by Bruce A. Dixon, bruce at dixonmail.com
Last modified 09/16/02
Why this paper?
Why did McKinney lose?
Lack of a campaign field operation cost thousands of votes
Strategic failure to discern the type of contest
First tactical error --- no voter registration drive
Second tactical error – no phone and door to door canvass
Third tactical error – no effective election day operation
Result of strategic and tactical errors --- large disparity in voter turnout.
Table 1: Top 21 Dekalb County precincts by voter turnout
Table 2: McKinney's top 20 precincts by margin with turnout
Conclusion: Internal factors played a decisive role in the defeat of Cynthia McKinney
Source data for this document
About the author
Do the results of this election signal a new electoral trend in Black America? Maybe so, but not among black voters. (A separate document)
1. Why this paper?
Because the movement for human rights and justice is serious business which deserves our best efforts. The labor movement in particular, as a consistent and significant donor of human and material resources is entitled to reliable analyses of the efforts in which those resources are employed. Besides extensive help from labor, the McKinney campaign received volunteers, financial and material assistance from many other organizations and unaffiliated individuals drawn from the Atlanta area and from as far afield as Washington DC and Chicago.
All these people and organizations deserve a clear discussion of how their efforts were put to use so that successes can be repeated and errors avoided. In this case, the margin of Majette’s victory was much larger than responsible people in the campaign predicted either publicly or privately. It behooves us to understand why.
This paper deals specifically with some of the internal factors which contributed to McKinney’s loss and draws upon the author's extensive campaign experience to offer suggestions for appropriate strategy and tactics in similar situations. External factors like Republican crossover voting, the almost universal hostility of the mass media, anti-democratic campaign finance laws that permit a flood of outside money to field surrogate candidates like Denise Majette… things the other side did are not discussed here. This author takes the position that the enemy’s job is to be the enemy, and to do his worst. Our job is to do ours, and win anyway. When we lose, our first task is to closely inspect what we did and didn't do in order to get better at it. This paper is offered as a small contribution in that effort. ,SNIP> http://www.bdixon.net/mckinney-analysis.html