MILLER: Illinois Dems look to impact more down ballot races

Last year, the Democratic Party of Illinois and Gov. JB Pritzker targeted local school board races to defeat candidates who wanted to ban books and/or were receiving support from right-wing political organizations. The governor ended up claiming victory in more than 70 percent of those campaigns.

The push was unusual because the state’s Democratic Party, like the state Republican Party, had for years been solely focused on processing direct mail for mainly legislative candidates so that those candidates could receive a discount on postage. The total federal discount every year was usually enough to finance mailers for at least one and maybe two additional campaigns.

But when the governor effectively took over the Democratic Party two years ago by electing a new chair, he promised to focus lots more on down-ballot races. Last year’s school board contests, which cost the party about $300,000, were the first visible signs that the party was moving in a new direction.

This year, the state party claims it is pushing 80 county-wide and county board candidates in 19 counties where they think they can flip seats to their side. It’s not known how much the party intends to spend on those races, but since June 30th, DPI has raised more than a million dollars above and beyond the $5.5 million it’s taken in from legislative leaders for direct mail. And about half that million bucks came from the governor.

The idea is not just to get supporters to the polls, but to encourage voters to cast votes in down-ticket races. “It’s a drop-off prevention program,” a party official, who asked not to be named, told me.

Lots of people will vote for the presidential candidate of their choice and some other hot races, but tend to drop off and not vote in as large numbers for lesser-known candidates for, say, county board, or even countywide offices.

The county candidates the Democratic Party is backing are in Bureau, Champaign, DeKalb, DuPage, Kane, Kankakee, Kendall, Lake, LaSalle, Macon, Madison, McHenry, McLean, Peoria, Rock Island, St. Clair, Sangamon, Will and Winnebago counties. Several of those counties also have contested legislative and congressional races, and party leaders say they will help coordinate another targeted 35 state legislative and congressional campaigns with any county efforts in those areas.

The plan is to shore up specific vulnerable local Democrats who may need protection as well as go hard in “partisanship transitional districts where we think we can flip some seats,” I was told.

The party has hired year-round staffers to help with this effort, “which means we’ve been able to attract some pretty serious and expert campaign folks,” the DPI official claimed. They’re supplying communications services to candidates, including pushing any opposition research to local news media outlets. They’ve also hired eight field organizers, have four regional directors, and have “onboarded four campus fellows” in university towns, who are all recruiting and supervising precinct volunteers.

“We’ve actually been successful at mitigating a good deal of redundancy in each of these regions where you might have a House caucus candidate knocking the same door as a Senate caucus candidate on the same day. Or a targeted county board district calling through a phone list that a state Senate candidate is calling through that same day,” said the party official. “Rather than trying to sprinkle new volunteer shifts across 10 different events and support 10 different candidates, we’re able to group those folks together into coordinated walks and phone banks.”

In addition, the party is organizing car caravans and renting buses to send volunteers to swing states like Wisconsin and Michigan.

But is that out of state effort undermining the county race focus? “No, not really,” I was told. “A lot of the energy we’ve seen directed toward Wisconsin and Michigan has come out of parts of our state where there aren’t targeted races.” And for those who want to volunteer out of state where they have local targeted races, the party is actively trying to convince them to stay in their neighborhoods.

The Democratic Party has a billionaire governor and cash-rich labor unions to fill its coffers.

The Illinois Republican Party, on the other hand, no longer has a reliable cadre of wealthy party members to help fund campaigns. They’ve mostly retired, moved to year-round-golfing areas or, sadly, passed away. So, it’s not surprising that almost all of the money the state GOP has taken in since the end of June will be redirected into the traditional mail program.

Rich Miller also publishes Capitol Fax, a daily political newsletter, and CapitolFax.com.