After failing to pick up enough votes in the early phase of hand recount, Larry Kissell has conceded to Robin Hayes. Kissell’s margin was an excruciating 329 votes out of over 121,000 total cast – not even three-tenths of one percent of the overall vote.
The good news is that Kissell – in an e-mail to supporters – today said that he’s going to run in 2008. (Quick, someone update the wiki!) This is great for a lot of reasons. Kissell got a late start this year because of the abortive candidacy of Tim Dunn. The late start and his perceived “replacement” status made it hard for him to garner support early on. (I should note that MoveOn did back Kissell’s play with some $200K in independent expenditures – clearly a great move.)
But now he can capitalize on his tremendous performance (in a decidedly GOP-leaning district) which he managed all on a shoe-string budget. (Less than half-a-million raised as of the last report – which was nonetheless quite an accomplishment, given the above.) An early start is so important these days – it certainly helped Paul Hodes a great deal. And I’d like to think that some of the bigger players will now get behind Kissell early, too.
We’ll be playing a lot of defense in 2008, but we can’t only play defense. We need to keep the playing field wide open, and that’s exactly what Larry Kissell will be doing.
but glad to hear he’s going to run again. He’s had great exposure to be successful the second time around and hopefully he’ll be in a position of having some top-of-the-ticket positive coattails to his benefit.
he made no effort to raise money outside of the netroots. His tv ads were awful. We’d be better suited finding a stronger candidate.
Kissell did not out perform other Democrats. Hayes underperformed. That’s the first part.
The second part is that Kissell didn’t raise any money on his own. Candidates need to raise some money before blame gets put on the DCCC. This race was lost because Kissell ran a lackluster campaign.
This is not a hard core Republican district. Its a swing district. The Dems need a better candidate in order to win. If they settle for Kissell, we’ll lose by more votes next time.
votes of Hayes-R was a noteworthy feat esp. considering the following:
I don’t see how anyone over or underperformed anyone as there were no major top-of-the-ticket races in NC in ’06. Bush-R won the District by 8 points in 2004 and the District is rated Cook R+3. In 2004 Hayes-R won by 12 points.
Had the DCCC participated this would have been a no-brainer. Hopefully they will be on board this time around.
http://www.cqpolitic…