My Experience working on a campaign (with Democrats)

So I spend the past few days (took Monday, Tuesday off work) to do some canvassing and calling on behalf of a local political candidate who I happen to know personally.  To be clear, this was a local non-party-affiliated race, but both candidate happened to be registered and active Democrats.

Moreover, the fact that I am not a registered active Democrat was not discussed. As far as most everyone knew, I was just as liberal as everyone else.

The candidate I was supporting is a lifelong resident of the city. Born, schooled, raised, and currently a new homeowner. A younger kid (thirtyish) who's political ambitions has been well known since he was a young child. He currently works full time for a legislator, doing policy research, campaigning, and other miscellaneous activities. He serves on a local arts and education board, and is an unpaid appointed commissioner to a housing board. He's been involved (behind the scenes) in many elections in many capacities, even managing a campaign. This was his first attempt at being the actual candidate. 

The other candidate was an immigrant who primarily grew up in the city, but had moved away for several years, working and living much of that overseas. He recently moved back to the city, where he has become active in the Democratic Party in terms of attending events, and I believe he served as a delegate at one time. He was described by some as an "activist". Otherwise, he had no policy experience, experience actually working in legislator or government. His argument for his candidacy was simple. He is a minority. He is an immigrant. He worked internationally in business.

The strategies were very different. While our candidate had many volunteers, and personally knocked several thousand doors and made several thousand phone calls, his opponent did far less in terms of personal canvassing, and phone calls. He relied heavily on signage and literature. While driving around, I probably saw as much as a 10-1 signage advantage for our opponent. It felt somewhat daunting, but the experienced campaigners said that signage was an overrated campaign tool.

The blind spot:

But at the end of the day, this really boiled down to a simple choice. A white Christian male, with lots of policy experience, working hard to talk to people at a personal level, against the minority candidate who felt his diversity of being born elsewhere, and having international business experience was his key to being a strong candidate.

Now what I found interesting is that within the campaign, the volunteers I met and family members understood this. They realized that their candidate (a Democrat) was being challenged by someone playing the diversity card. They didn't like it. On paper, there was no contest as to whom was the more qualified candidate. But even one of the volunteers admitted that prior to talking to our candidate, she had been leaning towards the other guy for that very reason (wanted to vote for diversity).

This lead to some discussion as to whether or not we all should be looking past the whole identity thing, and really look at who the candidates were and what they stood for. After all, that was what they were basically asking voters to do in this case. We wanted them to look "past" the fact that our guy was white and their guy was a minority and vote for who would make the better legislator.

But when a discussion broke out at a later time regarding the St Paul Mayors race, everyone quickly agreed that they wanted Melvin Carter to win. Why?  Because he would be St Paul's first black mayor. Did we not just have this discussion? 

Longer discussions:

All of this led later to a one on one discussion (me and a family member of the candidate) as to whether or not the Democrats may be putting less qualified candidate who may not be as capable as others of actually performing the job, because Democrats (in general) really like voting for diversity. Could this be hurting the Party long term, because the candidates are less successful after being elected, because their main qualification is just their background or color of their skin?

Ultimately: 

Our candidate won rather handily. In fact, it was a double digit percentage point victory. My best guess is that while these two candidates were fighting over who was the better Democrat, likely splitting up the liberal Democrat vote....  being the lifetime resident, and being the experienced candidate probably worked largely to his advantage with independents and Republicans (since there was no conservative in the race).

Afterwards, it was asked what the other guy was thinking, being he got pretty much waxed. Would he feel like he got outworked. Would he believe that he should have done more that put up signs and mail literature. Might he attempt to get more involved to build his resume if he decides to run again.

Am I the only one who understands? Since this guy's argument was that he was qualified because he was a minority and an immigrant and this particular argument was rejected by the voters. Those voters must be bigots and racists, and that's why the white Christian guy won. I guarantee you that was the buzz within his ranks.