown campaign like I have been some others I’ve helped with. But just from the looks of it, if Kevin wins it will be *despite* whatever advice he was getting from these consultants, and instead because of his ground game, which he clearly opened up to a much more diverse voting pool than Kohler is apparently concerned with. (Chance didn’t walk much, if any, admittedly.)
If Kevin Brown wins his race despite some novice decisions that clearly didn’t pan out great for him in terms of his campaign, hopefully he’ll cross the finish line with the key takeaway, which is that the way to win locally–whether it’s a campaign or with your performance as commissioner–is to bridge the gap effectively between the halls in Tallahassee and County drainage ditches. It really does take both sides of the equation. What Kohler’s “rebel fighter reformer” approach lacked is that it only highlighted that he has no idea how to roll righteous indignation into solid working relationships with peers on the board and constituents while working the purse strings on a state level. What Chance lacked on his campaign was, well, everything, except a bang-up campaign manager who made it look as if he was actually campaigning.
As much as some of the howlers howl about well-financed campaigns, in the end money alone rarely results in wins. That is surely not to say we don’t need another round of campaign finance reform. (We need it. Badly.) It’s just to point out that the social media hate squad is always working it both ways: “Look at all that money that’s why they always win!” “Even with all that money people saw through their corruption and they lost!”
Most people I know can’t possibly predict where it’s going to land for D2 commissioner. Next indicator: early vote count. Spectrum of possible outcomes: wide margin to skin of the teeth recount.
How did Chance pay for that political ad painted by Carter on Graffitti Bridge. I will say thatb was a smooth move, especially because you report he spent nothing.
He dumped it to a consultant in Tallahasse at the 11th hour. What good did that do.
You got home boy clueless Chance thats get his face on the Graffitti Bridge and Desperate Kohler pimping his military uniform. Too bad, I guess getting septic to sewer via state and oil spill dollars isn’t sexy enough for the average campaign facebook groupies. Brown can bring skills that will save home owners save big bucks on their property tax which in turn helps keep bacteria out of our area waterways. Maybe Brown will get lucky and pull a rabbit out of his hat. I hope so.