April 3, 2009
First billed as a multifaceted referendum on the Obama administration, the economic recovery plan, and the new leadership of the Republican National Committee; Tuesday’s special election in New York’s 20th Congressional District has already faded in importance. With another ten days before all the votes are counted, the opportunity for an important party victory has been lost.
The recently GOP-dominated district lost its first Democratic representative since the early nineties when newly elected Kirsten Gillbrand was chosen to fill Hillary Clinton’s Senate seat. Secretary Clinton was in the middle of her second term.
Democrat Scott Murphy currently leads Republican opponent Jim Tedisco by a small 65-vote margin with thousands of absentee ballots yet to be counted.
Nonetheless, the race to election day was filled with interesting tactics and positioning on both the local and national levels.
Murphy, a successful venture capitalist, touted his support of Democratic President Barack Obama, hoping to follow in the wake of Obama’s recent victory in New York’s 20th.
However, their campaigns differed vastly in structure and tone. Four out of six advertisements from Murphy’s official YouTube channel focused on attacking Tedisco, while another fell under the cheesy average-American-family-touting genre of political positioning.
On the other hand, State Assemblyman Jim Tedisco has earned acclaim for his populist appeal, bashing the status quo on Wall Street, and posting only one attack ad (out of 10 total) to his YouTube channel. Tedisco won 54 percent of the vote in the 20th District’s most populous county, taken by Obama in the presidential election.
The election seemed like a role reversal of political tactics, with recent political connotations switching parties. Businessman versus career politician, mud-slinging versus relative cleanliness, and party politics versus populism are all common themes more often associated with the opposite political parties.
Despite these complexities, many media outlets equated a vote for Murphy to a vote of confidence in Obama’s stimulus package, and pegged a vote for Tedisco as a vote of confidence (or at least not a vote of lack of confidence) in RNC Chairman Michael Steele. Coupled with mixed reviews of Steele’s public performance, a decisive loss in the 20th could have been a decisive loss for Steele’s job security.
As hopes for a momentous victory fade, so do the political consequences of this election. Ample time to position the results and an ambiguous culmination will surely water down the impact of victory for either party.
Alex Kronman 