A little inside baseball on how Dan McCaffery lost…

Dan McElhatton was also on the ballot AND had the top ballot position.

Voter confusion over the name similarity was so high, that McElhatton’s campaign got phone calls from people about how much they liked his commercials.
But…McElhatton didn’t even run any commercials, it was McCaffery.

The top ballot position is worth a few points automatically.

There is speculation that “Fast” Eddie Rendell engineered this with a “Who has a name that sounds like Dan McCaffery that we could put on the ballot?” Speculation for sure, but the names seem a lot more similar than pure chance.

For what it’s worth, it is easy to blame name confusion for McCaffery’s loss, but it is incorrect.

If name confusion was the reason, you would see McElhatton and McCaffery’s relative vote relationships to be consistant city-wide.

Instead, what you see is a McCaffery blow-out in white working class areas where McElhatton performed poorly and a strong McElhatton performance in “progressive wards.” Both performances were, for the most part, expected base voters for each candidate.

While name confusion must have accounted for some incorrect votes, it cannot be blamed for McCaffery’s loss based on the vote returns.

Name confusion had nothing to do with it, as McCaffrey wasn’t going to beat Williams even without McElhatton in the race.

Dan McCaffrey never has done anything to make him electable, other than be the brother of Justice Seamus McCaffrey.

Josh Morrow is a terrible campaign manager. He did a terrible job with Knox, and a terrible job with McCaffrey. I know Knox was an unknown at the start of 2007, but he outspent each of his competitors by 3:1 or more, in a “change election,” and he still lost. Knox will lose the Dem primary for Governor next year too. Can anybody name a winning campaign Josh Morrow has managed? How many elections does Morrow need to lose to prove he is a bad campaign manager?

When will people begin to accept the fact that the political power of IBEW Local 98 (John Dougherty and his thugs) is an illusion?

The backed Tom Knox in the 2007 Mayoral primary. As soon as they supported him, he went from leading in the polls to losing to Nutter on the only day that matters.

In 1998, their hero John Dougherty ran for State Senate and lost to an unknown Larry Farnese. Dougherty had great name ID, unlimited $ to spend, thousands of volunteer IBEW members who worship him, near-universal labor support, and was running against an opponent nobody knew, who was being supported by a State Senator who had been indicted for public corruption. Dougherty still lost, and it wasn’t even that close.

Every candidate IBEW 98 and Dougherty backed for PA House and PA Senate leadership for the 2009-10 session lost. Their top choice was Rep. Bill Keller for House Democratic Whip. They made dozens of calls to Democratic members. Keller received less than 20 votes from the 104 Democrats in the PA House. Pathetic.

Just last week, Dan McCaffrey lost by double digits, despite receiving more than $200,000 from Dougherty’s coffers and thousands of primary election day workers.

The political power of IBEW Local 98 is completely illusory.