A.G. Gancarski
The Twitter avatar of Brian Swensen, the manager of the Lenny Curry campaign, is a picture of a yard sign with the message: “I am a yard sign. I cannot vote. Go knock doors”. With that in mind, it’s not surprising that volunteers knocking on doors, both on weekends and during the week itself, is central to the campaign’s viability and vitality.
Before today, the campaign has knocked on 32,800 doors, according to Curry. Today, they expected 3,000 more contacts. Clearly, the Curry camp believes this is a strategy that will bring them victory. Before the event, I talked to Swensen and asked him to explain the rationale behind the “Duval Door Brawl” concept.
He’s used “different themes” like this on other campaigns, he relates. The “Duval Door Brawl” phrase was chosen for a simple reason, he says. It’s “catchy and it rhymes.”
The Duval Door Brawl involves teams of volunteers going out to make contact with potential voters. The most successful team will get to meet a national GOP luminary. As Swensen explains, tangible incentives bring results, as they “build a sense of competition among activists”, getting them “pumped and jazzed.”
The 60 or so volunteers who were present at the rally represented the demographic diversity of what Swensen called a “big tent organization”: men and women, whites and blacks, college students and those from older demographics.
Clearly, advancing the perception that Curry represents much more than the one-dimensional caricature his critics paint of him is key to this campaign’s viability. For Donna Barrow, the Executive Director of the Duval County Republican Party, the perception is reality.
“Lenny is a self-made man,” Barrow relates, “who does everything with honor and integrity.”
Barrow, a longtime GOP insider and operative, knew early on that Curry was destined for a special role, calling him the “golden boy” of the Republican Party even way back.
One of his strengths, she relates, was his ability to “lead everybody. Lenny brought all the donors [from the different wings of the party] together at the same time. He shows sincerity and honesty, and treats everybody with respect. He’s a good man.”
Those positive appraisals of Curry’s strengths resonate with the Young Republican crowd, and for his part, Curry makes sure to speak to their concerns, painting this campaign as a generational struggle for the city’s future.
“I love a good brawl,” he said during the kickoff rally to the assembled crowd, “but a brawl for a purpose. This is about the City of Jacksonville in ten years, in fifteen years. Let’s go out and brawl together.”
There are those, like local trial lawyer John Phillips, who take issue with the call to brawl, saying that “brawl” is an “interesting choice of words”. He goes on to muse:
Why not reward all of your supporters instead of pitting them against each other? We have enough negativity that we don’t need fighting in the streets. In fact, that is exactly Jacksonville’s problem- too much violence in the streets. This is a bit insensitive to that.
He may be missing the point. The crowd assembled today was not particularly pugnacious or prone to violence in the streets. Their passion is more for their candidate and the issues that motivate them.
Those issues were addressed by the event’s keynote speaker, Jeff Atwater.
“Think about how important this city is to overall success”, Atwater said about Jacksonville, which he called a “financial center for Florida and the Southeast.”
Atwater urged volunteers to knock on doors and “re-introduce people to integrity.”
“You’re going to be introducing them to Lenny,” he said. “Your enthusiasm will carry the day. Our job is to make the introduction to Lenny Curry,” Atwater continued, adding that would be especially powerful coming from “someone with their life ahead of them, who wants the city to be something special.”
“Let’s look down the road five or seven years”, he said, to “new commerce, capital, and innovation.”
He emphasized, as has Curry throughout the campaign, the importance of public safety.
“People are only going to invest capital when they think this is a safe place to be,” Atwater said.
Many in the Alvin Brown and Bill Bishop camps have taken issue with the Curry logo, which uses a bridge that isn’t identifiably one of Jacksonville’s. Atwater talked of that bridge in the context of metaphor.
“This will be the bridge where people fill their potential,” he said.
He continued the aquatic theme, talking about the metaphoric power of the St. Johns River, as a “river that flows through us, a force of nature. Will it be vigorous? Will it shape the city?”
The answer to that question is still evolving. The Alvin Brown campaign is still taking shape, expecting to be able to marshal money already raised and resources from throughout the state and country to promulgate its message at will as the March 24 election approaches. With new polls due to come out from multiple sources in the coming weeks, both the Brown and Curry campaigns will have tangible proof as to the effectiveness of their respective messaging operations.
