Julie Hamos spoke before Northside DFA at their October meeting, talking about why she's running for Congress in Illinois's 10th Congressional District.
Hamos had previously spoken before the group, but this time as a candidate for Congress in the Democratic primary. Questions were again pointed, but handled with aplomb.
i was asked a couple of weeks ago (or so it seems) to write about what's next on the radar. a presidential year is always an exciting political year -- made even more so by the fact that the likely democratic nominee (i hope) is from this state. but presidential elections is not the only thing going on, even if it is what garners all the media attention.
first things first. iwil, illinois women in leadership, is now accepting applications for it's next class of leadership training. there is no cost for this training; sessions meet once a month (as i understand it) and one participant has told me that the media training alone was worth the commitment for women thinking about running for office:
The program is open to all Illinois women who have a commitment to serve in public office and a willingness to commit the time necessary to participate fully.
deb shore was in the class of 2003, holly johnson was in the class of 2006 and sharon narrod was in last year's class. you may know other graduates. the curriculum is worth a gander. if you are a woman interested in running for office sometime in the future, i highly encourage you to take advantage of this tremendous opportunity, both for the training and the networking opportunities.
This morning, Billy Dennis, a.k.a. The Peoria Pundit breaks the story of the first Democrat to show interest in contesting the Republican nominee for the open Congressional seat being vacated by retiring Congressman Ray LaHood.
180 objections have been filed before the state board of elections, the overwhelming number of them coming today (tuesday, november 11). 76 of the challenges were directed towards (mostly) court candidates. the rest were distributed among the races most likely to be in the public eye leading up to february 5.
there were 12 challenges, one each for all the presidential candidates -- obama, though, got 2 challenges. all these challenges came from one person: richard mayers of berwyn, the controversial green candidate in the third congressional district.
there have been 5 challenges (one withdrawn) in the u.s. senate race. republican candidate norm hill was challenged by three different objectors (including mayers). mike psak was also challenged. mayers' challenge of dick durbin was withdrawn.
(I am promoting this not to start a freaking flame war but because I think it is good to look at the next election(and organizing for our candidates) by discussing concrete things about the last one. - promoted by unagidon)
this was in my draft diaries. i don't intend to finish it; i post it for information purposes only
in 1994, speaker of the house tom foley lost to a little known and severely underfunded candidate, george nethercutt. nethercutt successfully used the issue of the day, term limits, against the speaker, in a race that defined the wave election of 1994.
there was some hope that the same would occur to speaker dennis hastert, who could equally be tied to the scandals of the day. this hope was evident both from the generic ballot results in the district and the exit poll conducted on election day. the last generic ballot test in IL-14 showed the democratic candidate slightly behind the generic republican candidate 48% to 49% (62 respondents; no oversample; huge margin of error). exit polls from the il-14 indicated the 58% of voters (on election day) were disappointed with hastert's job performance. only 38% of voters (on election day) knew who john laesch was (nethercutt also had a subpar name recognition in 1994). 42% of voters (on election day) admitted that they voted for john laesch.
in indiana, a moderate, a conservative and a liberal democrat all beat republican incumbents. i could be wrong, but it seems to me that this red state was the greatest source of net gain for democrats in this late-breaking wave election year. like montana and colorado in 2004, indiana offers some very real clues about how democrats can beat republicans anywhere, everywhere.
they offer important lessons. two dramatic differences stand out between these indiana races and elsewhere: early field and opportunity (or climate).
politics is emotional. that's a lesson that democrats could stand to learn from republicans. as much as (some) democrats would like to dwell in the intellectual realm, the more visceral the connection between candidate and voters, the more likely that candidate will win their support.
it's really obvious from reading posts here that john laesch has made that emotional connection to some supporters, if not to voters of his district. and that's a good thing.
but it becomes a bad thing when those supporters are unable to look at the political environment, climate and their candidate objectively. drawing up candidates' strength and weaknesses is the starting point of any campaign blueprint.
politics, like religion, lends itself to a cult of personality. i'm going to throw two different types of post-election analysis together in this one, just because it is often difficult to get an objective read on races that ended so badly.
many years ago, when i was doing my usual post-election analysis on senate campaigns, i came across a journalist. he told me that he learned to look at campaigns through the lense of the following questions:
1. does the campaign demonstrate a clear purpose?
2. does it have steady political leadership?
3. does it have support from the electorate?
in football, the fundamentals are blocking and tackling. in campaigns, the fundamentals are money, message and mobilization. just like a football team that fails to either block or tackle, a campaign that fails to raise money, communicate a consistent, coherent message or mobilize its voters is unlikely to succeed.
money is the clearest indicator for outsiders of a campaign's progress. as much as people may resent this, it is the only quantifiable measure that we have. endorsements don't mean anything to people who don't know the people who've endorsed you. but everyone understands cash.
field is something that reporters often overlook but voters almost always know. the field organization is a critical component of any campaign, at any level. even presidential campaigns have a field organization, targeting key states and areas they determine they must win. this is more important at the local level.
one rule of thumb you've no doubt heard a thousand times (and probably forgot about it two seconds afterward) is "walkers always win." there's another rule of thumb out there that you probably haven't heard of: a good campaign needs 1 volunteer for every 25 votes it expects to need to win.
these rules of thumb come from people who do field. field isn't particularly glamourous, especially in the television age, nor especially easy in an era where adults all work outside the home. the basic volunteer base that used to exist has been destroyed by the need for everyone to work outside the home just to keep their standard of living intact.
which leads us to bored's rule of thumb: everything you do in a campaign must achieve at least one of three things: identify, motivate, or mobilize. when you do things outside these three, a campaign is wasting its time.
Democratic 6th Congressional District candidate Tammy Duckworth said Wednesday the Iraq conflict is not part of the war on terror, taking the opposite view of President Bush and her Republican opponent.
"I absolutely do not agree that Iraq is part of the war on terror," said Duckworth, an Iraq war veteran, at a news conference in Oakbrook Terrace. "I think a very small percentage of what’s happening in Iraq is terrorist activity. I think most of it is sectarian violence. It’s Sunni fighting Shiites."
we've talked a lot about the changing electorate in IL 6 over the past year. one of the aspects that we've discussed has been the fact that people from the city of chicago where moving into the district and taking their democratic voting habits with them. for anyone who's canvassed in the 6th, at least before the primary, you could tell the difference between these new residents and the long-time democratic residents who were their neighbors. the new democrats assumed that there were others like them, and sort of expected to be contacted by democratic campaigns, while the old dems were likely to tell you that you wouldn't find another democrat on their block. plus, the old democrats were grateful to be contacted; the new dems not so much.
The number of foreign-born U.S. citizens jumped by nearly 38 percent in the suburbs over the last five years -- leaping almost 50 percent in DuPage County alone.
RATINGS CHANGE: IN-02 from Lean R to Toss-Up. Despite a significant fundraising advantage over Democrat Joe Donnelly, which has helped fuel a barrage of negative attack ads, incumbent GOP Rep. Chris Chocola looks more like an underdog than the frontrunner.
this race becomes the most likely democratic pick-up in the chicagoland area.
first in a series looking at local campaigns; per request, cross-posted at mydd
i'm not particularly a believer in (national) wave elections. they occur too infrequently and you cannot plan for them, hence i don't count on them.
as an old surfer, i easily identified rahm's electoral strategy: whip a bunch of campaigns into shape, and keep looking over his shoulder for that big wave to ride. this gamble now looks like it may be paying off.
a lot of what i call (democratic) official-dom here in illinois has been focused on IL 6th, but the duckworth-roskam race will only offer a hint of whether there is a true wave election undertoe. a better indicator to the strength of the national wave is IL 10th, with the race between dan seals and incumbent mark kirk.
under normal conditions, kirk should be a safe incumbent. kirk won 64% of the vote in 2004, pulling 174,158 votes to 97,701. but kerry won the district (53%), kirk's re-elect number has hovered around 50%, and the generic ballot test has increasingly favored a democrat. bush's popularity in the district has dived into the toilet with the rest of the country.
the key here is clearly to tie kirk to bush and the administration's failures.
so i always ask: what's wrong with democrats? why is it that people assume that democrats can't win with ideological candidates when republicans having been doing so successfully since 1978?
In response to last week's Supreme Court decision affirming Texas' mid-decade redistricting, Joe in DC over at AMERICAblog asks the question of whether the Democrats do the same thing where they can such as Illinois. Joe answers "of course not," citing our own Rahm Emanuel who noted ""I couldn't get enough fellow Democrats to see the benefits of that." It is our state, what do you think?
