Jeff Merkley's been airing multiple ads for the past several weeks. In the mean time Wehby has been completely absent from the airwaves. And then last week she showed up in Oregon City and did a meet and greet while speaking to reporters.
Unfortunately, her campaign team didn't think her message through before she delivered it.
Coming out of hiding since the weekend before Oregon's primary elections, she finally spoke out about her run-ins with police over domestic issues. She said that these run-ins were proof of her strength to stand up for what she believed in, and for Oregonians.
Sheesh. That's a horrible defense for resorting to physical violence and stalking someone. But it got worse.
She then went on to explain that no one was perfect. So one moment she was calling her actions heroic examples of her strengths, then pointing to them as her failings. Wow.
Without airing ads, she's losing voters rapidly. The same day that she finally popped up, Survey USA (non-partisan) released its polling numbers showing Wehby down by 18 percentage points. You know who's really upset with her? Women. Female voters have her pegged at 21 percentage points below Merkley.
So today, she replaced her campaign manager with one from a candidate who lost his primary in Iowa, while her displaced manager has moved over to the GOP's challenger to John Kitzhaber in the gubernatorial race. Which of course begs the question as to why anyone would think it strategically smart to have a campaign manager move from a candidate who's down double digits, to a candidate who's down double digits.
I've said it before: Oregon GOP are completely clueless. Right now, they're barely alive in the state. Last year they replaced their newly elected chair, just six months into her tenure. Two years ago I laughed off Allen Alley's prediction that Oregon would become a battleground state for the presidential election.
Today, Oregon GOP hold just one national seat -- Greg Walden's seat in the House -- while Democrats hold the rest of the national seats, all of the top seats in statewide positions, and both chambers in Salem. And despite Cover Oregon's ills, they're all going to win re-election in this midterm year. Imagine that.
Now, obviously Wehby's campaign needed a shakeup, but she doesn't seem to have any money. Her last quarterly FEC report (end of April) showed that she had $352K in the bank. For reference, Jeff Merkley's got $3.7M. That was before the primary election, mind you.
She's broke folks. That's why she can't air any ads and why she's been spending so much time out of sight (fundraising from national GOP groups.)
But like I said before: She was always a one-trick pony, riding on the repeal of the ACA. If Cover Oregon and the ACA had any traction whatsoever in Oregon, Kitzhaber would be in a tight race or otherwise losing; instead, he's up by double digits. Outside of this single issue, she appears to have limited knowledge and capacity to debate with Merkley.
Not only is her campaign in cardiac arrest, so is the state's GOP. If I were in charge of the DPO, I'd be courting national money to take on Greg Walden and his votes to support going to wars around the world and supporting the NSA's spying on your average Oregonian. I believe taking back the House is a plausible possibility by simply targeting the most conservative members of Congress for obstructing governance, for wanting to use force any time things heat up around the world, and for giving the NSA a free, get-out-of-jail card to do whatever it wants.
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