PANAMA CITY — With fewer than 20 days before the election, Rep. Steve Southerland has not made his stance on hugs known, though hugs are not generally a prominent feature of his campaign stops. Not so for his opponent Gwen Graham, who seems never to miss a chance to hug.
She even hugged an enemy, a tracker — the people who follow an opponent’s campaign with a video camera, hoping to catch footage of a candidate doing or saying something that could be used against them — during an October stop in Panama City.
In a race that is one of the nation’s most closely contested congressional elections, hugs might be the easiest way to explain the difference between the two campaigns.
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Southerland, generally speaking, is all business. That’s not to say the Panama City Republican isn’t pleasant, or that he’s averse to hugging supporters, but his campaign events are more about spreading his message than making friends. He wasn’t sent to D.C. to make friends, as one of Southerland’s ads boasts; he went to advocate.
Contrast that with Graham, who sees making friends and building relationships as a key to breaking congressional deadlock and ensuring government functions in a way it has not done for years. For Graham, the hug is both the medium and the message, which is not to say she’s a pushover; ads she’s released this month suggest she’s a much more aggressive candidate than she revealed last summer.
Compare one of the first videos on her YouTube channel, in which she gently asks Southerland to participate in a debate, to a TV spot released last week that describes Southerland’s campaign, which has not been blunder-free, like this:
“Steve Southerland’s desperate campaign, now frantic and pathetic ...” a narrator says.
Southerland knows he’s facing his toughest opponent so far in his three campaigns for Congress in the prolific hugger and daughter of popular former U.S. Senator and Florida Gov. Bob Graham, who never lost an election and has been highly visible during the campaign.
If hugs were votes, Southerland might as well begin drafting his concession speech now, but there’s no reason to believe that a feel-good campaign message is more effective than one based on attacks and negativity, said University of South Florida political science professor Susan McManus. Both candidates have pushed positive and negative ads.
Southerland was first elected in 2010 by riding the Tea Party wave over Allen Boyd, a moderate Democrat who had been able to coast to victory in elections before he voted in favor of Obamacare. Southerland rolled to victory, and Boyd later called Rep. Nancy Pelosi the “face” of his defeat.
Four years later, Southerland’s using the same playbook, attempting to connect Graham, a Democrat, to Obamacare and Pelosi, names like ash on the tongues of many Bay County voters. But this time around Southerland’s opponent doesn’t have a record; he does, and it includes votes likely to rankle government employees, of which there are many in the eastern end of the sprawling district, and women.
Graham has pounced on Southerland’s record, especially his votes on the 2013 government shutdown and the Violence Against Women Act, which a Southerland ad claims he supported though he voted against the bill that became law.
At the same time, she’s cast herself as a centrist Democrat, a consensus builder and gridlock buster willing to cross the aisle in the name of effectiveness. She’s also said she’s disappointed with President Barack Obama’s leadership, and she won’t support Pelosi for a leadership position.
Hers is a platform based on cooperation and compromise summarized in a snappy yet vague campaign slogan: “The North Florida Way.” It’s an ultimately shrewd slogan for a Democrat in a conservative district because people who hear it have to decide what it means, McManus said.
“If you’re a conservative and you hear ‘the North Florida way,’ you’re thinking, ‘that’s us,’ ” McManus said.
So Graham can appeal to everyone while saying as little as possible about her own policy positions. Southerland said recently that his biggest challenge in this election has been “trying to figure out who I’m running against;” Bob Graham won’t be on the ballot, he said.
Southerland said in an interview that it’s “almost insulting” that Graham has been vague on policy while seemingly riding her father’s coattails; that won’t fly if she beats him and goes to Washington, he said.
But it makes sense for a candidate to reveal as little as possible, McManus said.
“The more detailed you are, the more your opponent can tear you up,” McManus said.
As the election nears, the attack ads and media coverage have intensified, and Graham has been forced to talk more specifically about her positions, at least partially in response to accusations leveled in Southerland’s ads connecting her to leading Democrats.
At the same time, Southerland has taken positions more moderate than might be expected from a Tea Partier. He’s lambasted Graham for suggesting tweaks to Obamacare, but he seemed resigned in an interview this month that Obamacare as a whole will not be repealed and content to tweaking the law so it does the least possible harm.
In fact, the more details Graham provides, the harder it gets to distinguish between her positions and Southerland’s. During Wednesday’s debate, they agreed in substance on how to handle the spread of Ebola and certain aspects — though certainly not all — of immigration issues. Both were critical of the U.S. response to the threat of the Islamic State.
Perhaps nowhere do they have more in common than the issue of campaign finance reform. Both have been pilloried in ads by outside groups beyond their control, but neither has gone so far as to condemn their supporters.
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But substantial differences remain, and they fall predictably along party lines.
The campaign takes place in the context of extremely negative public opinion of politicians, McManus said. Voters are so turned off that many are likely to spend Election Day on the sidelines.
“At some point I think we’re going to have to reassess how we reach voters,” McManus said.