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Normally there is a big dropoff between the votes received by the top of the ticket and the votes received by Supreme Court candidates. This judicial dropoff factor is well known. For a Supreme Court candidate to receive virtually the same raw vote total as the top of the ticket (Kerry got 15,004 more votes than me in a unverse of over 2.8 million) means that Supreme Court candidate received more than the typical level of support from his party's voters. The judicial falloff that Brister suffered is more typical - he received 400,000 fewer votes than Bush.
The most relevant statistic is that I received 41% of the votes of people who cast votes in Brister vs. Van Os, while Kerry received 38% of the votes of people who cast votes for president. Even the timid Beltway consultants consider anything over 40% against a Republican incumbent to be competitive. I also carried more counties than Kerry-Edwards. This didn't just happen by accident, nor was it bought with money. (I raised and spent approximately 200 thousand dollars for a statewide campaign, less than many candidates for state legislature districts.) I worked and sweated hard for those 2.8 million votes. Most importantly, I did it with strong Fighting Democrat messages, populist messages, messages of challenging political-corporate power elites.
Indeed one of my most important objectives was to find out what would happen if I presented rural "conservative" voters with strong populist progressive messages rather than the typical Beltway Democratic chase-the-middle tap dance. What happened exceeded the expectations of my own hypothesis. Small town "conservative" voters were overwhelmingly favorable to my messages. I saw it and heard it with my own eyes and ears and this evidence is irrefutable for me.
What it all comes down to, beyond all the punditry's jousting about ideologies and issue positions, is that the heartland voters want to support and elect fighters, who say what they mean and mean what they say, who stick up for themselves and stand by their beliefs, and who are relaxed and at home around people who work for a living; and they don't like wimps, mealy-mouths, apologists, bankers, insurance executives, corporate fatcats, people who put on airs, or scaredy-cats. I already knew all this from growing up the child of an oil-field worker in Kilgore, Texas; but I had to see it empirically in the context of stumping as a political candidate, and I saw it in spades. It is a vital lesson for the Democratic Party that I attempted to describe shortly after the 2004 election in my March 2005 essay published in The Texas Observer, "On Communicating From the Heart." It is a lesson that I follow because it is the only way I can be true to myself; and as an added bonus, the responses continue to be overwhelmingly favorable politically. With little money and spending only 11 months at it, in which I still continued as a working lawyer in order to earn a living, there were a lot of rural counties that I couldn't get to. But on a county-by-county basis my results in such areas were uniformly better than Kerry-Edwards in the places I was able to reach; indeed I carried several of them that Kerry-Edwards lost.
I don't like phony boosterism and I especially wouldn't like being a phony booster for myself. I'm not puffing. This is what I did and this is what I experienced, and it is what I continue to do and continue to experience. The lesson of it is powerful for the Democratic Party, but the Beltway insiders apparently do not have the capacity to hear it.
I maintain that all Democrats have the right and the duty to call out Democratic office-holders when they conduct themselves as gutless politicians who run away in fright from the Bushite power machine. When they do that it is not only bad for our party, it is a betrayal of the people and the Constitution. The Bushites are hellbent to wipe out Constitutional checks and balances, and we aren't going to stop them by retreating from their bullying tactics. We have to stand up to them and carry the fight to them. If Democrats who are in leadership positions don't have the stomach to lead us in this fight, then we have to call them on it and demand that they get out of the way.
You guys darn sure better call me on it if I roll over and don't fight for the people against the powerful after I become Attorney General.
David Van Os
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