From Campaign & Elections Magazine August 2000 by Chris Nolan Case Study The Baileys vs. The Turners: Mountain Warfare in Kentucky Eastern Kentucky's mountains have long been known for the infamous Hatfield and McCoy feud. Although those families have since buried the hatchet, a lesser-known feud between the Baileys and Turners is anything but simmering down. This is an old feud that sprouted 17 years ago amid the deep coal mines of Appalachia. First-term Kentucky State Sen. Benny Ray Bailey won a bruising three-way Democratic primary in 1983 against Ray Turner, a retired state Transportation Department employee. Gloating in his victory, Bailey taunted Turner after the election by sending him a certificate as an "Honorary State Senator." A rematch between the two families in this year's Democratic primary had a different result, bringing a shocking end to Bailey's 21-year legislative career. Ray Turner's son, Johnny Ray, took on the ringleader of Kentucky's so-called "Mountain Mafia" and used some of Bailey's biggest political coups to defeat him. "In part, it was a personal grudge match," said Dale Emmons, political consultant for Turner. "But the other part of it was Turner just didn't agree with Bailey's public policy views." Like the Turner family, consultant Emmons also had a score to settle with Bailey. Their feud dates back to 1980 when Emmons was president of the national Young Democrats Central Executive Committee. Bailey tried to block Emmons' nomination, only to lose to Emmons over a technical maneuver. Their spat surfaced again in the 1994 Republican congressional landslide. Tensions flared among Kentucky Democrats when many of their candidates lost, and Bailey told a newspaper reporter that Emmons was "a political consultant who had never won a race." Emmons, of course, begged to differ: he claimed to have won six races that Election Day. Now, six years later, Emmons and the Turners were staring Bailey down in one of the toughest local political tests to date. The younger Turner, a political novice, faced a 36-point poll deficit four weeks from the election, turned it around and managed to win by 8 points, capturing 54 percent of the vote. Film at 11 Perhaps the biggest break in Turner's campaign was an off-the-cuff decision, which   30-SECOND TV SPOT "Joke" Turner for State Senate Producer/Consultant: Emmons & Company ANNOUNCER: Did you hear the one about the state senator who lives in Knott County makeing a wrong turn on Highway 80? Instead of turning the right way to go home, he heads the wrong way to Hazard where his business interests are. If this is a joke, why aren't the people of Breathitt, Floyd, Johnson and Knott counties laughing? TURNER: It's time for a real change in Frankfort. ANNOUNCER: Johnny Ray Turner...Real leadership for real results. involved spending $100 to hire a campaign worker for the day, charging the battery on a video recorder and buying a $3 videocassette tape. This is what happened: Turner consultant Emmons hired a friend to take a video camera to a press conference held by Democratic Gov. Paul Patton and local leaders to announce a local energy project that was funded in the recently concluded legislative session. Emmons was hoping to get footage of Bailey and fellow Democratic mountain Senator Glenn Freeman (who was also in a tough primary race). Bailey and Freeman have adjacent Senate districts, and one issue resonating with voters was that Bailey was steering large projects to counties outside his own district. "Sure, we went fishing with the video recorder. But instead of catching a bluegill, we caught a whale," Emmons says. When the campaign worker returned with the tape the next day, Emmons only had to see the first few minutes to know he'd hit pay dirt: the governor, standing before a crowd, talking about Bailey's influence in a county outside his district."It's the only dang county I've ever seen that's got two senators," the governor said with a grin. "I've never seen anything like it in my life!" Within days, that sound bite was in a 30-second spot airing on the only local mountain television in the district. And in the closing days of the campaign, Turner's campaign made a $12,000 buy on Lexington's ABC affiliate (whose coverage area includes most of Eastern Kentucky) during the highest-rated TV show – "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" While the rest of the state was being lulled to sleep by a lackluster primary season, the two neighboring senate districts in the Eastern Kentucky mountains were mired in an all-out media slugfest. And for Turner, his carefully mapped out campaign against an entrenched incumbent was gaining traction. It's something that's not easy to do," says Turner's Atlanta-based pollster, Beth Schapiro. "But it's why you do a benchmark poll; to figure out what messages are out there and what works. In this case, it was a textbook example of how to run a good campaign." Enormous Task Candidate Bailey was known for his quiet intellect and mastery of the legislative process. As a reporter for the Louisville Courier-Journal wrote days after the election, "He could play the budget like a musical instrument—making sure he brought projects home to the mountains and occasionally helping the (medical) clinic he opearted." Bailey's two decades in the chamber is the second longest tenure of any state senator currently serving. This year, Bailey's re-election contest only drew one Democratic challenger (Turner) and no Republicans.   30-SECOND TV SPOT "Coach" Turner for State Senate Producer/Consultant: Emmons & Company TURNER: I've learned a lot from coaching high school basketball: commitment, leadership, having a goal and giving 100 percent because people are depending on you. That's the way I live my life off the court. I know what it's like to overcome the odds through hard work and dedication. And that's what I'll bring to Frankfort. As your state senator, I am committed to better education and better job opportunities here at home. I'm here to win for you. Turner, meanwhile, was a political novice. Even though he had no political wins under his belt, he had the next best thing for a rural district: wins on the high school basketball court. And in Kentucky, basketball is passion. Vice principal and head basketball coach at Johnson (County) Central High School, Turner coached the team to a coveted regional championship this Spring, which allowed them to play in the state's Sweet Sixteen tournament in Lexington's Rupp Arena, home of the University of Kentucky Wildcats. Despite local popularity, newcomer Turner had an enormous task in front of him if he was going to pull off an upset. Half of those polled in the benchmark survey didn't know whether they had a favorable opinion of Turner, and another 19 percent had never heard of him. Bailey's numbers, meanwhile, were intimidating: He held a 59 percent to 23 percent lead in the trial heat four weeks out; a 66 percent to 15 percent favorable/unfavorable rating; a 54 percent job approval rating (another 26 percent rated him fair); and a 48 percent "re-elect" base. "Those are the kind of numbers, as a pollster, that scare me," Schapiro said. "State representatives and senators generally are not well known. It's unusual to find more that 20 percent who can name their state legislature." Moreover, those numbers were derived four months after Turner jumped into the race. He filed for the seat in January, about the time Kentucky's biennial Legislature went into a four-month session. "After Johnny Ray saw the first poll, he didn't panic. That's when I knew we had a real shot at winning this race," Emmons said. "If anything, it showed how much resolve he had; the athlete in him came out and he wanted to win even more." Turner didn't turn to Emmons for professional help until early April—seven weeks before the May 23 primary. Emmons, who knew Turner from their college days at nearby Morehead State University, has spent the last 10 years as a Democratic political consultant in the state. "[Turner] essentially used the full-court press from day one," Emmons said. "While Benny Ray was in Frankfort at the Legislature, Turner was back home beating on people's doors asking for their help, looking people in the eye—people that Benny Ray had not been to see or talk to." Turner's campaign began putting together a strategy for the stretch run. Schapiro was brought in for polling, and the campaign went into the field with a benchmark survey the third week of April, a month before the primary. By this time, Bailey had already blanketed the four-county district with a direct mail piece and was on the air with a message of "leadership you can be proud of." "We watched his ads and listened to his radio commercials, and we tested his message in our poll," Emmons explained. "We had the benefit of second-guessing him. We put his message in the poll and tested it. And we used those findings to arrive at our conclusions." The poll tested several messages, both for and against each of the candidates, to see what issues moved voters the most. What they found was that Turner's years as an educator were an asset, while the issue of Bailey's sending economic development projects to neighboring Perry County, outside the district, worked well against the senator. After testing the messages, the second trial heat at the end of the 10-minute poll showed a 24-point shift in the horse-race question. Bailey dropped below a majority to 46 percent and Turner's support jumped 11 points to 34 percent. It was clear to Emmons and Schapiro that for Turner to win in such a limited time, they would have to raise Bailey's negatives, while at the same time giving Democrats a reason to vote for Turner. The decision was made to attack Bailey on his record, and specifically on his priorities. "It boiled down to a message of betrayal. What that did for us was drive votes away from Bailey, but it didn't necessarily give those votes to Turner," Emmons said. Storming the Court The first task was to introduce Turner and increase his name recognition. And capitalizing on his basketball popularity was an easy decision. The campaign borrowed home video footage of Turner's basketball team winning the regional tournament and the crowd storming the court, and used it in biography ads. Using the basketball theme, Turner said in television and radio ads, "I've learned a lot from coaching high school basketball: commitment; leadership; having a goal; and giving 100 percent because people are depending on you. That's the way I live on and off the court." To counter Bailey's campaign theme of "Leadership you can be proud of," Turner's campaign spun his basketball success into a theme of "Real leadership for real results." "We used basketball to qualify him—show him as a leader," Emmons said. "In sports, you either do it or you don't, and this guy can really do it. He's done it on the basketball court. It's not hype. It's not hoopla. It's real leadership." After months of a semi-quiet ground campaign by Turner, the two positive "bio" ads began a four-week media blitz in the final month of the campaign. Those ads only ran for a week on broadcast television before they were moved to cable outlets to make room for harder hitting ads. "Once we got him introduced we switched gears quickly, because we knew we had to drive Benny Ray's negatives up," Emmons said. The attack was two-pronged. It high-lighted the projects Bailey sent out of his district at the expense of his own constituents, and it connected a leadership coup Bailey orchestrated against a majority of his own party in the legislature on a major workers' compensation bill. Bailey was considered to have been the mastermind behind a 1998 legislative coup in which he and four other Senate Democrats joined the 18-member Republican caucus to seize control of the chamber's leadership and elect one of the five maverick Democrats president. It worked. And Bailey took over the reigns of the powerful Appropriations and Revenue Committee. That coalition fell apart two years later when two additional disgruntled Democrats switched party registrations, giving Republicans a historic 20-18 majority for the first time in the Senate's history. Eu Tu, Bailey? The Turner campaign was able to tie the workers' compensation reforms that were enormously unpopular in the mountains to Bailey's betrayal of the party—and make it stick. Meanwhile, the ad that made the biggest splash was the one with Gov. Patton talking about Perry County having two senators—its own, plus Bailey. That was coupled with another ad featuring footage of the local highway sign and the road leading out of the district toward Perry County. The voice-over says, "Did you hear the one about the state senator who lives in Knott County making the wrong turn on Highway 80? Instead of turning right, why he heads the wrong way toward Hazard (Perry County) where his business interests are." Bailey owns and operates a medical facility in Perry County. Both ads mention the controversial state Veterans Nursing Home that is now under construction outside Bailey's district. The home was originally slated for Breathitt County, within the district. The county fiscal court brought property and gave it to the state to build the nursing home. After a state representative who was instrumental in directing the home to the district left office, the project ended up outside the district in Perry County. Tony Fazio of San Francisco's Winning Directions Inc. produced Turner's only direct mail piece titled, "Betrayal." The message on the inside was to the point: "Benny Bailey's play for power handed the Sentate to the Republicans on a silver platter! In turn, the Republicans crushed workers' comp (in the 2000 legislative session) that would have helped miners in Kentucky." A barrage of "betrayal" ads flooded the airwaves in the weeks before the election. A 60-second radio ad, for instance, tied the basketball theme with the betrayal message. Two basketball radio announces introduced Bailey as "the little guy Governor Patton calls the 'second senator from Perry County.'" It accused him of "playing dirty" and "betraying his own team" over workers' compensation. One sequence in the radio said, "That's right, Jimbo. Not only did Benny Ray Bailey commit a personal foul when he used his influence to make sure Hazard and Perry County will get almost 500 new jobs instead of Breathitt, Floyd, Johnson and Knott counties, but he really threw the game when he handed the state Senate over to the Republicans." Meanwhile, Bailey chose only to respond through earned media in news stories, and even then the allegations were not directly challenged. For instance, Bailey never denied he sent projects out of the district. Instead, he cited the period before the 1990 redistricting when his district included Hazard and Perry County. Bailey had also spent much of his money more than two months out, including a TV ad buy of about $70,000 in April. In contrast, Turner put the bulk of his resources into a final four-week barrage. With 10 days remaining, Schapiro went back into the field with a three-day tracking poll to guage Turner's success. After a little more than two weeks of the betrayal message, Bailey had fallen below a majority to 48 percent of the vote (a drop of 11 points). Turner had jumped only five points to 27 percent with 18 percent of the voters still undecided. "When we saw those numbers, we knew what we were doing was working," Schapiro said. "We also saw that Turner's name recognition was rising and his unfavorables were not rising accordingly. The campaign that Turner was mounting was not boomeranging on him." Based on that information, Emmons made a calculated gamble to keep the "betrayal" ads on the air, instead of switching back to a positive message before election day. Meanwhile, the polling data from the largest county in the district (Floyd County) was encouraging; it suggested that a strong GOTV effort would help strengthen Turner's chances. The Tyson Organization of Texas was hired to make GOTV calls on the Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, right up to the polls closing. "The tracking polls showed us right behind him," Emmons said. "Everything was trending our way; we were moving up, and he was moving down. That's why we decided to stay with the attack messages all the way through election day." Not only did the polls keep trending in that direction, but when all the votes were counted on election day, Turner had won a solid 54 percent victory in a higher than expected turnout. Bailey left town on vacation the day after the election, but he told several people he had "bad polling," because his numbers showed he was up some 20 points prior to the election. What Bailey didn't know was that Turner's own poll showed Bailey up 21 points with less than 10 days remaining. "The only poll we won was on election day, but we were moving in the right direction," Emmons said. "I think Benny Ray anticipated the negative attack on the party switch, but I don't think he anticipated how we were going to tie it to workers compensation, and I think that miscalculation cost him the election." Finance reports are still trickling in from the election, but the combined total spending in the race should easily top $400,000 which would rank it among the most expensive state Senate races in Kentucky history. "I really believe it boiled down to our commitment to spend the resources on the right kind of research," Emmons said. "We had a good piece of research, we got the information in a timely manner. And we saved all our resources for the end."