Building from the base

The winner of the Democratic U.S. Senate primary will have to grab the biggest coalition of disparate interests

by Eric Krol

To grasp the lay of the land in the Democratic U.S. Senate primary, it’s helpful to see how political support is lining up in Chicago’s gay and lesbian community.

Illinois Comptroller Dan Hynes is supported by gay officeholders with establishment ties, such as state Rep. Larry McKeon and 44th Ward Alderman Tom Tunney.

Former Chicago Public Schools Board President Gery Chico has the backing of gay Latinos, including Rick Garcia, who is political director of Equality Illinois, the state’s gay lobby, because they share ethnicity and Chico came calling early.

State Sen. Barack Obama of Chicago is generating excitement among rank-and-file gays by running on his liberal record in the General Assembly.

Wealthy former trader Blair Hull of Chicago also has a share of support among rank-and-file gays, mostly because he’s been working for it so hard. “There isn’t an event in the gay community Blair hasn’t been to,” Garcia says.

Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas, also a Chicagoan, can point to her sponsorship of a gay rights measure while serving as a county board member. But she got into the race so late, many potential gay supporters have already made political commitments.

The scramble for votes within that core Democratic constituency mirrors the campaign strategies for votes among other communities of interest for the five major Senate hopefuls. Hynes has sealed up a good chunk of the party’s political establishment and major labor groups. Chico is holding onto the support he locked up as the first candidate to enter the race and the first Latino to run for the U.S. Senate from Illinois. Obama seems to be catching fire with rank-and-file liberals. Hull, without a natural base of support beyond the $20 million of his own money that he’s willing to spend on the primary, is working double-time to take pieces out of the other candidates’ bases. And the late-arriving Pappas is trying to find her footing among interest groups to which she might make a plausible claim.

Republican U.S. Sen. Peter Fitzgerald decided not to run for a second term, and the race to replace him is drawing top-shelf Democratic candidates. As of mid-December, just prior to the filing deadline with the State Board of Elections, no fewer than seven Democrats had expressed interest in this race. As a result, the disparate siblings who make up that party’s Illinois family have favored brothers or sisters in the race. And the winner will be the one who grabs the largest number of chairs at the table.

In an election in which only slightly more than 1 million votes are expected to be cast, victory rests more on building coalitions than on appealing to the large swathe of the Illinois electorate needed to win in November. In a multicandidate primary, it could be enough to score 30 percent of the vote. And, in a contest where the candidates will be splitting the Chicago pie, the one who puts together the best downstate network could walk away with the plate.

When turnout is expected to be minimal, the electoral recipe is a matter of motivating and broadening the base. In Illinois, a U.S. Senate seat doesn’t light a lot of fires anyway, unlike the patronage-rich governor’s mansion or secretary of state’s office. If the Democratic presidential nomination is sewn up by the March 16 primary, there won’t be much on the ballot to motivate people to leave the warmth of their houses.

This is a primary in which the candidates mostly are in agreement on the issues — President George W. Bush has been bad for the country, job creation is good — with only post-war Iraq providing something of a wedge. Hynes, Pappas and Hull were the only candidates to back Bush’s $87 billion funding request to rebuild that country.

So winning the Democratic nomination will be a matter of approach on the issues. Chico is touting an education plan to train more teachers and rebuild more schools. Hull is pitching a national health care program. Hynes and Obama are talking up jobs. Any increase in spending, they say, could be covered by rolling back Bush’s tax cuts — a near political impossibility in Washington, D.C.

This race is getting national attention, though. It is key to any Democratic hopes of retaking the Senate. And the prospects in Illinois look good: The Democratic nominee will face a largely untested, conservative Republican nominee in a state where ticket-topper and fellow conservative Bush lost by 12 percentage points in 2000.

Surviving the primary comes first, though, and the Democratic siblings will be socking it out in minibattles among interest groups.

Hynes, the 35-year-old comptroller, is piling up the most labor support. The two-term officeholder has amassed the backing of 62 unions with more than 700,000 members, including the Teamsters. Hynes’ voters will turn out no matter what, which will help if there’s a low turnout. Unions are disciplined about getting their troops out. That effort will be important to Hynes downstate.

Obama has virtually all of the labor support Hynes doesn’t. The 40-year-old state senator, who represents the Hyde Park area on Chicago’s South Side, touts a strong pro-labor voting record, and that helped him score somewhat surprising endorsements from the Service Employees International Union and the Illinois Federation of Teachers. Obama also is expected to get the nod from the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. The value of Obama’s union support is in Chicago, where he’ll have to win decisively to make up for Hynes’ expected strong showing downstate.

Among the other candidates, Chico, 47, has the backing of six steelworker unions, an electricians’ local and some ethnic umbrella groups, including the Italian and Hispanic labor councils. Hull, 61, brags about being the only candidate to hold a union card — he was a cannery worker in the 1960s — and he has even walked a downstate picket line with striking workers.

But workers aren’t the only group of voters the Democrats will be courting in the next couple of months. Perhaps no group is as up-for-grabs in the Democratic Senate primary as women voters. Until Pappas entered the race, Hull was doing all he could to position himself to cover that base. Hull sat on the board of National Abortion Rights Action League Pro-Choice America and touts his leadership on Title IX, the federal policy requiring universities and high schools to offer equal sports opportunities to women and girls. Pappas’ entry could hinder Hull’s efforts. She voted to reinstate abortions at Cook County Hospital while a county board member.

Voters who support abortion rights almost certainly won’t be able to use that issue as a determining factor anyway. “If they all come back fine, we’ll probably endorse all of them,” says Pam Sutherland, Planned Parenthood’s Springfield lobbyist, of the candidate surveys her group will collect.

Strategists believe that while women won’t necessarily vote for women, they will give women candidates a strong look. That means Pappas could end up sharing women’s votes with two other women candidates who are expected to be on the ballot: health care executive Joyce Washington, who ran unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor in 2002, and Nancy Skinner, a radio talk-show host. Skinner’s strength is her high-energy style, but she’s running a low-budget campaign and she’s no longer heard on the radio in Chicago.

Black voters, meanwhile, represent about 25 percent of the Democratic primary vote, which would seem to give leading black candidate Obama a jump-start. But there are signs Obama has yet to cement this base. The state lawmaker lost badly in a primary challenge to 1st District U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush in 2000. Rush hasn’t forgotten: He’s already cut ads for Hull that are airing on highly influential black radio stations in Chicago.

As a result, Obama has had to counter with his own ads featuring state Sen. James Meeks, who oversees a 16,000-member South Side congregation, and 7th District U.S. Rep. Danny Davis. This has led some observers to question whether the Harvard Law-educated Obama is connecting with the black community.

“While I think the middle class [black community] has signed on, I don’t see a lot of grassroots support,” says Robert Starks, a political science professor and director of the Harold Washington Institute at the Center for Inner City Studies at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago.

“People will give you their support, but you have to ask them. If [Obama] can’t show progress in that community, he can forget about anything else, because that’s his base.” From Starks’ perspective, Washington is working the black grassroots harder and could be a spoiler.

However, Obama, who can point to his work on anti-racial profiling legislation, does have state Senate President Emil Jones and 2nd District U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., both of Chicago, in his camp.

For Hynes, the question is whether black voters remain angry at his father, Thomas Hynes, former Senate president and member of the Democratic National Committee. The elder Hynes briefly ran for Chicago mayor as an independent in 1987 in an effort to unseat Harold Washington, Chicago’s first — and only — black mayor. Supporters point out that the younger Hynes has twice won statewide without any backlash from black voters, but he has never faced a primary challenger.

Hull has spent some money to try to build an organization in the black community, part of his strategy to get just enough of every interest group to eke out a primary win.

Like Obama, Chico is having some difficulty shoring up what should be his base. Chico, who is half Mexican, has had to hire a full-time coordinator to build Latino support. Though he is Mayor Richard Daley’s former chief of staff, Daley so far is neutral in this race. This means the allied Hispanic Democratic Organization is as well. Fourth District U.S. Rep. Luis Gutierrez has not endorsed Chico either.

Chico has spent about two-thirds of the $3 million or so he’s raised so far, much of it on early TV ads, to try to boost his candidacy into the top tier. The question is how much more Chico can raise for the stretch. “This is a primary. It’s about money and workers,” says one Hispanic civic leader who has been involved in politics for more than three decades. Even if Chico vaults to that top tier, he could be damaged by stories about the collapse of the law firm he led, the once-powerful Altheimer & Gray.

All of the candidates will be looking for votes outside the city. The suburban vote accounted for nearly 14 percent of the Democratic primary total in 2002, up from 8.6 percent in 1998. Most of the credit for that jump goes to losing governor hopeful Paul Vallas, whose education-first candidacy more than doubled the number of Democratic ballots cast in the Republican haven of DuPage County. Vallas isn’t on the ballot this time — though he is appearing in a TV ad endorsing Chico — so the suburban influence likely will be more akin to 1998 than 2000.

The candidates are seeking suburban voters more through endorsements than visits. Obama appears to have high appeal for liberals along the lakefront North Shore. He lined up early support from his Senate seatmate, Terry Link, who doubles as the Lake County Democratic chairman. “He spoke out here and the crowd left excited,” Link says. Hynes also is trying to hold his own on the North Shore. State Sens. Susan Garrett of Lake Forest and Jeffrey Schoenberg of Evanston are on board, as well as state Rep. Lou Lang of Skokie. Hull is using his considerable bankroll to make suburban inroads, with at least three mail pieces. Pappas has been a top local vote-getter in suburban Cook, where voters don’t like the tax collector but like the woman who collects them.

The suburbs and Chicago might make up 70 percent of the vote in this race, but it’s the 30 percent of the vote downstate that could decide it. With all of the candidates carving up the Chicago vote, downstate is the place where each can make up lost ground. After all, then-U.S. Rep. Rod Blagojevich was losing to Vallas coming out of the Chicago area, but he rolled up huge margins downstate, where county Democratic chairmen still can direct the vote.

So far, Hynes is the candidate most likely to succeed with this formula. He has been courting downstate organized labor, which provides the backbone of his campaign apparatus. In the vote-rich Metro East area, Hynes has the backing of influential 12th District U.S. Rep. Jerry Costello and wealthy young attorney John Simmons, who flirted with his own run but is raising money for Hynes through trial lawyers.

Motivating unions to drive the downstate turnout is more important than paying for TV ads, but Hynes hasn’t been shy about that either. He is looking to cement his gains among union foot soldiers with a major downstate ad buy that ran from mid-October through at least Thanksgiving.

Not to be outdone, some of the more than $7 million Hull has spent so far has been used for biographical spots in downstate markets, which have been running since the summer. Polls show that strategy helped him move into second place downstate behind Hynes.

Obama, who is quietly raising more than $2 million and holding off on spending it, will rely on endorsements from such Quad Cities leaders as 17th District U.S. Rep. Lane Evans of Rock Island and state Sen. Denny Jacobs of East Moline. Obama also hopes to attract support in liberal-leaning college towns and in cities with large numbers of black voters, including Rockford and East St. Louis.

But East St. Louis Mayor Carl Officer is supporting Chico, as are some downstate school superintendents who like Chico’s emphasis on education. Chico also has been on the air downstate with TV ads talking about jobs and his background.

Arguably, the biggest question mark downstate — and perhaps the biggest one in the race — is Pappas. Because she didn’t declare until early November, Pappas has no downstate organization to speak of. Her campaign aides say she’s working on it, but they also are quick to add that Pappas plans to rely on a record of turning around the once-corrupt and inept Cook County treasurer’s office as a reason voters should give her a promotion to the

Senate. Political analysts question whether that’s enough to win support outside that county. Yet an October Chicago Tribune poll that put Pappas in a theoretical lead — 45 percent were undecided — is said to be the final push she needed to get into this race.

Months before the primary, though, Pappas is essentially starting from scratch on fundraising. This led one longtime political operative who has worked for both parties to issue the prediction that “16 percent in the Tribune poll could very well be her high-water mark.” Pappas certainly hopes that’s not the case, but her late start gives her candidacy a nothing-to-lose fallback.

That’s not as true for the other candidates vying to represent the Democratic Party and the interest groups lining up to back them. For Hynes, the election will determine whether his star continues its ascent — and show whether his downstate labor supporters can deliver again. Obama’s political future also is at stake, as is proof that black voters can still flex some muscle a decade after former U.S. Sen. Carol Moseley Braun made history. For Hull, the Senate bid takes him back to his 1970s roots as a weekend card-counting Nevada blackjack winner. Once again, he’s playing with his own money, but this time the stakes are higher. And for Chico, his showing could pave the way for future Latino candidates to run statewide or reveal that minority group has some distance to travel before becoming a political force.

Barring a highly negative and divisive primary, though, whoever wins should be well-positioned to become the state’s next U.S. senator.

Eric Krol is the political writer for the Arlington Heights-based Daily Herald.

Illinois Issues, January 2004

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