1. Advertising works -- but only when there's enough of it. Conventional wisdom held that Supreme Court Justice Mary Jane Theis's decades of judicial experience might not matter in light of Appellate Court Justice Aurelia Pucinski's name recognition.
So Justice Theis raised money, and lots of it, and bought time on every evening TV newscast. I usually watch the news at 9:00 and 10:00 -- so I, for one, was doubly grateful when Justice Theis premiered a new commercial in the waning days of the campaign.
Theis's margin of victory over Pucinski and Appellate Court Justice Joy V. Cunningham suggests that the ad buys were a vital component of her victory strategy.
The advertising employed by Judge Kevin W. Horan and Associate Judge Joan Marie Kubalanza, though noteworthy (and, in my opinion, pretty darn cool), was not nearly as successful.Jane Lynch, star of the Fox-TV show Glee, made a commercial for Judge Horan; "Da Coach" himself, the Right Hon. Mike Ditka, made a commercial for Judge Kubalanza. These were not 'paid celebrity endorsements.' As the very nice write-up in the Sun-Times (now off-line) explained, there were personal or family connections in both cases.
But the airwaves were not saturated with either Ms. Lynch or "Da Coach." I can recall hearing Judge Horan's commercial only once. I heard Judge Kubalanza's only a couple of times, both times on a Sunday morning on WBBM-AM. The cost of weekend radio airtime is lower than TV airtime on the flagship newscasts of Channels 5 or 9 -- but the audience is smaller, too.Without constant... constant... constant repetition, even clever commercials fail to penetrate the public consciousness.
2. Turnout is all important. A total of 311,002 voters came to the polls in the City of Chicago on March 20 (311,002 out of 1,288,293 registered voters). In the Cook County suburbs, 329,193 voters came out (of 1,394,649 registered voters). Thus, of 2,682,942 registered voters in Cook County as a whole, only 640,196 – 23.9% of us – participated in the primary election.
Most Cook County voters – 436,899 if you're counting – took Democratic primary ballots. Columnist Russ Stewart correctly predicted a Democratic primary turnout of "less than 500,000, with fewer than 150,000 blacks voting, fewer than 50,000 Hispanics, and about 300,000 whites. That means that a majority of the turnout will be 'controlled' voters." Stewart defined "controlled" voters as "quid pro quo voters who have a personal interest in the outcome. Either they or a family member have a government job, or they need to pay back a precinct captain or politician for some favor, or they're ambitious and want to curry favor. Reciprocity is the name of the game. Controlled voters number about 350,000 countywide."
Whether one accepts this definition or not, the conventional wisdom is that low turnout elections are best for slated candidates.
That principle certainly held up in this election: There were 27 contested judicial elections on the March 20 Democratic primary ballot. I was able to verify slating in 24 of them. (There was no slated candidate for the Cole vacancy in the 8th Subcircuit; although I could make an educated guess, I don’t know for certain who the slated candidates were in contested 7th Subcircuit races.) There were three countywide Circuit Court elections in which the party-slated candidates did not prevail.
Of those three countywide races where the party-slated candidate did not prevail, two were won by women with Irish surnames (one of them a Filipino-American); the other was won by a woman with an English surname. In that last race, the second most crowded field among the countywide races, there were three sitting judges to divide up the vote (Judge Kubalanza was one of these). While Elizabeth Mary Hayes, the victor in that race, was rated "Qualified" by only the Asian American Bar Association, the Hispanic Lawyers Association of Illinois, and the Puerto Rican Bar Association, the other two non-slated winners, Karen Lynn O'Malley and Jessica A. O'Brien, were rated Qualified or Recommended by the Chicago Bar Association and every one of the 11 Alliance bar associations.
But those are details. The big picture is that, despite these three losses in countywide Circuit Court races, candidates slated by the Cook County Democratic Party won 20 of the 24 elections in which I could determine slating. (The other race in which the slated candidate failed to prevail was in the 9th Subcircuit - Epstein vacancy.) In this year's small-turnout race, slated candidates won 83% of the time.
Posts
4 comments:
The notion of “controlled voters” in anything near those kinds of numbers is completely unrealistic. The value of party slating in judicial contests over the years is nowhere near high enough to support the idea that hundreds of thousands of people are trying to curry favor or otherwise fervently support a party. Not even close.
Also, remember that turnout was also low in our previous primary, in 2010, and yet the value of slating in the judicial contests was shockingly low—less than 30,000 votes countywide. If voters don’t like what they see at the top of the ticket, or if the electorate is in an angry mood, the slate will suffer for it. Again, rebutting the notion of hundreds of thousands of “controlled voters.”
Will have some statistical analysis of the 2012 results for you next week.
Here's a few observations on your piece. I generally agree with your conclusions, especially if we can loosely interpret Russ Stewart's term "controlled voters" to "influenced voters," a less antiquated view of voting for judicial candidates to get garbage cans or jobs. In some subcircuits, the Tribune was much more influential than party slating.
In the 8th, all 3 contested races were won by the candidate endorsed by the Trib. This isn't coincidental - Trib endorsements are always a big factor in the Lakefront, even more so given the decline (entropy?) of IVI-IPO. So when the turnout is this bad, a higher % of folks clutching the Trib list will be more decisive; when people are more motivated to vote on other races, and then see a dozen judicial races populated by people they've never heard of, the more typical patterns of ethnic/gender preferences are more decisive.
For example, staying in the 8th, in prior years Celia Gamrath's win would be attributed to being the only female against 3 men. Harder to rely on that when the same subcircuit failed to elect Lainie Berger as the only female against 5 men. Attributable to "watering down" the Jewish ethnic vote with 3 other apparently Jewish candidates? Hard to make that case given James Shapiro's loss as the only apparently Jewish candidate (Osran is also Jewish, but nobody knew) against 3 apparently non-Jewish candidates.
As to the party slating influence on the Lakefront, setting aside the traditionally prickly independence in much of that turf, my observations working the Senn HS precinct gave me no reason to suspect the party endorsements of Judges Gubin or Gamrath were attributable to their wins. In fact, the 48th Ward palm card (for the entire slate) was augmented by a separate card for Judge Kaplan, endorsed in 48. No apparent effect on his totals in the 48th Ward, very comparable to his overall totals elsewhere in the District. But the Trib endorsement of Ehrlich was just as decisive in 48.
Compare the 2 races in the 9th Subcircuit with the 3 races in 8. The Tribune endorsements of Judges Bender & Trew failed to prevent either from losing decisively (Bender approx 60/40; Trew finished 3d - both had top ballot line). The difference in 9 is the wide gap between the effectiveness of the Dem Party of Evanston and anything else in the district. But we're not talking about city jobs, precinct captain favors, etc. in either 8 or 9. Although Abbey Romanek was the "slated" candidate in the Epstein vacancy, her repeated failure to keep the Evanston coalition together led to defeat by Evanstonians Kull (2010) & Axelrood (2012) who derived significant support from Evanston political figures.
Advertising: Jack, obviously you weren't listening to much sports radio. The Kubalanza Ditka ads and non-Ditka-centric ads for Appellate Court candidate James McGing were running in heavy rotation on WSCR mornings for 2 weeks before the primary. If radio/TV advertising is as effective as suggested, it should have worked for candidates other than Justice Theis. McGing's radio ads were superb. I suspect the mountain of Personal Pac mailings suggesting "right to choose" may be at risk if Theis lost had an impact, but since the combination of Trib & slating worked all over Countywide races, it would have worked just as well for Justice Theis without TV ads.
At the end of the day, it's all about the pitifully low turnout, allowing the "influenced voters" to be more decisive than the norm.
"Controlled" probably is too strong a word -- especially because, in this post-Shakman world, no one would ever take heat at their City job for not even bothering to vote, right? And everyone votes in primaries because people realize it is one of the few civic duties we all have, right? And then I wake up.
Whether 'controlled' or 'influenced,' the few actual voters on the 20th had an apparent sense of purpose: They came out to vote for specific people. Avy Meyers said there was unusually little dropoff between the total number of votes cast and the votes cast in judicial races, suggesting that most people came into the polling place with an intent to vote for judges.
Albert, this should minimize the effect of being first on the ballot -- right? After all, two of the three countywide slated candidates who did not win were first on the ballot. And, Michael, perhaps the Tribune endorsement was stronger in the 8th Subcircuit Cole vacancy because there was no slated candidate in that race?
My guess is that the 'bump' for Irish surnames & first ballot lines increases proportionate to turnout, while the 'bump' for slating decreases as turnout increases. (Albert, did that sound at least a little mathematical?)
Michael, you said Judge Kaplan was on the palm cards in 48 -- well, he did finish second in that ward (to Ehrlich), and while that was only his third highest percentage vote, he got his second highest number of votes in 48.
I plan to talk about palm cards in my next post.
But, meanwhile, Michael, on advertising you're right: I don't generally listen to sports radio except when I drive -- and I usually take the train. I did hear Judge McGing's commercials -- and also quite a few for Brigid Mary Hayes -- and Jesse White's commercials for Justice Cunningham -- but I think the radio audience is just too fractured for campaign commercials to have an impact. I suspect the audience (and the pool of likely primary voters) is much larger for the TV newscasts -- even in this age of 500 cable channels.
I really appreciate both of your perceptive comments.
Goodness, so much to deal with here. Will send you stuff next week in pieces and you can post whatever you like.
Generally speaking, you'd expect that certain things would change predictably with changes in turnout. But these tend to be smaller, more incremental shifts and are not always clearly seen in the results. Larger characteristics that are unique to each primary (things the math doesn't handle as well) can overwhelm them.
Post a Comment