running early voting operations.  I am an expert at running early voting programs within a campaign organization.  Any wee-oiled campaign is going to have about 1/3 to 1/2 of their dollars earmarked (don't ya just love that word?) for EV operations.  

In early voting states, you CANNOT win without an effective EV program.  It appears the Ciro didn't even have one.  If he had one that wasn't even that effective, if it shed some votes off of Cuellar's EV total, Ciro's election day total would have made up for it.

To run an effective EV op, the key is EARLY MONEY.  Early money is indeed like yeast.  Because of the EV situation on the ground in TX-28, Ciro lost this race a LONG time ago, and all the last minute money in the world wouldn't have changed that.  

With his good EV campaign, Cuellar institutionally could not lose this race.  The numbers just weren't there for us.

Next time, we need to get involved early and concentrate JUST as much on EV as election day.