Scenes From the Campaign Trail, 2010

One story, from August, sums up an entire election:

Leslie Pearce frowned as Congresswoman Suzanne Kosmas entered the near-vacant Bandshell on Saturday morning.

“Here comes Suzanne. I’m going to hide under the table,” said Pearce, president of the Democratic Women’s Club of Volusia County. Pearce had organized the 10 a.m. rally for local Democrats, but didn’t get the turnout she wanted.

The crowd maxed out at about 30 when Kosmas spoke just before 11.

Kosmas, who is fighting to keep the District 24 seat she won in 2008, joked as she took the stage about the “throngs of supporters” she was about to address before railing against Republicans. […]

“We know that this is going to be a difficult time for us. That’s why we need you there,” Kosmas said before turning the stage over to Dan Gelber, a candidate for Florida Attorney General.

As Gelber finished his speech, screams of “Kraut dog! Somebody order a kraut dog?” reverberated through the Bandshell. The shouts came from a hot dog stand adjacent to the Bandshell. No one came forward to claim the hot dog. […]

Donna Garcia, who runs DJ’s Hotdogs and Sausages with her husband, John, said she wished someone had told her about the rally, but not for political reasons.

“I wish I knew. I would have opened earlier,” Garcia said, before looking over at a hot dog smothered in sauerkraut. “I also wish I could find whoever ordered that kraut dog.”

In the end, we were all left holding the kraut dog.

18 thoughts on “Scenes From the Campaign Trail, 2010”

  1. I’ve been thinking about this – objectively, Dems got killed this election. I mean, if you had told me in the summer of 2009 we were going to lose 60+ seats in the house, the governor’s races in Virginia, New Jersey, Ohio, Florida, Michigan, Texas and Pennsylvania, the Republicans would retain all of their Senate seats and pick up seven more (including Scott Brown at the beginning of the year) by the end of 2010, I would have said – wow, what a disaster!

    Yet, maybe because we know it could have been worse (in the Senate and Governor’s races, anyway), many of us are suprisingly upbeat. Heck, DCCyclone, one of our best analysts and commentators, who’s posts were consistently depressing the hell of me over the past three to four weeks, has turned upbeat and optimistic after last nights results (and he makes good points about Republican underpeformance).

    It’s not just us – Jim Geraghty on National Review has been calling this the “feel bad landslide” for Republicans, owing mostly to victories like Reid’s in Nevada and Brady’s in Illinois.

    So before anyone accuses me of drinking too much of the kool-aid, I will say that IMHO this was a disasterous election for the Dems, mitigated only by a couple of unexpected victories in the House and the Senate. The next two years are going to suck, policy-wise, anyway. We need to do a lot better in 2012. I want to see signs of an economic recovery ASAP, or I’m going to continue to worry about the future.

    Okay, there, now we can go back to the unicorns and rainbows.  

  2. Rae Waters, an awesome Democratic State Representative in the southern flank of AZ-05 who appears to have lost her seat:

    There was a lot of money put into negative campaigning and a lot of lies against me…. They said I voted for Obamacare; I didn’t know that I was in Congress.

    Even if you voted against Health Care Reform, even if you weren’t actually empowered by the people to make a decision on it either way, you might as well have been the chairman of the death panel if you were a Democrat in a swing or conservative district.

  3. IL-Sen:

    Mark Kirk (Rep)         48.2%

    Alexi Giannoulias (Dem) 46.3%

    LeAlan Jones (Green)     3.2%

    Mike Labno (Lib)         2.4%

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