Yesterday, Booman mentioned being concerned about last night’s results possibly being impacted by the post-Citizens United flow of money into local politics. And while overall yesterday was a good day for Democrats and the left, the impact of such money on local races in my area, Seattle and Washington state, was beyond question significant and worrisome.
For the last several months, I’ve been on staff for a well-qualified woman challenging an incumbent for a seat on Seattle City Council. I had a chance to watch the process up close. Seattle elects all of its nine council members at large, meaning that voters are drawn from a city of 625,000 – a more populous jurisdiction than a Congressional district. There’s simply too many eligible voters for doorbelling to reach most of them. The only ways to reach most voters (outside the pathetic local media coverage such downticket races receive) are yard signs, posters, phone banks, robocalls, direct mail, and ads (buses, billboard, Internet, radio, and especially TV – which ain’t cheap in a top 15 market.) All of these cost money, usually a lot of it. The conventional wisdom heading into this year was that a challenger needed to raise at least $100,000 to have a credible campaign, and well over $200,000 to have a good shot at winning.
Fundraising is the lifeblood of a campaign like that. People working on the various campaign locally noticed two things about fundraising this year: individual contributions were down (not surprising, given the economy), and corporate contributions were way, way up. City politics in Seattle is ostensibly non-partisan, but in practice anyone with a shot at getting elected is a socially liberal, business-friendly Democrat; there’s very little ideological diversity on city council. The divisions are mainly among identity groups – race, ethnicity, immigrants, GLBTQ – and between downtown business elites and, well, everyone else. The downtown business elites generally call the shots, but every now and then they and their favored elected officials get swept out by a revolt of the neighborhoods.
2011 had the potential to be one of those years. The business guys had just pushed through an unpopular, staggeringly expensive new freeway tunnel project under downtown (think “The Big Dig” in geologically unstable soil), the latest in a succession of big, pricy downtown vanity projects while basic services continue to be cut. Parents were in open revolt over a school district and school board that had finally (and reluctantly) fired another scandal-plagued superintendent last year. On top of it, the local economy sucks.
The public mood seemed sour. But that was no match for money. One school board race is still too close to call. In every other county council, city council, and city school board race, the incumbents won, usually comfortably.
My candidate didn’t run a particularly good race; she’s well-qualified, personable, articulate, energetic, and photogenic, but she only raised $65,000, and that just didn’t cut it. Her opponent, a downtown favorite who was originally appointed to fill a vacant seat specifically because she promised not to rock the boat (and she hasn’t), started with over $100,000 carried over from previous years, had another $100,000 in hand by the primary, and finished (so far – the final reports aren’t in yet) with about $250,000, mostly raised from a who’s who of corporate Seattle, including Boeing, Microsoft, Amazon, and a host of lesser-known developers and other local movers and shakers.
Three of the other four incumbents did even better on the money front; one topped $300,000. There’s a pretty direct correlation between amount of money raised and margin of victory, with one exception – the only close race of that night.
Jean Godden is a two-term, 80-year-old incumbent who has enjoyed a second career on city council after over 30 high-profile years as – I shit you not – a gossip columnist for the city’s daily newspapers. (Think Herb Caen without talent.) She leveraged her universal name recognition and a lifetime of writing flattering things about the powerful people she saw at parties into a golden retirement present of a council seat in 2003.
There was only one tiny problem: Godden was and is terrible at her current job. She came in utterly clueless about civic issues (I sat on editorial boards that interviewed her, twice, and was staggered by her lack of knowledge or curiosity), and hasn’t gotten any better over eight years. She’s notorious among colleagues for not doing her homework, not knowing what was going on, falling asleep in meetings (including committee meetings she chairs), and not being a particularly robust 80-year-old health-wise. It’s open knowledge in local political circles that Godden has been a disaster, and, sensing she was vulnerable, people lined up to challenge her this year.
She won last night with 54 percent of the vote.
Surprisingly for an incumbent in Seattle, Godden missed out on a lot of endorsements from Democratic Party and civic groups – a reflection of her job performance. Those went to the challenger who advanced from the primary, Bobby Forch. Forch also picked up support from some downtown types hedging their bets. But most stayed with Godden, and her massive fundraising advantage (and the loyalty of her former colleagues in local media) carried the day. Godden raised $258,000; Forch, just under $100,000. With Godden already having a massive name recognition advantage, the extra deluges of ads and direct mail did the trick. (The photo of a terrified-looking Godden supposedly rowing a kayak to demonstrate her nonexistent environmental credentials is an instant classic.) Money, most of it corporate money – Godden is a reliable vote for one percenters – was the difference.
The school board races were an even starker study in the impact of money. Four reviled incumbents of a beleaguered, scandal-rocked urban school district up for citywide reelection. Four races where the incumbents got massive, mostly business support. Three wins and a pending, possible fourth for the incumbents.
Yesterday’s statewide initiatives in Washington state were also a sobering reinforcement of the local trend in recent years. There were three, and each was backed by a single deep-pocketed institution. One, an SEIU-backed measure on home health care workers that passed once in 2008 but was defunded by the state legislature, passed again easily. The other two were more ominous. A pro-car developer in suburban Bellevue singlehandedly bankrolled a measure against tolling highways that would have blocked expansion of Seattle’s light rail and jeopardized funding for all sorts of bridge and highway improvements. It looks like that will fail – narrowly. And then there was I-1183.
Last year, the discount retail chain Costco (which is based in Seattle) spent over $10 million on a statewide initiative to dismantle the state liquor store monopoly and privatize hard liquor sales. It was a purely self-interested corporate initiative, and it went down to defeat. So Costco tried again this year, but they did two important things differently.
First, they defused opponents’ fears of hard liquor in every corner market and gas station by specifying that it could only be sold in retail stores of over 15,000 square feet – in other words, they gave themselves even more of a new monopoly. And this time they spent closer to $25 million. You couldn’t watch TV for the last three months without being bombarded by their ads.
I-1183 passed this time. Easily.
Most people aren’t political junkies. They pay attention, if at all, to the front page of newspapers and the first two minutes of a newscast. They have opinions about presidents and maybe governors and senators, but usually not about city council members or state legislators. In those races, reaching such low-information voters takes money, and money usually correlates pretty directly to success.
What we saw this year was more overall money raised. The more striking change, though, was that fundraising for non-incumbent candidates without good corporate connections (like my candidate) was much harder than it has been before. And institutional fundraising for demonstrably corporate-friendly measures or candidates got easier.
I’d have to do some more number crunching to figure out whether more companies are donating, average donations are up, or both. But the consequences for local elections like ours are pretty clear. In the future, under the new status quo for our local races, it’s going to be much harder to challenge an incumbent; it’s going to be much harder to win with a progressive campaign and message; and it’s going to be much harder to win with a volunteer-fueled, populist campaign. The political implications are pretty obvious.
This is an excellent after-action report on the current situation in local elections.
Either as a comment or another diary, could you describe why it is that neighborhoods have not worked to get either a ward system or a ward-and-at-large system for city council. Or why it is that such efforts failed.
And how anti-establishment candidates get known to the various groups that they don’t normally deal with.
It seems to me that most of the campaign work has to do with validating that someone is indeed running instead of introducing them to the public eye. (Well that part of the public that actually pays attention to local politics and votes.)
Also, how do you figure out how to piece together a strategy that tells you where the requisite number of votes to win (which I suspect is much less than the nominal total voter base) are going to come from.
There have been two recent attempts, in (from memory) about 1998 and 2005, to pass initiatives for a mixed system of districts and at-large seats. Both failed narrowly due primarily to, ironically enough, fundraising scandals on the “yes” side – both times, if memory serves, from Republican operatives who have an obvious interest in trying to craft a more affluent district in an 85% Democratic city. I know of at least two groups that are thinking of taking another shot at a similar initiative in the next year or two.
As far as targeting voters, it’s pretty standard stuff. Both the Democrats and Republicans (and their consultants) have access to pretty sophisticated precinct-level databases that have voter contact info and breakouts crosstabbed with voting frequency history and census demographic and income data. In nonpartisan races, any candidate or consultant who is a party member can pay to get access to those databases. Any serious campaign can afford consultants who can then develop a pretty targeted outreach plan based on that information, for advertising, phone calling, direct mail, and doorbelling purposes.
Forgot that one.
It’s mostly just a lot of work – an endless succession of community forums to attend and questionnaires to fill out from neighborhood and interest groups. One of my primary jobs the last several months has been to draft responses to arcane questions on endorsement questionnaires from groups like houseboat owners (“What’s your position on the proposed new Coast Guard requirements regarding gray water disposal on house barges?”) to transit riders to co-housing trade groups. It’s actually a great crash course in exactly the sort of arcana that dominates most local legislative agendas, but it’s also an essential tool for showing you’re a serious candidate who does her/his homework and listens to constituent concerns – especially if the incumbent hasn’t done so.
Those folks are generally opinion-setters, so you’re then relying on word of mouth (through endorsements or personal contact) that will, hopefully, reinforce your existing outreach efforts. But it ain’t easy, especially since for our primary, which is in the middle of summer. In these parts, the weather is mostly gray eight months a year, but the summers are generally glorious, the parks, mountains, and beaches beckon, and nobody wants to think about local politics.
Thanks for the clear explanation. It looks like a sustained progressive group strategy over several election cycles is required. This is not something that can be done by paid consultants, and it is long-term and consequently difficult for volunteers to retain interest in the work required to make it happen.
The Occupy Wall Street framing is that the problem is that money trumps the interest of constituents. That ties a lot of disparate issues together. It also forms a basis for a broad grassroots coalition. How does dealing with how money has corrupted local politics become a more persistent long-term project?
I raise this question because the situation in Seattle seems to reflect a common situation across the country.
Interesting isn’t it that the rebuilding of the progressive movement comes back around to the motivating issue of the 20th century progressive movement — corruption in local government.
great diary, thorough and informative, thanks!
That’s really brilliant of CostCo. We have a state liquor store system in PA, Wine and Liquor are only available at these Stalinist stores that vary widely in terms of quality. Most of them are closed on Sunday. If you want beer at a normal price, you have to buy it by the case at a licensed beer distributor. If you just a six pack, you can get that at restaurants and bars at a ridiculous markup.
Since the Tavern-owners make a killing selling six-packs, they love the system. Their lobbying group has teamed up for decades with the temperance folks to keep the Stalinist system in place.
Probably some lives are saved by making alcohol consumption more challenging and annoying than fun, but it about the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen a state government do.
The current Republican governor wants to get rid of the state stores, which I obviously support. The problem is that they create a lot of revenue which will need to be replaced somehow. And guess what Republicans won’t do?
That was the crux of the privatization argument here – proponents argued that the state would save money (by not having to operate the liquor store system) – although they didn’t explain how, if the state system was losing money, why Costco was anxious to spend so much to get the right to sell the same product unless they plan to massively increase either prices or sales, or both; and if the state wasn’t losing money, where that revenue loss would be replaced. Something didn’t add up. We’ll find out.
There were also two ancillary issues: the loss of union-wage jobs, and the dismantling of the most logical distribution system if, as many people expect, a marijuana legalization initiative (that’s already up and running with a lot of heavy hitters and widespread polling showing public support) passes in 2012.
Though Booman makes an interesting point, Penn State is a little different than Washington as you’re already aware. Beer and wine are already mass-profit product centers in major grocery stores (a full aisle) and every gas station with a stop and go mini market. The only thing not on the shelves is the hard stuff. Seeing as Costco also has the B & W and has carried it since the store’s inception in Washington, I tend to agree with your assessments that the big money is reaching elsewhere: higher prices; the dismantling of union jobs (even though Costco is, I believe, a union operation); and the creation of 100,000 Mary Jane R Us mom and pop operations – until, of course, “Wal-Mart’s Costco Gold” kills the competition. 🙂
As someone who has lived most of his life in Seattle and is old enough to remember Dorm Brahman and the SPD Gambling crisis, I want to thank you for your excellent diary and explanation of Seattle politics.
I also lived in SF for a few years during the early 70’s. And I often thought how weird it looked to see all four walls of a tiny downtown corner store at Geary and Larkin displaying Jim Beam, Johnny Walker and their many, many cousins. It was like a foreign country to someone from a blue law state. But I also spent my pre-digital-age time reading the Chronicle and the Examiner. So “Think Herb Caen without talent.” is both incredibly astute and deliciously funny. I’m still laughing.
Interesting and challenging post, thanks