Brian Dubie's Tax Commissioner Richard Westman on VPR (By Josh Manheimer)

Woah! Did I Really Just Elect Vermont's Next Governor?

Before you dial 911 and inform the dispatcher I've stopped taking my medication again, let me tell you why I may have just elected Vermont's next Governor.
During the recent 2010 gubernatorial election in Vermont -- acting as a solo political loose cannon -- I created a series of homemade videos for Youtube under the pseudonym AnyoneButDubie to combat the GOP candidate, Lt. Governor Brian Dubie, who had hired a professional communications firm named Harris Media from Austin, Texas while he was running on a platform, "I will bring jobs to Vermont."
To drive traffic to my videos, I created and ran a series of Google and Facebook ads which generated 1,600,000 impressions and 6,000 clicks. My buxom Dubie Girl was my best performing display ad, garnering 83,183 impressions and 1,655 clicks. My best text ad was, "Dubie Wants To Work Less / Lie In Tanning Booth More" which achieved 109,340 impressions and 132 clicks.
Altogether, I spent about $3,600. The ads were targeted throughout Vermont and, on occasion, aimed directly at the Harris Media office building in Austin -- the theory being that maybe the Dubie operatives inside would get pissed off, misjudge the mood of the Vermont electorate, perhaps even believe I was really part of the Democratic candidate's campaign -- I had no communication with Peter Shumlin or his senior advisors -- and overreach by retaliating with full guns blazing.
The result? The Democratic candidate, Peter Shumlin, won the election in a squeaker by a slim 3,000 votes -- one of the few bright blue spots in a bloody sea of red that election night.
Is it possible my ads and videos here actually had something to do with the narrow Democratic victory?
Well, why don't you decide for yourself.
Josh Manheimer, Norwich, Vermont
www.jcmanheimer.com

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• Vermont Governor
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• Deb Markowitz
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