Votes are What Count; Know Where They Are
Asked by a staff person of the Wisconsin Counties Association how I was elected chair of the 14-member county board at the same meeting I was sworn in for my first term, my answer was somewhat provocative, but simple, “I can count to eight.”
The fundamental questions for every serious campaign and organizer are: Who gets to vote? How many votes does it take to win? Where are my most likely voters? You add them one by one. Everything else is distraction.
People in a neighboring county who had organized to persuade the county board to place a referendum on the ballot in the next election came to me for advice several years ago the night before their request was to be heard by a board committee. I asked: What committee? Who are the members? How many votes are needed? They didn’t know. Intent on how best to make the case for their issue, they hadn’t given thought to the essential step of getting the necessary votes.
When I was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention, one of our tasks was to elect six people to serve as members of the Democratic National Committee. The vote kept getting postponed as leaders of the various factions in the delegation tried to reach agreement on a consensus slate. In the meantime, one person who wanted the job walked around asking individual delegates, “Will you vote for me?” By adding votes one by one, he won, quite easily, despite not being included later on the “agreed” list.
When it came to controversial legislation the Democratic leader in the Illinois House when I was a member always knew where the votes were. The state income tax was a deal between the Republican Governor and the Democratic Mayor of Chicago. The deal included the number of votes to be supplied by each party. Our leader knew precisely how each member was going to vote and had established a sequence in which he wanted us to vote. He made sure that as many members as possible who might be hurt in their district by a yes vote could vote no. The vote passed by one more vote than necessary when at the last second a suburban Democrat switched from no to yes, deciding to vote his belief rather than his district. The leader was angry, not because the member switched, but because he hadn’t told him in time to allow another member to switch from yes to a safer no. For the leader, always thinking ahead, there were future votes to plan for.
Strategy always comes down to how to add a vote. Legislative leaders at every level know how many votes are needed for control and where the most likely places are to get them. In Wisconsin, they know that it takes seventeen votes in the Senate and fifty votes in the Assembly. They know in which districts they should concentrate their resources to maximize their chances of winning those seats. The numbers drive their strategy.
This is often not the case with voters at the local level. At a forum on education funding hosted by the local school board, members of the public clearly frustrated with the political process and their inability to achieve what they wanted, were in a “let’s have term limits for our state legislators, throw everyone out and start over” frame of mind—not thinking that they already had fifteen votes in the Senate, that they needed to keep those fifteen and figure out where and how they were going to get the other two. Throwing everyone out and starting over isn’t a strategy that gets you closer to 17.
Winning campaigns are based on an accurate understanding of where the potential winning votes are and a specific plan to get them. The most ambitious example I think of is Dan Walker’s Democratic primary campaign for Governor of Illinois. He was relatively unknown and was challenging a popular Lieutenant Governor who had the endorsement of the Party and the support of Mayor Daley and his Chicago machine. The Walker campaign looked at the history of primary votes and concluded that all of the normal primary vote would go to the Lieutenant Governor. Their only chance of winning was to double the normal turnout. That became their goal. Everything they did, all their strategy, was centered on motivating new primary voters and doubling turnout. They succeeded. Turnout did double and they won by a few thousand votes.
That election taught me that you don’t plan a campaign based just on voters who vote regularly. Turnout is a variable that can be influenced and new voters of whatever age can provide the margin of victory. The trick is to know where they are.
This next week is the deadline for Wisconsin legislative and congressional candidates to file their nomination papers to be included on the ballot for the August primary. The first step in putting together a campaign plan is knowing the ward by ward voting history of the district and where lies your opponent’s voting strength. In Kathleen’s three races for the State Senate, she had three different opponents, three different strategies for winning, three different sets of wards she focused on. The chance of success improves when the campaign is tailored to the district, the candidate, and the year.
It is easier to find the votes you need to win, if you know where to look.
Douglas Kane is the author of "Our Politics: Reflections on Political Life" published in 2019 by Southern Illinois University Press
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