Hancock elected Denver’s mayor

Moments ago, almost immediately after the polls closed at 7pm, the Denver Post projected the City Council president, Michael Hancock, as the winner over the former state senator and political scion, the ex-Governor’s son, Chris Romer, in the Denver mayoral runoff.

Here’s a pretty picture I took earlier today that has nothing to do with that:

UPDATE: Hancock’s “feel-good story” is being credited with helping lift him to victory. But the “feel-good” moment of Election Night came courtesy of the loser, Romer, who showed up at Hancock’s victory party, hugged his opponent, and had a public kumbaya:

Just before 10 p.m. following Hancock’s speech, Romer and his wife, Laurie, arrived at Hancock’s watch party and the two rivals appeared together and hugged on stage.

“Congratulations to all of you,” Romer said to Hancock’s supporters. “I’m ready to help. I love [Michael] and I love this city.”

In that moment, Romer showed a magnanimity that he seemed to be missing throughout the campaign. His descent from presumptive front-runner to landslide loser (58% to 42%) is being blamed in part on negative campaigning:

Political analyst Eric Sondermann viewed Hancock’s overwhelming victory as evidence that the race broke based on the opposite tones of the candidates’ campaigns.

“When it broke away from Chris Romer and toward Michael Hancock over the last few weeks, it broke bigger than anyone expected,” Sondermann said. “I think the town just made a group decision that was a rejection of what was seen as unseemly, unfair, overly negative, non-Denver campaign.”

Romer, characterizing himself as a “bull in a china shop”, went on offense immediately [after finishing first in the initial round of voting, with 28% to Hancock’s 26% and James Mejia’s 25%] and attacked Hancock for what he alleged were less than absolute or mistaken positions on a woman’s right to choose, evolution, Secure Communities and education vouchers.

Hancock answered Romer’s heat with a steady cool, continuing to run a series of TV ads that highlighted his own rough upbringing and his work in the community.

When a Romer ad attacked Hancock’s city council vote to approve a pay increase for the next mayor and council, Hancock responded with his own ad underlining the nuance of his position — and tying the negative ad around Romer’s neck.

“Yes, I voted for a pay raise after six years of no raises,” Hancock said in the ad. “No, I will not accept the raise.”

But it was Hancock’s last line of the ad that subtely turned the tables on Romer.

“No, I will not run a negative campaign,” Hancock said.

Negative ads often work, as much as people always profess to hate them, but this is the rare case where they really did seem to hurt the attacker more than the target. They certainly did that in my personal case, as I switched from Romer to Hancock (more on that later).

My take is that Romer’s lines of attack simply seemed too trivial — making mountains out of molehill-sized gaffes and non-issues — and he harped on them too much, particularly given their relative triviality. This made Hancock’s criticism of Romer’s “negative campaigning,” which are a predictable and often ineffective response by targeted candidates, more effective than such criticism usually is, because Romer’s attacks simply didn’t resonate all that much, and his persistence in making the same attacks over and over ultimately did more to make him seem petty (and, at times in his delivery, smarmy) than the attacks did to damage Hancock.

The Denver Post blames Chicago:

Some campaign insiders say Romer listened too much to political advisers from AKPD Message and Media, a Chicago-based consultant.

“AKPD is a flashy firm but not creative,” said an insider who asked not to be named. “They played this more as a partisan race rather than nonpartisan. Denver is a very different beast than Chicago.”

That said, I think Romer should have taken a cue from a well-known Chicagoan, Barack Obama, who was masterful in 2008 at letting his opponents (particularly Hillary Clinton) twist in the wind over miscues and gaffes until maximum damage was done (with attacks usually carried out by surrogates, not Obama himself), then relenting in the attacks and appearing magnanimous in doing so. Romer, by contrast, seemed mean-spirited and petty in persisting with his attacks long after Hancock had clarified the gaffes and there was nothing more to be gained from hitting him over the head with them repeatedly.

Also, Romer seemed not to recognize that Hancock’s miscues weren’t the sort of mistakes — like McCain’s “the fundamentals of the economy are strong” or Kerry’s “I voted for it before I voted against it” — that are so central to the campaign narrative, they can fundamentally define your opponent, and are therefore worthy of endless repetition. These were the sort of things that you attack briefly and then move on, sowing doubts in the voters’ minds and trusting them to connect the dots.

In other words, it wasn’t that Romer ran a negative campaign — it was that he did so poorly.

It’s also true that Romer never adequately “defined himself.” His pitch should have been: I’m a successful businessman; I have the Hickenlooper-esque experience that Denver needs; I’m a compassionate progressive but a fiscal conservative and, above all, an effective leader. And he did say all those things, but ineffectively. What should have been the core of his message got drowned out by his attacks on Hancock. He was too busy making too-cute-by-half comments about how “I believe in science” and “I support a woman’s right to choose” to actually demonstrate his presumed fiscal fluency and business acumen. He effectively ceded the “Ready From Day One” argument to Hancock, when he should have been fighting tooth and nail to demonstrate that he has the right kind of experience, whereas Hancock, as council president, has the wrong kind (a far more credible argument than “OMG Hancock secretly hates science and is secretly pro-life and OMG he voted himself a pay raise!!1!”).

For my part, I voted for Romer the first time around, but switched to Hancock in the runoff, in substantial part because Romer’s campaign tactics made me think less of him — and you know I’m not some naive shrinking violet who can’t handle the fact that politics ain’t beanbag. But the attacks were so trivial, and his manner of making them so redundant and quite frankly slimy, it made Romer seem not just mean-spirited but somewhat non-substantive. I’m sure that’s not a fair assessment of his character, but that’s the way he presented himself in the campaign. Moreover, the way he attacked Hancock opened my eyes to the way he handles himself generally, and I concluded that while Hancock is less polished when speaking extemporaneously, he often speaks more substantively than Romer, who tends to speak in sound bites — again, poorly. With so little policy daylight between the two, those factors were enough to convince me to change my vote. Ultimately, I decided that I’d just rather have Hancock around for the next four years than Romer, and so I switched sides.