I was invited yesterday by Emanuel Pleitez’ press secretary Emily Dulcan to come to the office to interview Emanuel Pleitez and some members of his team on the second day of GOTV weekend. By chance, campaign consultant Eric Hacopian, who has been the center of a manufactured controversy recently, happened to be in the office, so I got a chance to interview him as well.
The office was lively, with about two dozen phone bankers of all ethnicities and ages working the phones from the campaign office. According to the field directors, they currently had 55-60 volunteers canvassing neighborhoods from that office at the time. For space, the recap of the interviews is below the flip.
When I talked with Hacopian, the subject I was most interested in was his take on Cedillo’s strategy–and Hacopian struck an affable but mildly derisive tone. But in the end, it came down to the idea that Cedillo’s mail team was completely incompetent:
They’ve raised close to a million. We’ve raised nearly $300,000. And we’ve either outmailed them or it’s even. If we had their money, we would have sent out 25 mail pieces, instead of the 15 that we have.
Eric told me that the main objective of mail is to develop a narrative about the campaign–that mail pieces aren’t just extemporaneous, but that they’re carefully designed to build in the minds of the voters a story about who the candidate is and why he or she is better than the opposing candidate. Eric told me that one of the Cedillo team’s main problems is that their mailers hadn’t done that:
…but Gil hasn’t done that. It’s all, endorsement, endorsement, endorsement, and, oh, the other two candidates are evil.
But what Eric really pointed out was that Cedillo’s latest mailings that we have been covering have not been centered around advancing the narrative of the campaign at all, but rather toward what appeared to be staunching the bleeding:
So, the first mailer [that Cedillo sent against Pleitez] went out to Latinos in [East L.A.]. But the second one–they took out the Rosario Dawson picture and then sent it to the whole San Gabriel Valley. Now that should tell you something.
It should tell you what I wrote a few days ago:
There are two ways to look at this: one is that Cedillo’s campaign is bleeding educated Latino voters in the SGV. The other is that the Cedillo campaign has so much money left to spend in the days before election day that they figure they may as well.
And, for good measure, I asked him about the conspiracy theory that Pleitez only got in the race as a pawn of Mayor Villaraigosa to take votes away from Gil Cedillo:
Emanuel announced before Gil did, so it’s pretty difficult to be a stalking horse for someone who’s not even in the race yet. Of course I know Parke [Skelton, consultant for Judy Chu]. There are only 7 or 8 guys who do what we do in L.A. But you ever notice how all these conspiracy theories involve meeting in public places? The last one I heard was about how we all had a meeting at a CPK. If we were going to plot a conspiracy, you think we’d do it at a CPK? It’s all ridiculous.
And last point from my conversation with Eric–I asked him about the description of Pleitez in a few publications as a “web candidate.”
There is no such thing. The internet has never won an election. It has helped. It can give you an additional edge, which is what we’re seeing, but that’s it. This doesn’t happen without the people running the field and running the mail. The web has been great for raising money–about 80-90% of contributions are online–and those people may have written checks, but the web just makes it that much easier.
I also talked for a few minutes with Emanuel himself. There has been so much coverage of the campaign already that I decided to focus on what happens after tomorrow. First, I asked him what he intended to do next if he didn’t advance to the July 14 runoff.
I’m not worried about that…I’ll be fine. The people I’m worried about are the 60 full-time volunteers, some of whom have refused paying jobs to be able to work on this campaign.
I also asked him if, given recent events, he would have a hard time endorsing the Democratic nominee if he doesn’t succeed, depending on how the vote tomorrow goes.
It’s customary for that to happen, and I am a Democrat and I would support the one Democrat against the one Republican, for sure. It would matter more if it were a 50-50 district instead of a really Democratic one, because the Democrat is going to win. Now, how much of my time and resources I would commit to helping would be something I would need to figure out.
I certainly wasn’t trying to ask “gotcha” questions, but I also asked Emanuel agreed with the recent characterization of Congressman Baca that the CA-32 was a Hispanic seat.
Well, the district was originally carved in the 1980s to be a seat with a a large Hispanic population, and the district is 60% Latino. And I knew that when I got into the race a lot of people would accuse me of [splitting the Latino vote]. A few elected officials told me that I would stay out of the race if I wanted to continue a career. But I ran anyway because I wanted to offer the voters of the district a different choice.
Emanuel was heavily focused on the idea that his campaign could set a model for how insurgent or nontraditional campaigns could be run in the future. He repeatedly stressed the idea that he did not have the most money and did not have any prominent endorsements, which required him to run an outside-the-box campaign using dedicated and passionate volunteers doing outreach to their friends and family, both online and offline.
My thoughts? Emanuel’s success–or failure–will provide an example for whether the type of campaign that he is running will become a model for the future. If Emanuel finishes anywhere besides third–or even if he has a strong showing in third place behind the two heavyweights he’s opposing–he will send a message to other young insurgent candidates that there is a new model of campaigning out there that could spur them to electoral success.
