- Roem outraised Marshall 3-to-1 with nearly $500,000 in donations, much of it coming from LGBT advocates and other supporters across the country. Her campaign was relentless, knocking on doors more than 75,000 times in a district with 52,471 registered voters. Roem sat for endless public appearances and interviews and maintained a steady social media presence. Marshall kept his schedule private but also mounted a healthy ground game; his campaign said this week that staffers knocked on voters’ doors about 49,000 times this fall.
This snippet can tell you a few very critical things
1.) America's center-left and left finally got organized and got some money behind themselves.
2.) The Republican candidate likely thought that Roem didn't have a snowball's chance in hell, and that was a huge mistake.
3.), and this is the most important one: When people meet a trans person, in real life, in the flesh, they realize that we're not the monsters the fearmongers make us out to be. they realize that we're just like them, and that being trans is the least interesting thing about us.
I doubt that it was Moen knocking on all 75,000 of those doors, but even a small amount, combined with all of the public appearances, and the focus on issues shows that we can convince people that we're not the monsters.
The other big thing is that she didn't really engage Marshall on the cultural issues, and instead focused on local ones (like traffic congestion, which is a huge problem in that part of the state). See my post about the election here: