Alison Lundergan Grimes is running the worst Senate campaign of the year

And yet, Grimes’s gaffe does reveal something genuinely disturbing about her—or at least her candidacy. And that’s why it’s so politically damaging. Grimes’s refusal to say who she voted for is emblematic of her entire campaign, which, for the last 15 months, has been waged in a defensive crouch—evading and obfuscating at every turn.

The reason for that crouch is obvious. Grimes doesn’t want to give her Republican opponent, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, any openings for an attack. Even in this age of scripted, on-message politicians, Grimes has stood out for her, uh, discipline. When I was writing an article about the Kentucky Senate race last year, just scoring an interview with Grimes was an ordeal. After initially ignoring my interview requests, her campaign eventually told me that I could talk to her for 15 minutes before a rally she was doing in Owensboro, a river town in Western Kentucky. But on my 100-plus-mile drive to Owensboro from Louisville, I got a call on my cell phone from Grimes’s press secretary telling me that the candidate was running late and the interview was off. When I and another reporter—who’d driven even farther, from Lexington—tried to buttonhole Grimes after her speech, she pretended that she was talking on a cell phone and breezed past us. Finally, about a week later, I managed to get Grimes on the phone for about 10 minutes and, honestly, it was 10 minutes of my life that I’ll never get back…

More to the point, Grimes’s candidacy is showing just how absurd–and ultimatley self-defeating–the modern political campaign has become. So preoccupied with not making mistakes, and demonizing the opponent, the modern political campaign often forgets what would seemingly be its most important task: to make an affirmative case for its candidate. If Grimes and Terri Lynn Land–the Republican candidate for Senate in Michigan who’s run a similarly bunkered race–both go down to defeat, perhaps it’ll serve as something of a wake-up call to strategists on both sides of the aisle.