It’s a tough list to beat:
- Bruce Braley (Iowa Senate)
- Anthony Brown (Maryland governor)
- Martha Coakley (Massachusetts governor)
- Wendy Davis (Texas governor)
- Sean Eldridge (New York House)
- Ed FitzGerald (Ohio governor)
- Chris McDaniel (Mississippi Senate)
- Pat Roberts (Kansas Senate)
- Mark Udall (Colorado Senate)
- Monica Wehby (Oregon Senate)
…but I got three reasons for saying Lt. Governor Brown.
- Home field advantage. I live in Maryland.
- Anthony Brown had the single worst screwup of any person on this list. He was in charge of the Maryland Obamacare exchange. It blew up so spectacularly they had to junk the whole thing.
- Everybody else on this list? …You kind of knew by Election Day that they were going to lose (or, in Pat Roberts’ case, win*). Anthony Brown got absolutely blindsided.
Moe Lane
*Well, I knew that Pat Roberts was going to win.
Yes, but his screwup wasn’t from his campaigning, it was frmo the poor way he did his last job.
Braley, OTOH, hosed his campaign. Hard.
Wendy Davis seems like the one on that list where from the moment she was ordained as the candidate, she was toast. She kept shooting herself in the foot on top of it, but with her views, she never had a realistic chance to begin with. That seems like a bad candidate to me.
Wendy was never going to win, but she could have helped the democrat brand in Texas by running a halfway competent campaign. Instead, she was relentlessly negative, and let the O-brats on her staff display their id whenever they felt like it. I thought she had a chance to lose by less than Bill White (since she wasn’t running against a successful incumbent) but boy did she prove me wrong on that count.
Wendy Davis was unmitigated awful and might get my vote, but given that she never had a chance to win, I’m not sure if that’s the right answer over Brown or Coakley. Its not like Massachusetts or Maryland have never had Republican governors, even recently, but man does it seem like you have to be a special snowflake to lose as a Democrat in those states. Pat Quinn deserves some mention in that regard too, maybe more so.
Well I was going to say all of this, but you did first. So ditto. And thanks.
Folks, don’t get me wrong: every Democrat on that list earned his or her place on it. 🙂
But Moe, Martha lost twice to a republican in the people’s republic, the land of Kennedy’s. There’s gotta be a special reward for that level of incompetency, no? 😀
Do not forget Martha Robertson (NY23) who ended a terrible campaign by practically being laughed off the debate stage with her “War on Women” attacks.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXQEl6XSfWU
I actually changed my affiliation to Democrat to vote for Gansler in the primary and he was way up in the early campaigning. I wonder if he would have been more successful in the general election?
Gansler probably would have won.