Post-election wrap-up

Dan Weintraub has the goods on a post-election conference featuring Bill Carrick, Steve Schmidt, Gale Kaufman, Rick Klaussen, and Andre Pineda. It is definitely worth a read. Here's Schwarzenegger manager Schmidt on winning the race in the summer: we made the decision very early too that we would come right out of the primary at a time when these guys were not well defined and we believed we had a window til about July 4 to define the race. That was our most concentrated amount of advertising. I think we spent $14 million on TV in June through July 4. Then we were up with $4 million in July, $4 million in August and came back up on Labor Day. But we were never at more than $2.5 million a week through the fall campaign, but June was the, we always viewed June as the decisive month in the race. We believed if we did everything right over that post primary period that we could lock in this race, at least from a dynamics perspective by July 15. We could get through the rest of the summer and deep into the campaign in a pretty stable situation, and that’s the way that worked out. More highlights: Q. How much did the alliance end up spending? Kaufman: In the general we spent about, in the last run of ads, some were negative about the governor and some were positive for Phil, it was about 6 and a half to 7 million dollars. We spent somewhere in that range. It was under $10 million. And more: Carrick: One thing we did address was, Phil obviously came out for a middle class tax cut, which, you know, it would have be better if he had done that in the primary and started to inoculate himself on that issue earlier. Q. Did bill Clinton advise him to do that? Carrick: Phil told the president, Clinton that he was going to do it and the president thought it was a good idea. The conversation wasn’t initiated by the president.