Political Junk Mail

I love this time of year. My mailbox is flooded by dozens of political mailers from candidates and issue groups encouraging me to vote certain ways. Some are factual and issue based, but I love the really ugly negative attack ads.

Like most public affairs junkies, I save all the mailers and review them. So far, 70% of the mailers have been from Republican candidates, 5% of the mailers are from Republican interest groups, 20% of the mailers are from Democratic interest groups and just 5% are from Democrat candidates. I was surprised at the volume of Republican mailers – since I’m a registered Democrat. I figured my partner would get most of the mailers since she’s an independent, but it hasn't turned out that way.

Some interesting observations:

• None of the Democratic candidates invoke President Obama in their mailers – a strong indication just how much the President’s popularity has fallen.
• One of the Democratic issue ads (from a group called PA for Equality) encourages me to vote Democratic because voting for Republicans would be severely detrimental to gay rights. Of course, I wanted to call them back and note that a vote for Barack Obama has been the single most detrimental act to gay rights in the history of the country as Obama has refused to fulfill any campaign promises on the issue and is, in fact, going to court to ensure no advancements in equality are allowed to remain permanent.
• All of the Republican mailers focus on the economy and jobs.
• Similarly, Democratic mailers focus on jobs, but their mailers continue to try to blame Bush and conveniently ignore the last two years in which they’ve done nothing to help the economy (and have actually done a lot to ensure more Americans continue to lose their jobs – more on that soon).
• Not one mailer from either party made references to the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan (the latter being Obama’s contribution to global instability).
• I particularly like mailers that offer direct, factual, head-to-head comparisons of candidates or issues. Dee Adcock had a nice head-to-head ad against Allyson Schwartz. I also liked the Dan Onorato ad comparing himself against Tom Corbett.
  

I can’t wait to see what next week brings to my mailbox.

However, thankfully, the candidates have (so far) not engaged in those obnoxious robocaller calls. However, I’m sure they’ll be starting soon.