Coakley’s Pollster Joins Halter Campaign

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


After Martha Coakley’s disastrous run for the Senate in Massachusetts, one might wonder what’s next on the agenda for the consultants and operatives who staffed her campaign. Coakley’s pollster Celinda Lake has landed well. She’s now working for a very different kind of candidate: progressive darling Bill Halter, the Arkansas Lieutenant Governor who announced Monday that he would challenge Sen. Blanche Lincoln in the state’s Democratic primary.

Lake confirmed to Mother Jones that she is working for Halter’s primary bid, though she declined to comment further without clearance from the campaign staff. A leading Democratic pollster, Lake was among those whom Rahm Emanuel and other top officials reportedly blamed for Coakley’s spectacular defeat.

If Coakley was emblematic of the Democratic establishment—having been groomed by the party machine to run for Ted Kennedy’s seat—Halter is presenting himself as the quintessential populist outsider, campaigning on the message that “Washington is broken” (though he himself is an alum of the Clinton administration). In announcing his candidacy, Halter railed against “bailing out Wall Street with no strings attached, while leaving middle-class Arkansas taxpayers with the bill; protecting insurance company profits instead of protecting patients.” Long frustrated with Lincoln’s centrist views and defense of corporate industry, the liberal netroots has moved quickly to embrace Halter, with MoveOn.org raising some $600,000 in the first day of his campaign—on top of $3 million the AFL-CIO has pledged to his challenge.

By teaming up with Halter, maybe Lake is just paying close attention to the numbers. She has already acknowledged that “anger is a lot more motivating than hope” in the current political and economic climate. “2010 is fast turning out to be a blame election and I think that either we are going to characterize who deserves the blame—whether that’s banks and lobbyists and people who still want to hold on to national Republican economic strategies—or we’re going to get the blame,” Lake told Politico in the wake of Coakley’s defeat.

It’s unclear whether Halter’s “candidacy of blame” has a real shot at prevailing in either the primary or the general election. Polls show him trailing even further than Lincoln in a match-up against leading GOP candidate John Boozman. But the support that Halter has already elicited from establishment Democratic operatives like Lake shows how flexible Democratic consultants can be. And while Coakley never came across as much of a fighter, perhaps Lake will have better luck with Halter, who’s already coming out swinging.

Update: As it turns out, Celinda Lake also used to be Blanche Lincoln’s pollster. That makes her jump to the Halter campaign even more of a coup for him.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate