The Elaine Marshall campaign sent a very interesting letter to Cal Cunningham’s supporters in the June 22 North Carolina Democratic Senate primary runoff.
Three weeks ago, the Marshall campaign’s general consultant Thomas Mills mailed the letter to a list of Cunningham donors taken from FEC filings. To read the full letter, provided to us by the Cunningham campaign, click here. The letter told recipients that Cunningham could not win, after Marshall came in first place in the initial round of the primary, and encouraged them to get behind Marshall:
In the runoff election, Mr. Cunningham has very little to build upon. Sec. Marshall’s fundraising has taken off since her victory. She will have to resources to complete in every medium and has a stronger, broader base to build upon. In addition, the runoff electorate will be African-American, a population in while she overwhelmingly defeated Mr. Cunningham, and almost 50% will be women over 50 years old, Sec. Marshall’s base.
With your support, Mr. Cunningham built an impressive campaign. However, as I said, he has no credible path to victory in the runoff. Sec. Marshall will be the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in North Carolina. I invite you to join our campaign so we can begin the process of defeating Richard Burr in November. (Emphasis in the original.)
The Cunningham campaign complained to the Charlotte News & Observer about the letter late last week, saying that the Marshall campaign may have violated guidelines against using FEC reports for the purposes of fundraising. However, Mills told the paper that he was within the rules, as the letter did not solicit money.
“I checked with my compliance people and they said ‘You are fine,'” Mills told the paper. “We just want to reach out to good Democrats and begin uniting behind the likely nominee for the U.S. Senate in the fight against Richard Burr and to prevent folks from throwing good money after bad.”
I asked Mills what exactly he was trying to accomplish with the letter. “You know, what we were trying to do is let people know that she’s going to be the nominee, and begin to unify the party to take on Richard Burr,” said Mills. He then asked me if I’d seen the letter, to which I replied that yes, I had. He added: “I thought it was a very respectful letter, and I’ll stick by my guns. I don’t see a credible path to victory for Mr. Cunningham, particularly now that Mr. Lewis has come on board.” (This is referring to the third-place candidate in the initial primary, attorney Ken Lewis, who endorsed Marshall two weeks ago.)
Was this letter a sort of psychological operation to discourage Cunningham’s supporters, I asked? Mills said that the point of the letter had been to “bring people together, because now the fight mainly is against Richard Burr.”
Mills also denied a claim by the Cunningham campaign that the letter had been sent to Cunningham’s grandmother, Mattie Terry. “I’m not gonna say that she wasn’t living in a household that somehow got it,” said Mills, but he insisted that the letter had not been addressed to her. He e-mailed me a mailing list that he said contained the full list of recipients, and which does not contain Terry’s name.
I asked Cunningham spokesman Jared Leopold for comment on the claim that the letter was an effort to bring Democrats together. “I personally will trust the polling out there rather than the Elaine Marshall campaign’s second premature victory lap,” said Leopold, referring to Marshall’s earlier claims before the first primary that she could win the 40% of the vote needed to avoid a runoff. “We’re gonna trust the voters, it’s up to them, and the latest and only runoff poll shows that it’s a 36-36 tie.”
