| Clearly there was tremendous turnout - a likely record for a Democratic Primary in the 14th District. The Daily Herald reports today:
"In Kane County, Clerk Jack Cunningham said some precincts showed twice as many Democratic voters as before - which he attributed to the Clinton/Obama race, the 14th congressional seat and two new judicial subcircuits.
Cunningham estimated turnout could be 80,000 [voters].... As well, more than 10,000 early ballots were cast in Kane County, up from 3,000 in last year's local elections."
For the history of Kane County Primary voting see this - and also see what ArchPundit wrote about early primary voting this election. Kane County is only one county in the 14th - I use it as an example - but in general district voting numbers were up.
While the numbers may have overwhelmed and negated the reach of Bill Foster's mailings and cable TV ads, it also must have posed a challenge to everyone's mobilization efforts. People off the radar were voting in the Democratic primary, including people who might normally take Republican ballots (and see here). Overall this likely hurt Foster more than John Laesch because paradoxically in a campaign where money was often brought up as an issue, high turnout likely negated some money effects.
Ballot position may also have played a role. I'm not an expert in this and the amount of "primacy effect" (i.e. bias towards the first person on the ballot) seems to be contested and variable - but as much as a 10% vote count bonus effect is claimed in some circumstances and up to 2% seems a much more commonly cited number. Low information seems to increase the effect. In this primary election a lot of people who don't normally vote in primaries cast votes - many likely driven by the competitive presidential race - suggesting that John Laesch may have benefited from being first on the primary ballot (where Bill was third). Compare John's total where he was first on the ballot in the primary (31,587) with his numbers in the special election where he was second (28,053). Bill, of course, presumably may have benefited from being first on the special election where he got 31,792, compared to 31,910 in the regular primary - but most people probably filled the general primary ballot first - so they had already made the choice in a scenario that benefited John by the time they got to the special election. You would expect a bit of a drop off in the special election for both candidates just because it was unusual, and in some cases required a separate effort to cast a vote (i.e. requesting another paper ballot).
Name recognition may also have factored in the totals. A lot of people, including me, were under the impression that polling suggested low name recognition for John despite his candidacy in 2006 - but we (and perhaps the polls) may have been wrong.
Other factors no doubt played a role - including effective efforts by the Laesch Campaign - but what I've written above attempts to explain some of the non-Laesch effort effects. The reason for explaining the 'non-Laesch effort' is that when I look back at my criticisms of the Laesch campaign I'm hard pressed to think any of them wrong based on what I know today. As I've said before, I believe in public financing of campaigns and campaign finance reform - but my beliefs are not today's reality. In the real world John Laesch's Congressional Campaign could be significantly outspent running for an Illinois state senate in a much smaller district than the 14th Congressional. While I may have completely misjudged it, I also didn't see evidence of a huge, local grassroots groundswell for John. It wasn't evident online, where John and his campaign spent significant time (see for example the number of views his videos got here). It wasn't evident in the number of signatures John got for the special election in a single week (1,700) - which was less, but close to Bill Foster's number (1,832), and only half of Chris Lauzen's total (3,400). John also was the last candidate in the race (with the exception of Joe Serra) - and thus the last to start campaigning and connecting with voters this cycle. Just because I couldn't see it doesn't mean it didn't happen - but I think my skepticism justified of a huge movement that didn't show up in huge numbers for events I saw or read about, didn't sign petitions, didn't donate and didn't even passively view video clips online.
Throughout the campaign I indicated I thought John Laesch had improved considerably over his run in 2006. I still believe that is true. No doubt that translated into votes. How many? No idea. As for the rest? It could have been luck. |
