Reply #195: The beginning??

[karynnj]

Are you referring to late December 2000? The fact is that Dean was not any higher then - it was thought Gore would run again. Kerry was at a later point - after Gore said he was not running - considered one of the frontrunners - when Dean was around number 10 in polling. Dean gained traction in spring of 2003 and peaked in about November 2003. He lost some support then to Clark. In 2003, Dean's poll numbers were partly a function of the huge amount of positive media coverage he got - especially in the summer when he appeared on 3 major covers at the same time. (Kerry got almost no coverage then) In fall 2003, Clark got a ton of intensely positive coverage. In addition, Dean got many important endorsements.

There was NO time in 2002 or 2003 when Senator Kerry was at .03%. (You do realize that is less than 1%)

The fact is that Kerry started to gain traction in Iowa as he campaigned face to face with people. Even though he was still recovering from cancer treatments after surgery in February 2003, he worked extremely hard in Iowa and when he won people to his side - they stayed with him. By late January 2004, he was polling the best in Iowa - something the rest of the media blindly ignored. Adam Nagourney even reported 2 weeks before the caucus that even Kerry's biggest backers did not think he could win Iowa. The press still mainly spoke of Kerry in terms of whether he would drop out after Iowa - or wait until after NH.

To some extent, it was the poor reporting of most of the mainstream media that was responsible for both Deaniacs like you and Dean himself being surprised by Dean's loss. Had they reported the Des Moines register's tracking poll - that did an outstanding job in 2004 and 2008, the results would not have come as a shot out of the blue. Dean was so surprised that he supposedly had not written a concession speech.

(In fact, if you did not have a dog in the race, you might have liked that someone with far less money to spend (Dean blew most of $46 million on Iowa and NH), far fewer big endorsements, and little media hype beat the guys who had that because he personally won more people to his side. )


Looking for something else - I found this essay written by a Dean worker in February 2004. It has some interesting insights as do some of the comments. (I am not saying I agree with all of his conclusions, but it is a candid internal view and far less egocentric than Trippi's, which really blames the failure squarely on Dean.)