The 2022 campaign awards

Created
Sat, 31/12/2022 - 10:00
Updated
Sat, 31/12/2022 - 10:00
Dave Weigel’s take on the best achievements in campaigning is one of the more interesting year-end pieces I’ve read. He spends all his time on the trail and I suspect he knows what he’s talking about: Best U.S. Senate campaign: John Fetterman in Pennsylvania. Did he get an assist when Donald Trump lifted Mehmet Oz to win the GOP primary? Obviously. Did a decade-plus of ad campaigns, TED Talks, and media profiles of the 6’8’’ mayor of a left-for-dead town help him? Yes, but that wasn’t luck, and he’d already run for Senate and lost before, in 2016. This year’s Fetterman campaign excelled at everything, convincing Democratic primary voters that a candidate Republicans would call “socialist” was electable, then pummeling Oz while its own candidate recovered from a stroke. The best Fetterman gimmicks — like his constant Twitter trolling of Oz, largely for his living until recently in New Jersey — probably wouldn’t work for other candidates, which was the point. He spent years developing a style and record that could appeal to non-Democrats, which the campaign boiled into “no county left behind,” sending the candidate to places where his party was toxically unpopular and spending in underserved markets like Erie. Best gubernatorial campaign: Joe Lombardo in Nevada. He did what no other Republican could pull off this year, unseating a Democratic governor by indicting his record during the pandemic and the 2021 crime spike. Lombardo pocketed an endorsement from Donald Trump, then never talked about the ex-president, separating himself from a statewide ticket obsessed with…