This is the website of Alex White, in Melbourne Australia, a campaigns and communications professional working in the trade union movement.

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Tag Archives: Republicans

Tea Party warning

For my Project 52 post this week, I thought I’d quickly comment on Karl Rove’s recent article in the Wall Street Journal. Karl Rove writes that the conservative, anti-Obama Tea Party movement needs to avoid being co-opted by the Republicans. They strength, he writes, is their decentralisation and their ability to “hold the feet of [...]

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Massachusetts election outcome shows dangers of incumbency

On Tuesday, I wrote that the Democrats would be the victims of incumbency. In Massachusetts, a strongly Democratic state, the Dems control the state Legislature, most or all of the Congressional seats, and now all but one of the Senate seats. With Obama in the White House, and the Democrats controlling the US Congress and [...]

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The Democrats will be victims to incumbency

There’s been some discussion about whether the Democrats will be victim to the over-cooked expectations of Obama supporters and energised conservative Republicans: First, the background: the party of the president in office essentially always loses seats in the mid-term elections (2002 was a post-9/11 one-off), a tendency likely to be reinforced in 2010 by the [...]

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Mobile campaigning: using text messages

If you’re a follower of US politics, you’ll know that the Republican candidate for Governor of Virginia, Bob McDonnell, has won a resounding victory over his Democratic rival. While the campaign seems to have been run mainly on local issues (rather than national issues like health care), there is an interesting debrief taking place on [...]

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Republicans struggling, near bottom

I have previously written that the US Republicans are cannibalising themselves, that they are struggling to find a leader, and that they have no clear strategy for combating Obama and the Democrat machine. Now, with the Democrats hammering the Republicans over Rush Limbaugh, some Republican representatives are acknowledging that they nearly as low as they [...]

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diverge

Republicans eat their own

Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin typifies the hard-right conservative group in the GOP that would rather eat their own than work towards defeating a common foe. From CNN: At a boisterous Sarah Palin rally in Polk City, Florida on Saturday afternoon, one name was surprisingly absent from the campaign décor — John McCain’s. Looking [...]

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Negative campaiging works

Negative campaigning works. Negative ads are also generally are more ‘honest’ than positive ads – they generally reference their sources. They are more likely to energise supporters into taking action – even Obama’s campaigning to potential volunteers use the scare-tactics of Rove, Cheney, Bush and ‘more of the same’. It especially works when you are [...]

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