Lyndon LaRouche, whom the New York Times characterized as a “quixotic, apocalyptic leader of a cultlike political organization who ran for president eight times, once from a prison cell,” died Tuesday at the age of 96. LaRouche’s far-right fringe movement has run candidates in numerous elections, but, thankfully, with very little success. However, his allies unexpectedly scored key wins in Democratic primaries in Illinois in 1986, an infamous event that completely upended Team Blue’s hopes to unseat GOP Gov. James Thompson.
In 1982, former U.S. Sen. Adlai Stevenson III, the son and namesake of two-time Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson, had challenged Thompson. Stevenson lost 49.4-49.3 and contested the result until the Illinois Supreme Court affirmed it in a 4-3 vote days ahead of the Republican’s inauguration. Thompson sought a fourth term in 1986, and Stevenson had no trouble once again winning the Democratic nomination for their rematch; it looked like Illinois was in for another tight race.
However, state law at the time did not allow nominees for governor to pick their running mates. Instead, candidates for governor and lieutenant governor would compete in separate primaries but would be paired together on the general election ballot. LaRouche’s allies ran a little-known candidate named Mark Fairchild, who beat the mainstream Democrat, state Sen. George Sangmeister, 52-48.
Janice Hart, another LaRouche candidate, also won the Democratic nod for Illinois secretary of state in a 51-49 upset against Aurelia Pucinski. Hart exclaimed after her win, “I’m going to revive the spirit of Abraham Lincoln and General Patton, and we’re going to roll our tanks down State Street.” She also said, days after her victory, that, “There will be Nuremberg tribunals set up around the country,” and “Illinois will lead the charge. Traitors will be charged with treason, drug runners will be charged with killing children.”
The results attracted national attention and left Democrats wondering just what had happened. A spokesperson for LaRouche’s front group attributed their win to their platform, which opposed laws requiring balanced budgets and supported a national laser-defense system similar to Ronald Reagan’s proposed “Star Wars” initiative. Fairchild and Hart’s platforms also called for mandatory AIDS screenings and for anyone with the disease to be quarantined.
However, a more likely culprit was low turnout, with bad weather also keeping voters at home. The New York Times also wrote at the time that Illinois politicians speculated that their intended nominees had been overconfident and had run weak campaigns. Voter confusion also likely added to the upset. Democratic officials speculated that some voters confused Hart with Colorado Sen. Gary Hart, who had run a high-profile bid for the Democratic presidential nod two years earlier.
Party operatives also mused that low-information voters were more comfortable backing people with “familiar” names like Fairchild and Hart rather than ethnic last names like Sangmeister and Pucinski. Some Democratic voters also said they thought that LaRouche’s group, National Democratic Policy Committee, was affiliated with the Democratic Party. Plenty of Republican voters also likely crossed over to vote in the Democratic primary to support those whom they correctly viewed as weaker candidates.
Whatever the cause, Stevenson declared the day after the primary that he would “never run on a ticket with candidates who espouse the hate-filled folly of Lyndon LaRouche,” and that he was “exploring every legal remedy to purge these bizarre and dangerous extremists from the Democratic ticket.” Days later, he kept his word and he announced that he was running as an independent, a move backed by the mainstream Democratic statewide ticket. The former senator acknowledged at the time that this could hurt the Democratic Party because voters would need to split their ballots between him and nominees like Sen. Alan Dixon, but “that is a small price for a message that our Democratic Party is united ... against the madness of Lyndon LaRouche and his small band of neo-Nazis.” Two months later, Fairchild declared himself the new Democratic gubernatorial nominee “by right of succession.”
Ultimately, no candidate was the Democratic nominee for governor. Stevenson, who had created the Solidarity Party for this bid, lost his rematch with Thompson 53-40, with another 7 percent voting for the Democratic nominee “no candidate.” GOP Secretary of State Jim Edgar, a future governor, defeated Solidarity Party nominee Jane Spirgel 67-17, with Hart taking 15 percent. However, other members of the statewide Democratic ticket, including Dixon, still pulled off wins.
While the law that would have paired Stevenson and Fairchild together caused so much frustration for Democrats in 1986, it remained on the books to cause trouble again 24 years later. After the 2010 primary, Democrats awoke to learn that a little-known stockbroker named Scott Lee Cohen had won their nomination for lieutenant governor in a six-way primary. But Cohen didn’t remain little-known for long, and the public soon learned of his sordid past as, in the words of the local NBC affiliate, “an abusive prostitute-dating steroid user.”
Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn, like Stevenson before him, was alarmed at the prospect of sharing a ticket with Cohen, but unlike Fairchild, Cohen did withdrawn from the ticket. Quinn was narrowly re-elected in the fall, with Cohen taking 4 percent of the vote as an independent. After all of this, Illinois finally changed its law, and now candidates for governor pick a running mate before the primary. However, despite these two awful experiences, a number of other states, including New York, still nominate governors and lieutenant governors separately and pair them together on the ballot for the general election.
P.S. Despite their embarrassing 1986 primary losses to the LaRouche candidates, Sangmeister and Pucinski still had successful political careers afterwards. Sangmeister was elected to the U.S. House in 1988 and retired ahead of the 1994 GOP wave, while Pucinski was elected as a judge in Cook County.
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