Chuck Muth's Opinion On The 48th CD General Election

This is a must read piece from seasoned campaign veteran Chuck Muth. I hope my team takes it to heart. The thing that stands out the most to me is:

Fundraising........It's a fact of life that would be politicians must pick up the phone and dial for dollars. It's not unlike what I do all day long. I make at least 100 phone calls a day on a bad day to constantly keep my pipeline filled up up with new account prospects. Here's Chuck's take on this issue....

"The ONLY way Jim Gilchrist has a prayer of actually winning the run-off in December is if he puts together a first-class winning message, saturates the district with it throughout November, does extensive telephone voter identification, and turns out people at the polls who didn’t show up yesterday. And that’s going to cost a considerable amount of money.

The sad thing is, Gilchrist *could* raise that kind of dough. He has NATIONAL name recognition as a leader on an extremely emotional issue. He only needs around 500 donors - out of the almost 300 MILLION people in this country (legally) - to kick in $1,000-to-$2,000 each and he’d have the money to effectively “inform the public who he is and what he can do.”

But the man just won’t pick up the phone and ask for the money. And as anyone with even a passing knowledge of political campaigns knows, “money isn’t given; it’s raised.” And it has to be raised by the candidate, not a bunch of surrogates. Donors want to talk to “the man.”

If Gilchrist won’t raise it by letting his fingers to the walking 4-6 hours a day for the next 30 days, it won’t come in. It’s as simple as that. And without the money to communicate his message to the voters and turn them out at the polls, he’s dead meat on December 6".

That's a tough pill to swallow, but we also have to live in the real world. Jim has to take this message to heart about the fundraising. It is the key to victory. Please just read the whole column. It's well worth the time.