Former 6th Congressional District Republican nominee Anna Little has been retweeting Save Jersey posts quite a bit lately. It has been greatly appreciated by the Save Jersey team, but I would be lying if I said I was sure where the motivation to do so had come from. Well I think we have our answer.
According to our good friend Art Gallagher over at More Monmouth Musings, Anna Little has announce that while Frank Pallone is her primary target for the 2012 election cycle, she may instead consider an even tougher fight against Senator Robert Menendez.
In a conversation with NJ.com’s The Auditor, Little said,
There are a lot of people pushing me to do it. It’s has been suggested I consider a statewide Senate race. I have not ruled that out, but right now I’m just focused on Pallone.
Art Gallagher is rather skeptical, saying that Little has been a distraction and a disappointment, and that the Tea Party is no longer behind her as they once were during the election last year.
I will be a bit nicer than my colleague from Monmouth County. The truth is, I really like Anna Little. She seems like a great lady (though I have yet to meet her myself). She has been good to Save Jersey, doing video interviews in June of 2010 and helping to push some of our stories to her followers. She did an incredible job, in relative terms, by coming as close as she did to Frank Pallone during the midterms. The margin if loss was still wide, there is no way to spin that, but the margin was cut so far below the level Pallone usually wins that it would be a huge injustice to leave it unmentioned.
However, if I were advising Anna Little, I would tell her that she has ‘Little’ to no chance of successfully taking on Senator Menendez.
She has Little fundraising ability. I understand that it is hard to raise money in the 6th district. Frank Pallone was nearly insurmountable and that does not create a ton of confidence in the investment required to unseat a congressman. That all being said, raising money for a statewide campaign, wedged between the first and third most expensive media markets in the country and having to compete everywhere in between seems like a near impossibility.
She has Little statewide name recognition. She may have been a Tea Party darling in the 6th, but thats essentially where it ends. She’s an unknown in a sea of, well, knowns. Not to say that any of the current potential candidates have an incredible shot at taking down Menendez (regular readers know how I feel about this), but Anna would need something big to happen to propel her to where she needs to be to even win a primary. I understand she is traveling the state and doing events with many different groups and elected officials (example: walking in the Burlington County Parade, see below), but taking down Diane Gooch is not the same as vaulting past names like Kyrillos, Kean, and Guadagno.
She would be the next Angle and O’Donnell. Tea Party candidates running statewide campaigns are notorious for being marginalized and made into a joke by the media, whether it is deserved or not. Christine O’Donnell in Delaware lost to a nobody after becoming a laughing stock for her poorly run campaign and less than ethical life choices. Sharon Angle, who came here last year to campaign for Anna Little (which I found to be a waste of time) managed to go from being the premier Senate race of 2010 to having no shot against Harry Reid in less than a month.
Anna Little, like these women before her, was a “movement” candidate. She rose out of the Tea Party in a year when they were a driving force. If we want to take this senate seat in 2012, we need to move on from movement candidates.
Anna, do not overplay your hand. Please keep working hard and take out Pallone in the 6th next year. Stay in the district and build that army back up.
You think Palin's a joke? You should ask the people that worked on Little's campaign what they think. They are laughing about this from now until next year. The really sad part is that even I thought she was a good Freeholder. She was more independent then. Somewhere along the way, she just lost it and was all about the hype and the power.
But, then again, I would expect anyone on this blog to vote for any idiot as long as there was an R next to their name because you really don't care about the people, just about the "R".