Guest Blog- Flushing Campaign Dollars Down the Toilet

Ira N. Forman — November 4, 2010 – 2:59 pm | Election 2010 | Israel | Republicans | Stop the Smears Comments (0) Add a comment

The closer we got to Election Day this year, the “wackier” the behavior of some partisans became. Nowhere was this more true than in the hysterical-conservative segment of the Jewish community. For example, the Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI), along with the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC), ran millions of dollars worth of TV ads attacking Representative Joe Sestak (D-PA) as being anti-Israel and pro-terrorist. I recently pointed out in a Washington Jewish Week article that the organizations running these ads are either very naive or very cynical about this ad campaign. If they are not naïve—and I doubt that they are—they were raising these dollars not to defeat Sestak but to enhance their organization’s visibility and relationships with big GOP donors. Why would I make such an assertion?

These two groups spent millions of dollars in the Philadelphia media market. They had to pay very high ad rates and spend all this money because TV in this market reaches 6,000,000 people. Unfortunately only something like 180,000 of these people are potential Jewish voters. Moreover, of the 180,000 potential Jewish voters only 10-20 percent are swing voters. So our conservative friends spent millions of dollars to reach 18,000-36,000 swing voters. If they really wanted to use this money to help former Representative Pat Toomey (R-PA) or defeat Sestak then they would have spent the money on building a grassroots organization to spread their point of view as well as to finely target these voters with direct mail. But such activities, though much more efficient and effective, take time to organize and are much more time consuming for an organization than buying TV ads…. and large donors are not as impressed.

When I made this argument last week, a Commentary blogger responded that these ads could have been targeting non-Jewish voters. Well, if Jewish voters (except for the 10 percent of the community that is Orthodox) consistently rate Israel as an issue that ranks very low on the hierarchy of issues that they vote on (except when there is someone on the ballot who is clearly antagonistic toward Israel), then which non-Jewish voters are likely to vote for a candidate based on their position on Israel? One could argue that some evangelical voters might vote on Israel, but about 99 percent of these voters were already voting for Toomey. Some day conservative Jewish donors might figure out this is NOT about winning votes for Republican candidates - it’s about building up and raising the profile of someone’s organization. Meanwhile, Jewish Democrats like myself should not complain. If these groups can raise large amounts of money, it’s much better that they flush these dollars down the figurative toilet by buying TV ads in expensive media markets then spend their dollars wisely.

Ira N. Forman is the former CEO of the National Jewish Democratic Council. The views expressed in this post are those of the author and not necessarily the views of the National Jewish Democratic Council.

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