Another election day has passed, another 16 hours on my feet, another day after in a state of collapse, and Mike Quigley has won the special election in the Illinois 5th Congressional District for the seat in Congress formerly held by Rahm Emanuel:
Democratic Cook County Commissioner Mike Quigley claimed victory tonight in the 5th District race to replace Rahm Emanuel in Congress.
With 94 percent of the Chicago and suburban Cook precincts reporting totals, Quigley was ahead with 70 percent of the vote over Republican Rosanna Pulido and Green Party candidate Matt Reichel.
Quigley told supporters at a North Side tavern that he knows he will initially be recognized in Washington as “the guy taking Rahm Emanuel’s seat,†but he promised to establish his own credentials, push for change and help tackle the nation’s problems. “We have our work cut out for us, but we’ll get it done, one day at a time,†he said.
Quigley, 50, essentially won the seat a month ago when he emerged from a field of a dozen Democrats in a special primary election where voter turnout was minimal.
He earned just 22 percent of the vote, but his strong name recognition from many high-profile battles in county government helped him bypass top competitors who had larger campaign funds and more union support.
The heavily Democratic district Quigley stands to inherit is an ethnically and culturally diverse territory that stretches from Lake Michigan to suburbs near O’Hare International Airport, encompassing blue-collar, bungalow-belt neighborhoods as well as more upscale Lincoln Park and Lakeview.
I voted for Quigley because I thought that of the three candidates running he was the one most likely to serve the district well. As I noted yesterday the turnout was abysmally low. In the precinct in which I served 15% of registered voters managed to drag themselves to the polls and most of those were policemen, firemen, and other city employees. Compare that to the 90% turnout we had for the general election.
What the Trib article quoted above fails to point out but the AP article on the election does is just how small a number of voters made the difference:
With 98 percent of precincts reporting, Quigley had 29,634, or nearly 70 percent of the vote. Pulido had 10,360 or 24 percent, and Reichel had 2,839 or nearly 7 percent.
That was roughly the outcome in the precinct in which I served, too. But look at that number! It means that if Rosanna Pulido had turned out another 20,000 voters district-wide, she could have won.
One gauge of just how supine the Republican Party is in the district, in Chicago, in Cook County, in Illinois, and, for all I know, in the entire nation is just how phlegmatic an effort the party put out on Pulido’s behalf. She could have one. I guarantee you that there were another 20 Republicans in the precinct in which I served and I suspect that 20 Republicans per precinct was all that would have been needed.
It’s ridiculous.
Dave — I think you are thinking in static terms here when a dynamic analysis is way more appropriate.
Let’s say that yesterday’s 15% is the “Vote no matter what the issue is” level. These voters barely need any GOTV of any sort to get them to the polls. And thus neither campaign spends any money to GOTV.
Now if a campaign wants to expand the voter universe by 30% to 40% they are going to have to start early if they want to be effective. They need to get the comparatively apathetic out to vote as their marginal voter now instead of the dedicated and hardcore activist as their current marginal voter. They’ll be starting early enough for those expenditures to show up on FEC disclosure forms. GOTV/Field expenditures are noticable by informed local political junkies.
For instance in Pittsburgh, if I saw a handful of individuals receive consulting or operations fees from a campaign, I could predict which neighborhoods a campaign is planning to hit hard with their field ops. If I was a campaign manager for a Republican campaign (I know the Dem field operatives WAY better) and saw that Individuals X, Y and K each received a $3,000 consulting fee 45 days out from the election, I know that I would be worried about an expanded voter universe as I know Individual X can turn out Shadyside, Individual Y has had demonstrated success of getting marginal Republicans to vote Democratic and Individual K has repeatedly created massive margins in Aspinwall and Millvale. So my countermeasure would be to expand my voter universe by devoting resources to my own GOTV campaign to get my more marginal voters out to the polls.