Illinois should have gone differently
The loss of a senate seat in Illinois is almost the Democrats' equivalent of
GOPers nominating Christine
O'Donnell in Delaware, Ken
Buck in Colorado, and Sharron
Angle in Nevada, and Carl Paladino
for governor of New York.
The parallel is not precise. With all his liabilities as a candidate, Alexi Giannoulias is still not one of the fruitcake ingredients. In some ways his story is simple: he is basically just one in a long string of youngish up-and-comers of whatever political party, endowed with some good connections and promoted at some political juncture by a small group of people complacently betting on the wrong horse. Not much mystery there.
Nonetheless, Giannoulias is a particular irritant. The Illinois senate seat is an outstanding example, perhaps the outstanding example, of a loss Dems did not have to suffer in 2010, a gratuitous loss snatched from the jaws of victory.
There are times when some good finger-pointing is needed.
First, a little of the backstory, as they say in screenwriting:
In 2007, the Illinois primary became one of the earliest in the nation--moved up to the first Tuesday in February. This scheduling was not just a jostling to be one of the first states on the campaign calendar; it was intended to help then-Sen. Barack Obama win the nomination. Prognosticators wildly underestimated Obama and his campaign, and exactly how much the date of the Illinois primary contributed to Obama's win is debatable, but the motive was widely known. In 2010--after the primary that nominated Giannoulias and Republican Mark Kirk--the Illinois primary was moved back to March.
Illinois' 2010 primaries were something of a fiasco all around, with winter weather and the lowest voter turnout in history. Nominees included the Dems' pick for Lieutenant Governor, a pawnbroker with a questionable background, Scott Lee Cohen. But the problem is broader than just Illinois. One of the unreported truths about primaries is that some states time them so as to discourage voter turnout. In scheduling elections, there are three main ways to maximize disengagement and to discourage the will of the people: You can close the polls as early as possible, to give working people who want to vote after work the hardest possible time; you can schedule your primary elections during a month when you know turnout will be lower; and you can prevent or refuse to pass legislation for early voting.
All three tactics are in heavy use in states where the GOP is dominant:
- Polls close at 6:00 p.m. in Indiana and Kentucky; at 7:00 p.m. in Vermont, Virginia and South Carolina; and at 7:30 p.m. in North Carolina, Ohio and West Virginia. Midday voting is done largely by retired people and by people who can leave work or who otherwise have flexible schedules; note that almost all of these states went disastrously in 2010 elections. The notable exception, Vermont, has solid policies in place for voting by absentee or early ballot.
- The primary calendar for 2010 shows Illinois (Feb. 2) and Texas (Mar. 2, run-off Apr. 13) leading off the pack with primary elections scheduled before the campaign season fully reveals voters' needs. Idaho schedules its primary in late May, approaching Memorial Day; Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, Washington and Wyoming hold theirs in August, when as many people as possible will be out of town. Of these states, Connecticut, Colorado and Washington have voter-friendly absentee voting. Louisiana has early voting, accessible to anyone who can navigate the website, but early voting is also in August.
- Two-thirds of the states offer some form of early voting. States that do not permit early voting include Alabama, Connecticut, Delaware, and Kentucky; Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, and Missouri; New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island; and South Carolina, Virginia and Washington. Some of these states have, as mentioned, voter-friendly absentee voting. Several of them at least hold their primaries during election season--in fall, a reasonable period before the general election.
Just for fun: among the rest, try off the top of your head to think of an example of a state where there was not a disastrous outcome in one or the other party, in either the primary or the general election, in 2010.
To be continued
