“TV paid off for the two campaigns that decided to use that medium.” That was Gregg Knaupe‘s conclusion following his surprisingly thorough defeat at the hands of Margot Clarke and Jennifer Kim. Both had run television ads in the last week of the campaign; Knaupe said his campaign had made the decision to stick to a traditional “mail and phone-banking and block-walking, a grassroots effort.” It was a call that apparently turned out to be wrong. The break toward Kim in the election-night numbers seems to support Knaupe’s theory. Kim led Knaupe by only 268 votes and just a point in the early voting tally (24% to 23%), but on election night that spread moved to nine percentage points and more than 3,000 votes. “There were a lot of first-time voters and uninformed voters who came out just to vote on the smoking ordinance,” Knaupe said. “And being on TV in that last week certainly was a big factor.” (On the other hand, if TV helped Clarke, it’s not immediately visible in the numbers – her percentage actually dropped from 41.4% in early voting to 39.8% on election night.)
The politico buzz on Saturday night at the Travis Co. election headquarters was that Knaupe sat on his campaign war chest, expecting to enter the run-off with a big money advantage, but the candidate says not so. “We always planned to do four mail pieces, and that’s how many we did, and a huge phone-banking initiative – we discussed TV, but the decision was made not to do it, and when we were done we didn’t have enough money left over to afford TV.” Knaupe says both the mail-outs and the phone calls were targeted at identified voters who had voted in previous city elections – “but there were so many new voters, and undecided voters, and those people did not receive a piece of mail from us. And they were more likely to vote for someone who was on TV.”
Knaupe says he has no regrets and that it’s far too early to consider any future political involvement. “We ran a great campaign, a positive campaign, based on ideas – a vision of how we wanted to make things better. I’m very proud of the campaign we ran. But on Sunday, I had a really great Mother’s Day with Alison and the kids, and I didn’t think about this very much at all.”
This article appears in May 13 • 2005.
