David Sirota would probably like to think his column, Measuring Electoral Success, adds to our understanding of how to advance the progressive agenda but it seems to serve basically as an apology for outside support of Tom Geoghegan's candidacy in the IL-05 special election.
Sirota writes:
There is a value in backing long shots, even if those long shots lose. In Geoghegan’s case, many progressives supported someone who has been an important voice on so many issues, and who has had the courage to fight the good fight.
Tom Bowen, someone I certainly count as a friend, responds to the Sirota apology in this Progress Illinois column:
It's true that Geoghegan brought fresh policy approaches to the table. And it's always refreshing to see a candidate introduce new proposals into the debate. But a campaign is not just about ideas.
I think that Bowen is extraordinarily kind to both Geoghegan and Sirota here. Because I didn't find any evidence that Geoghegan was able to "introduce new proposals into the debate."
Especially if we are talking about the debate among voters.
Let me be clear here: if you use Bowen's measure, the "outsider" candidate that most influenced the debate was Charlie Wheelan, who's carbon tax proposal was quickly picked up by other candidates.
And Sara Feigenholtz and SEIU certainly tried to make health care central to the debate in this special election. But neither Geoghegan's nor Feigenholtz's policy approaches appear to have had much, if any, influence on voter decisions on March 3rd.
As people who know me already know, I have a practice of talking to voters after an election to see what kinds of campaign efforts influenced their decisions. In this case, I called voters in Ward 38 (one of the wards where I sampled voters at the end of January) to see why they voted as they did.
Here are the results as they came out of the 38th Ward on March 3rd:
Ward 38
Victor A. Forys 1311 25.86%
Mike Quigley 1036 20.43%
John Fritchey 771 15.21%
Sara Feigenholtz 586 11.56%
Patrick O'Connor 382 7.53%
Tom Geoghegan 272 5.36%
Charlie Wheelan 204 4.02%
Paul J. Bryar 157 3.10%
Frank Annunzio 137 2.70%
Jan Donatelli 85 1.68%
Carlos Monteagudo 67 1.32%
Cary Capparelli 62 1.22%
It's important to note a few things. First of all, 38 is in the western part of the 5th, and was outside of any of the districts served by the elected officials in the race. However, it is adjacent to Mike Quigley's County Commission district, and is served by Forrest Claypool, who not only endorsed Quigley but was prominently featured in Quigley's mailers. Many of the voters I talked to who said they voted in the Democratic primary acknowledged the connection between Claypool and Quigley, even if they didn't know he was their County Commissioner.
Secondly, the Geoghegan campaign told me when I visited their field office that this was one of the wards where they thought they had an opportunity to gain a foothold in the district.
In the end, I talked to 113 voters. After they were screened ("Did you vote in the March 3rd special election?"), I asked them three questions:
- When did you decide who you would vote for in the Democratic primary (voters could have chosen any ballot -- Democratic, Republican or Green party -- when they went to the polls on March 3rd)?
- What was the most influential factor in your decision?
- What was the most important issue that influenced your vote?
I also asked if they would tell me who they voted for, as a check, although answers to this question have rarely added up correctly after a winner is known.
Because my interest is to understand why the winners won and how effectively they communicated their message -- or influenced voters -- I take copious notes. In looking through my notes here, I don't find any indication that Geoghegan's message about increasing social security's payout made an impression on the electorate. Not a single voter I talked to after the election said that this or Geoghegan's interest rate cap were the reason they supported a candidate. And health care, an interest shared with Sara Feigenholtz, was the 9th most important priority for voters in the 38th Ward.
What was important to voters I talked to? The economic crisis was by far the most important issue on voters minds in the first half of March. Taxes were the second most important reason in this overwhelmingly Democratic district. And the third most important factor was what I call a feeling of abandonment by these voters, that they weren't being represented in Congress.
As the results from this ward demonstrated, voters felt that Dr. Forys, Commissioner Quigley and state Rep. Fritchey embodied the values they wanted in their next Member of Congress. The values and the issues that Tom Geoghegan voiced were barely a blip on the electorate's mind.
Mike Quigley's success was in being able to talk to voters in the language they understood and felt comfortable with. He focused on their core values and conveyed a determination to take their values to Washington. Is that all that a Cong. Quigley will do? Not bloody likely. Mike Quigley is as wonky as they come, and has strong progressive/reformer credentials that will undoubtedly please the progressive community. But Quigley's campaign focused on the issues that were important to voters. He didn't try to use this short election as a teaching moment.
David Sirota sought to take advantage of progressive's profound distaste of the electability argument. In his column, he implies that Tom Geoghegan would have been more electable if the "institutional players" (or unions) would have coalesced around Geoghegan. I tend to agree, and made that argument early on. But the fact is that Geoghegan's message was always directed at the progressive elites and had great difficulty being translated down to the voter. Part of the reason for this was that Geoghegan's voter contact efforts relied far more on personal contact at their door than in their mailbox or through the airways. While I'm a great believer in direct voter contact, I know that it must be reinforced through direct mail and broadcast media.
The fact that a prominent union lawyer was basically rejected by the local unions couldn't have helped. But it doesn't appear that Geoghegan's campaign made as much of an effort to gain their support as did John Fritchey or Sara Feigenholtz. So one might wonder what was the rational behind Geoghegan's campaign. In attempting to explain the candidates to someone from outside of Illinois, I had previously referred to Geoghegan as a "pure play" for progressives. Inherent in that definition was the inference that Geoghegan was the least likely to win election.
The question that Sirota wants to answer is whether supporting a pure play advances the progressive agenda (even though he never asks -- or answers -- this question). Like Bowen, I remain dubious. Mike Quigley's win -- and Geoghegan's defeat -- does offer lessons, but not the ones that Sirota prefers to focus on. Illinois' 5th Congressional District has been described as "very Catholic, very conservative." Some residents of the 5th have taken exception to this definition, but that's not my point. A wonky progressive, a proven reformer who will get involved in the nitty-gritty of legislative work, won this "very conservative" seat in Congress. It isn't a moral victory at all. It's an actual progressive victory that deserves duplication throughout the country.
Mike Quigley can -- and should -- serve as the same example for progressives running in less solid districts for Democrats and progressives that Melissa Bean has served for centrist Democrats. I have argued (for far too long, it seems) that for progressives to advance their agenda they must move the center leftward, just as Republicans following Reagan moved the center to the right to enact their conservative agenda. Mike Quigley fits this example, by sticking close to the issues actually on the minds of the electorate while understanding that his own progressive agenda could be advanced, as well. Quigley will have his teaching moment because he won.
David Sirota may have preferred Tom Geoghegan over the other (and, I'd argue, equally) progressive candidates in this race, but the voters clearly did not. While one might have expected that voters would jump at a message of increasing the social security payout, they have proven to be much more circumspect. As a means for getting activists to remember the limited time that most voters will spend thinking about candidates and elections, I advise them to think of voters as stupid. You have to connect the dots -- directly and simply -- for voters if you want to influence the electorate. Geoghegan's central message of economic security was too convoluted, too much of a stretch, for the voters I talked to. Quigley's message of reform, taxes and improving mass transit spoke to the electorate. That's why he won.
Do voters matter to progressives? They should. David Sirota seems to think it's all about the elites. But to win elections, the electorate remains supreme. We should never forget this, and we should never assume that the electorate naturally shares our interests. Voters have interests and successful candidates speak to them. The Quigley campaign did that...