Anatomy Of A Grassroots Win

David beats Goliath!
What did the trick was our going door to door talking to real people about real issues.
David Simpson is now the District 7 Representitive elect as he is running unopposed in the general election.

March 8, 2010 4:51 PM

SIMPSON EXPLAINS HOW HE BEAT MERRITT
No big money, no high-powered consultants

One of the true shockers from this week’s primary election, as measured by how often it was referenced afterward in the traditional election post-mortems around town, was Tommy Merritt’s loss in the Longview-anchored HD 7.

While there were other big upsets, this one got folks’ attention mainly because how unexpected it was. Merritt has enormous name ID in his district and had survived a well-funded challenger in 2006 who was backed by Austin power players intent on taking the incumbent down.

The man who actually took down Merritt was somebody entirely different. David Simpson was modestly funded (of the $50,000 or so he raised for the race, $30,000 came from his father). His only political experience was as mayor of Avinger (situated well northeast of HD 7) in the mid 1990s. And in a region where your congregation of choice is just about as important as your choice of political party, he worships with a church located out of the district.

And there’s one more factor – Simpson wasn’t really looking to run for office. He told QR this week that while he had his eyes on a run for office a couple of election cycles down the road, he wasn’t focused on running this year. He filed papers to run at the close of November and his campaign, in essence, was active for only about two months.

So how did this David slay the giant? QR spoke with Simpson in an extended interview this week as well as a couple of members of his campaign team.

What the conversations revealed was a challenger who was in some ways fortunate but who also put in the work at the ground level to leverage the advantages presented by an election cycle dominated on the right by anti-establishment fervor.

At one of those Austin post-mortems this week, Bush Cheney ’04 political consultant Matthew Dowd said that he sensed that the voters this primary season weren’t animated so much by a single political issue but rather by whether an incumbent was seen as out of touch with his district. He added that another big takeaway from this cycle was that good messaging and good campaigning still matter in elections. Applying that rubric to the HD 7 primary provides valuable insight into how the under-resourced candidate won.

--- Message: In a certain sense, Merritt was responsible for creating the opponent who eventually defeated him. The Simpson camp all told the same anecdote of how Simpson got into the race. In October, Merritt was challenged at a candidate meet and greet in Hide-A-Way Lake, a gated community just north of I-20 in Smith County.

The people in attendance were adherents of the Tea Party movement and grilled him on a lot of federal constitutionalist issues. The Simpson campaign says that Merritt got frustrated with the direction of the questions and snapped at the crowd. As state representative, he would look out for his district, he said, but he indicated he didn’t share the group’s keen interest in the 10th amendment to the Constitution.

Simpson was later approached and asked to run by Tea Party activists who were put off by Merritt’s behavior. He prominently espoused the Tea Party message – in his first mailer as a candidate for state rep, Simpson said the would fight to “Enforce the 10th Amendment and reassert state sovereignty.” He also ran on Voter ID (Merritt famously was one of two R’s to vote against a Voter ID bill in 2007) and curtailing social services to undocumented immigrants.

The Simpson camp now says that Merritt’s message of “send me to Austin and I’ll take care of my constituents” was simply out of step with voter sentiment this year, especially in a rock ribbed conservative district like HD 7.

One of the first signs that Simpson was winning the messaging battle, one of his advisors said, was when the incumbent started saying that he represented Tea Party values. “I wonder if (his pollster) was telling him he could lose this thing,” the advisor said.

--- Campaign: The dustbin of history, though, is filled with insurgent campaigns that claimed to be fighting on behalf of the little guy against the incumbent who they said had lost touch with the voters. Successful challenges to the status quo must match the opportunity with the shoe leather to make sure the message is getting across.

In Simpson’s case, the campaign said they did this mainly through mailers and knocking on a lot of doors. They realized early on that the best strategy was to expand turnout beyond traditional primary voters, especially since they sensed that many drawn to the Tea Party movement were probably new voters.

So even though they worked off of lists with primary voters from ’06 and ’08, Simpson said that he looked for ways to contact those with no recent primary history. One way was to visit businesses during the day instead of knocking on the doors of residences where it was likely no one was at home. He said he was also helped by a three-way county court at law contest in Gregg County. He said that every time he passed a house that had a sign for one of those candidates, he stopped even if the address wasn’t on his list. The thinking, Simpson said, was that having a sign up for a local race indicated interest in this election cycle even if the person hadn’t voted in a primary recently.

And Simpson said that what voters were telling him had him increasingly convinced that he was tapping into something that could carry him to victory. He said that he found that Merritt’s name ID, while high, was a mile wide but an inch deep. People were telling Simpson that they would vote for him and the only hard core support that he found for Merritt were among those who knew the incumbent personally.

Constituents were telling Simpson that the incumbent was out of touch. “The feedback that I got” from potential voters, Simpson said, was that they had the impression that Merritt “thought he was unbeatable.”

Somewhere around the third or fourth week of January, Simpson got the impression that his challenge was starting to achieve critical mass. County officials like the sheriff or county judge, “instead of aloof, were smiling and wanted to talk to me,” Simpson said.

“I had to fight becoming overconfident,” Simpson said. He said he challenged himself further, deciding to knock on doors in communities like Longview and Liberty City where the Simpson campaign thought Merritt’s support might be strongest. The worry became “would I have enough time to meet enough people and shake their hands,” he said.

By the close of the first week of early voting, the Simpson campaign began to realize that the turnout was on track to set new records. And the people coming out early only increased during the last week of early voting, according to Simpson campaign coordinator Ryan Mauldin.

“We started to get an inclination by end of first weekend of early voting, but I don’t think anyone expected the turnout of the last week,” he said. “Each day, the numbers kept getting bigger and bigger.”

The campaign was expecting about 3,300 people to vote early and for final turnout to be somewhere in the range of 11,500 – the amount that voted in the last couple of primaries.

In Gregg County alone, 5,317 people voted early and a total of 11,251 votes were cast. Districtwide, 6,678 people voted early and 14,848 votes were cast. Simpson took 54 percent of the early vote, staking him to a lead early in the evening from which he never looked back. He ended up winning 52.9 percent of the vote and bested Merritt by 856 votes.

“The most effective (thing) was just going door to door,” Simpson said, looking back on the experience. “Two months was all we had. If I had another month, the margin could have been much bigger.”

State Rep-elect David Simpson

By John Reynolds

Copyright March 08, 2010, Harvey Kronberg, www.quorumreport.com, All rights are reserved