Some random thoughts.
On the positive side, the vote was close. Apparently, Axelman lost by less than 40 votes:
… and first-time candidates typically don’t win their first race.
On the other hand, SNHU was on spring-break. If not, drive-by voting by non-resident college students likely would have boosted Martins’ margin of victory to several hundred votes. Also, Axelman was not really a first-time candidate as he served on the budget committee. Also, Hooksett is supposed to be a “Red Town.” Also, the unprecedented support for President Trump in the primary did not manifest itself in this contest.
This is going to piss some people off … but … Martins ran a much better campaign than Axelman.
To begin with, the time to scrub your social media is before you declare you are running … not after the Democrats have taken screen-shots. Alternatively, if you want to run for political office, refrain from debating trendy polemics on social media.
More (in my opinion) importantly, Martins ran a much better campaign … a Trump-like campaign. Trump won in 2016 because he identified issues that the voters really cared about and focused on those issues … illegal immigration (build the wall); ending the GOP Establishment’s endless wars, and tearing up the so-called “free-trade” agreements that exported good American jobs to other companies. Meanwhile, Hillary was talking about white-privilege and intersectionality and other matters that the voters who decided the election did NOT care about.
Martins ran a campaign modeled on Trump’s:
Granted … as I discussed here … this was all code. But the voters did not necessarily know that, and I’m not sure how much of an effort was made to make them aware of that. And like it or not, these issues … education, healthcare … are the issues that matter to the voters that decide elections.
Stated differently, the voters that decide elections don’t care about politically-existential questions such as the proper role of government in our lives. They want to know whether their lives will be better off or worse off if they vote for this candidate versus that candidate.
I don’t claim to know all the literature that Axelman put out, but if this from the State Party is representative, he wasn’t connecting with the voters that decide elections the way Martins was:
If all you are offering in terms of a positive agenda is “cutting regulations” as opposed to “improving schools without (unlike my opponent) raising taxes,” you are Hillary Clinton talking about white privilege while your opponent is Donald Trump talking about building the wall.
Whoever in the State Party came up with the ad in the above screen-shot committed political-malpractice.
If this is how the GOP intends to run this year … wrapping themselves in Sununu and espousing platitudes such as “grow our economy” … they had better hope that Trump has some incredible coattails because that’s their only hope.
