Poll position, ballot bribes, and dirty dollars
Can anyone referee the crazy game of Chicago politics?
Politics is often described as a sport. The metaphor is appropriate, I suppose. Politics is highly competitive. There are rules that need to be followed. And there are professionals who have strategies about how to stretch the boundaries of those rules to create a competitive advantage for their team. But, one thing that is missing from the “sport” of politics: the referee, that person who pulls the combatants to the middle of the ring says, “Remember, we want a good, clean fight!”
You may have heard that newly re-elected Congressman Chuy Garcia is the “frontrunner” in the contest for mayor of Chicago. This widely-reported view is the outcome of an opinion survey conducted Nov. 10 to Nov. 17 by Impact Research, a consulting firm with deep connections to establishment Democrats. But what if I told you that the poll, which also showed incumbent mayor Lori Lightfoot with 18 percent support, followed by former schools CEO Paul Vallas at 14 percent, was only one of the many games that campaigns play in the rough and tumble of intensely competitive elections?
One of the overlooked details of this news report is that the poll was commissioned by the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 150, a union that previously endorsed Garcia and has committed $1 million to his campaign. When campaigns and their supporters release polls early in election cycles, it is important that reporters and other members of the interested public try to get a look at the entire poll, not just outcome information that the campaigns release. Often, the way the questions are asked in the poll can tell you a lot about the way respondents answered. The best political pollsters know just how to shape a survey in order to drive a narrative that will be beneficial to their client.
We don’t know for sure that this is the kind of poll that Garcia’s people put into the field. But the outcomes are extremely convenient, and without the release of the full poll, we can’t know for sure what kind of survey was conducted.
Games.
You probably read or saw on the news that former State Senator Rickey Hendon was secretly recorded on a phone call allegedly attempting to bribe Kevin Hobby to drop his challenge to nomination petitions filed by mayoral candidate and Hendon client Willie Wilson. Of course, Hendon denies any wrongdoing. Wilson, a Chicago businessman and philanthropist, released a statement saying that he “does not condone bribes.” But the nature of the call is undeniable. And while an audio recording of that kind of political gamesmanship is certainly newsworthy, it would be a mistake to assume that this kind of behavior is uncommon.
Many, if not most, of the successful campaigns in this city spend significant amounts of money in the petition gathering and challenge processes. Campaigns pay teams of mostly low-income workers by the signature to go out and collect the thousands of signatures needed to qualify for the ballot. It is considered best practice to collect and file two to three times the number of signatures required to qualify for the ballot in order to deter or defeat a petition challenge. That’s because after nominating packets are filed, armies of paid workers flood into the Board of Election headquarters to comb through the petitions of rival candidates line-by-line with the goal of invalidating signatures based upon a number of allowable technicalities.
The large number of signatures needed to qualify, the inflated market at the grassroots, the professional legal services needed to help navigate the complex process and the regularity of Hendon-style “extracurricular activity” ensure that a system that is supposed to ensure a basic level of support for candidates before their name is certified to the ballot becomes a test of financial capacity instead. It gives an edge to the wealthy and well-connected over true grassroots candidates.
Games.
The money spent on making the ballot does not begin to approximate what candidates actually need to spend to get elected. Talk to anyone who has run for public office and they will tell you that one of the most important – and most difficult – parts of the process is raising the surprisingly large amount of money required to be successful. To put things into perspective, the 2019 mayoral race saw the top five candidates spend $6.9 million, $5.8 million, $4.4 million, $3.1 million, and $2.9 million, respectively. The average spending on an aldermanic race last cycle was more than $177,000.
The need to spend that kind of money on everything from campaign staff to television ads is no doubt the reason candidates do practically anything they can to raise support. Mayor Lightfoot’s supporters recently established an independent expenditure committee that seems designed to help the incumbent skirt campaign finance rules and take money from developers who do work with the city. She has also traveled as far as California to raise money from ideological supporters, who will likely not be directly impacted by the day-to-day decision making in Chicago’s City Hall. The mayor is on record cheerleading for the recently disgraced cryptocurrency billionaire, Sam Bankmon-Fried. SBF has also contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to support Chuy Garcia.
Games.
In sports, we keep the game fair by making the rules public and having an impartial arbiter of those rules, the referee. Perhaps there was a time when a robust, free press could be counted on to fulfill this role. But the media today is increasingly captured by various ideologies. News outlets are stretched by a lack of resources. And too many in the fourth estate seem more interested in access to powerful people than accountability for them.
If we want a fair election, it may well fall to the broader community, to clergy and community leaders to call balls and strikes, and insert ourselves into the action when things get out of hand. It’s up to us to pay attention, to keep our people informed, and to demand accountability for violations of the rules and norms. We’re headed into the holidays and after the first of the year, this campaign is really going to heat up. Now would be a great time for us to remind the candidates who are contending to serve this city for the next four years that we want a good, clean fight.