Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Nutter Consultant Does Good

Chris Cillizza (or more likely someone in a little tiny cubicle in the basement of the Washington Post) has been sending me his "The Fix" postings via email. Mostly they are way over my head but there was a tidbit in one that arrived today that had a local angle. Here is your gossipy nugget for the day:

What do Michael Nutter, the odds-on favorite to become Philadelphia's next mayor, and Steve Beshear, the front-runner to be elected Kentucky's next governor, have in common? A man named Fred Yang. Yang, a partner in the Democratic polling firm Garin Hart Yang Research Group, handled the survey research for both men's surprisingly strong victories in recent party primaries. Nutter, a former city councilman, won with a surprisingly strong double-digit margin in the May 15 vote, despite a seven-way field that included two sitting members of Congress. A week later, Beshear, who served stints as state attorney general and lieutenant governor, won 41 percent in the primary to avoid a runoff with free-spending businessman Bruce Lunsford. And, no, Yang and his firm aren't aligned with any of the current crop of presidential candidates. Let the courtship begin.


The full column is available here.

5 comments:

Sparky Duck said...

Nutter is a democrat in Philadelphia. I think that is enough to get him elected

Anonymous said...

I agree. Nutter's original campaign ads running against the incumbent and lame duck mayor gave him no traction whatsoever. Presumably that strategy was thought up by his consultant. After the negative ads against Knox, Nutter sort of won by default and benefitted from the splintered field.

AboveAvgJane said...

Just to play devil's advocate, and I don't have any reason to think this happened. Suppose these are the folks who suggested he needed something to soften his image and came up with the idea for the Olivia ad. I thought it was a great ad. But this is all just speculation on my part.

Anonymous said...

I never saw the ad with Nutter's kid, but IMHO, what turned the tide were the ads/media about Knox owning part of a bank that was involved in payday lending.

AboveAvgJane said...

I hardly ever see tv so I missed most of it. The ones I saw were on YouTube.