Good News From the Tim Burns Campaign in PA-12

PA-12 Republican candidate Tim Burns.

News from John Manganaro over at pa2010:

Tadd Rupp, who ran Burns’ unsuccessful special election bid against Democrat Mark Critz last month, has left the campaign

The campaign has not yet confirmed Rupp’s exit.

The good news?  Rupp’s departure might be a signal that Tim Burns is serious about taking the fight to Mark Critz this November.

The results of the Special Election this May caught many off guard which has caused pundits to speculate that the Critz campaign’s strategy of running to the right and hitting conservatives hard on taxes and jobs (as seen in these three commercials) is a blueprint for Democrat victory in November;

The Flat Tax commercial:

The Outsourcing Jobs commercial;

And the commercial that sums it all up;

The problem with these ads, they blatantly misrepresent Burns’ positions. So much so that at one point in the campaign, Burns’ opponent, Mark Critz apologized for the DCCC’s misrepresentation of the Republican’s record. The DCCC commercials distorted the truth so bad that one local TV system pulled them from the air.

Even after the apology, the commercials continued.

Although the Burns campaign did eventually react to the Democrat’s distortions, they did so rather passively.  At first, rather than attacking the DCCC or its ads, the Burns campaign at decided to lie low and simply “ignore” the commercials.   It was believed that if the campaign made too much of a fuss, it would draw attention to the ads, lending credibility to the Democrat’s claims.

So without rebuttal, the ads continued.

When Burns did decide to confront his opponent about the commercials, Critz himself apologized, yet the DCCC continued the ads, pounding that message into the minds of the voters.  By the time that the Burns camp decided to become more aggressive, the issue had already been planted in the voter’s head.

At the polls, many of the people who voted against Burns did so because they thought he supported increased taxes increased taxes and shipping jobs overseas.  The candidate himself personally handed out a “briefing” explaining his tax position at the polls, but to no avail, the voters had already made up their minds before arriving at the polls.

And so what should have been a close race, became a 7 point shellacking.

Hopefully, with new leadership, the Burns campaign will run a much more aggressive this November, completely shutting the door on the DCCC’s lies and distortions; resulting in a Republican victory.