June 10, 2011 08:57 AM UTC

Inside Hancock's Blowout Win

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• by: Colorado Pols

Originally posted at Colorado Pols.

Denver Mayor-elect Michael Hancock significantly outperformed a poll we released earlier in the runoff election, and it’s a consensus among most who we’ve talked to that his margin of victory was larger than just about anyone had honestly predicted. While the final results are basically in line with an internal poll released by the Hancock campaign at the same time as our own, maybe presciently, we think there is more to the story.

Former state Sen. Chris Romer certainly did lose this low-turnout election, as opposed to the Hancock campaign having definitively won it. We do believe that there was much more momentum for Romer early in the runoff election than at the end, and even though it was close to the final result, we think the snapshot taken by our poll at that time was a more accurate view of the race then than Hancock’s internal poll. So what happened? A couple of things, actually:

First of all, Romer had a significant likability disadvantage that he never really tried to resolve. Chris Romer is a testament to the self-destructiveness of being a personally stiff and unlikable person, even though every other factor in a campaign may work in your favor. Romer’s stuffy, canned “class president” demeanor in debates and on the campaign trail gained him nothing with apolitical voters who didn’t care about his last name, and once voters understood that they didn’t like him very much or relate to him, that family legacy became a major disadvantage. Romer seemed only peripherally aware of this, and to the extent that he did understand, he didn’t seem to care. Romer certainly had his supporters, but those folks backed him more because he seemed likely to win than because they genuinely believed in him as a candidate; when Romer seemed to fade in the last two weeks of the campaign, those supporters faded right along with him. This personal lack of appeal is also a reason why many voters worked harder in their minds to rationalize Hancock’s various gaffes than they might have otherwise.

On the other hand, the Hancock campaign skillfully defused the issues lobbed at him by Romer and his allies. It’s just as important to understand why they did this as how: the hits on Hancock over his vote to raise city council pay, and later on his repeated creationism gaffes, could have indeed done severe damage to Hancock in a liberal town like Denver. But instead of answering any of these charges on their merits, Hancock’s campaign kept to a simple, boilerplate line about “not engaging in negative campaigning.” Hancock’s team diligently repeated the claim of Romer running a negative campaign, and it eventually stuck with a news media that wasn’t paying that close of attention to the race.

This strategy allowed the Hancock campaign to blunt basically any charge leveled against him, while ensuring that Hancock never had to respond to the facts of what he was being accused of. The critical moment when this strategy prevailed, and quite possibly the end of any chance that Romer ever had, came when Romer decided to pull an ad running against Hancock over the pay raise vote. As soon as Romer conceded this, he gave the “negative campaign” canard–and it was a canard, as the Denver newspaper managed to admit one fleeting time–all the legitimacy it needed to become a part of every report on this race. Romer did not run a negative campaign by any serious measure: the attacks he made on Hancock were backed up by Hancock’s own words and votes. But by not combating the “negative campaign” charges, Romer let them stick.

Rather than pulling his own campaign ad, which was mild at most, Romer should have said, “There’s nothing wrong with pointing out Hancock’s own statements, and there’s nothing wrong with this ad.” Pulling the ad brought nothing positive for Romer, and it began a retreat in which his campaign became hesitant to attack Hancock when it most needed to be aggressive.

There are some other pieces to the story we’ll circle back with in future posts, but these two facets–Romer’s unrecoverable lack of personal appeal, and Hancock’s ability to turn the daily news cycle into a consistent debate on his terms–were the key factors in Hancock’s big win.