Toomey's Web Advertising On Bayh: Yet Another Example of GOP Leading Dems Online

So Evan Bayh is announcing his retirement today. Setting aside the babble about motivations, implications, and reverberations-- seriously, given his track record, who didn't know that Bayh was going to do something to kneecap the Democratic Party on his way out the door-- I was pleasantly surprised that one campaign had the speed, intelligence, and sophistication to take advantage of the situation.

Of course, it's right-winger Pat Toomey's campaign, and that sucks, but it highlighted once again the continually-widening gap between Republicans and Democrats online.

Politics is all about unapologetically taking advantage of a situation. It's about seeing the openings, moving quickly to put a plan in place, and being willing and able to pull the trigger in order to reap the rewards.

Republicans are doing this. Democrats are not. We saw it with Brown, we saw it with McDonnell, we saw it with Christie and the RGA in NJ.

And now Toomey's campaign is doing that right now on the Bayh keyword fight. It's not a perfect campaign: I'm sure they're paying through the nose on relevancy, the ads are being served to me even though I'm not in PA to vote for him (though this could be intentional), and the ads are either directing to the homepage or to an unappealing donation landing page.

Regardless, they're there and no one else is. How long until the DSCC, Specter, or Sestak, or other campaigns actually take advantage of this spike?

P.S. Toomey campaign: Great website! Love the design (not enough to give you traffic, of course...) It's nice to see some other shops out there doing something different besides the rotating header, take-action tool box, generic logo header. Bravo.