Bruce Braley has a problem with farmers.
Videos By Rare
The Iowa Democratic congressman, running for retiring Senator Tom Harkin’s open seat, was caught on a video released in the spring disparaging Senator Chuck Grassley as a “farmer from Iowa who never went to law school” to a room full of trial lawyers at a fundraiser.
In a press release responding to the video, Braley’s campaign insisted that “Bruce grew up in rural Iowa and worked on Iowa farms, detassling [sic] corn and bailing [sic] hay.”
The attempt at damage control was rather severely undercut by the misspelling of “detasseling” and “baling.”
That inspired a closer look at Braley’s Facebook page, where it turned out that a picture posted months earlier, ostensibly of a farm in Iowa, actually depicted a farm in England.
Last week video emerged from a Fourth of July parade that caught Braley in an exchange with a woman along the parade route:
“We’re farmers,” says the woman.
So am I,” Braley responds.
“But so is Grassley.”
“So am I.”
That prompted the Des Moines Register to note that “Braley is not an active farmer. He doesn’t own farm land and doesn’t earn any farm income… He doesn’t perform or manage any farm operations, campaign aides said today.”
The Braley campaign claimed that the candidate had misheard the woman and thought she said “we’re for farmers.” That may be true. Or he may have been making a ham-handed attempt to invoke the spin from that poorly-spelled press release about his time at summer jobs on farms growing up.
Either way, that Braley is on the defensive in exchanges like this suggests that the damage from the gaffe may be sticking.
If so, that’s unusual. Political scientists are fond of telling reporters that they pay too much attention to gaffes that rarely matter to election results. Jonathan Bernstein weighed in to that effect when the video from the fundraiser first broke.
But polling guru Nate Silver had a more nuanced take, pointing out that once in a while, gaffes actually do matter. He took George Allen’s “macaca” gaffe in the 2006 race for U.S. Senate in Virginia as a case study. What made that gaffe fatal? Silver:
First, the race was on the fringe of being competitive before the gaffe. Webb’s campaign wasn’t a lost cause, but Allen was not an easy target, even in a Democratic-leaning environment. Webb probably needed some catalyst to generate more attention for his race and push him over the finish line.
Second, the news media found other examples of intemperate or insensitive remarks by Allen, which gave the story life and made it a prism for interpreting the campaign.
Third, the gaffe helped to mobilize the Democratic base around Webb’s campaign. Although Webb was already a favorite of the netroots, Allen’s comment dramatically increased their attention on Virginia. And the netroots maintained their heightened attention right up through the November election.
Silver argued that the first factor also applied to Iowa, but it was uncertain whether the other two would be.
“Does Braley have a track record of making remarks that seem elitist, classist or otherwise disparaging of rural life,” Silver asked, “or will he make such comments in the future? And will Republican activists and officials maintain their focus on Iowa, rather than treating it as a passing fancy?”
On the latter question: Americans for Prosperity just launched an $800,000 ad buy attacking Braley, featuring the video from the fundraiser.
Joni Ernst (facing a divided primary field at the time Silver was writing) ended up winning the nomination easily, with the party united behind her from the establishment to the base.
Activists and officials focusing on the race? Check.
What about a pattern that turns the gaffe into a prism for interpreting the campaign? Besides Braley and his campaign digging a deeper hole every time they try to escape the anti-farmer label, there’s the matter of threatening to sue a neighbor because her chicken crossed into his yard.
That story, reported this week at the Iowa Republican, has gotten little attention outside conservative media so far, but it certainly reinforces what Iowa voters are learning about Braley as those of them outside his district get to know him for the first time. He’s on Team Trial Lawyer and doesn’t like farmers.
If Braley continues to be dogged by that reputation, Joni Ernst has a real shot at winning.