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Post Mortem from the Grassroots The voters in the state of California decided yesterday to maintain the status-quo and voted to reject Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s reform ideas. Why did an electorate, that only 2 years ago voted a reform candidate into office, not vote to give him the tools to achieve that reform?
Before we answer that question, I want to examine a few things that went right in this election. First of all it is obvious that we were successful in getting our people to send in their absentee ballots. When the results of the permanent absentee ballots were dumped at 8:15, it looked like at least 73 and 75 would win. This is due to a very successful campaign to get Republicans to vote by mail.
Contributor Mr. Korenthal is a lifetime resident of Southern California. He was a City Chairman for Bush/Cheney04 in Los Angeles County and currently writes a daily weblog at http://www.socalpundit.com. [go to Korenthal index] |
Another thing we did right was in the area of volunteer recruitment. Our 2-year long volunteer drive resulted in a last minute deployment of volunteers for phone-banking and precinct walking. However, as a grassroots volunteer organizer, I am left wondering what would have happened if we had filled the phones and had precincts walked every weekend throughout the election instead of just in the last 3 days. I blame the late start in volunteering on voter apathy. People seemed to find every excuse in the book for not getting out and campaigning. Notable in this area was the state party’s program for paying precinct walkers.
Eileen is a conservative that has worked at the polls in a retirement community for many years. She remarked to me earlier today that a great number of the voters who came in yesterday acted as if this was the very first time they had voted. Eileen described the scenario in an email to me.
I woke up with the thought that I should/would write to Gov. Arnold and tell him what brought out so many senior democrats to vote yesterday. It was a small mailing plainly marked that it was from the Democrat Party. It was the same size as the Official Sample Ballot and looked very similar to the back page that had the addressee’s name and address. It wasn’t as bulky as the Sample Ballot which many people take to the polls with them, and of course it was easier reading because it only had the names or the people to vote for and Yes or No next to the titles of the various State Measures (rather than 6-8 line descriptions). This was much easier for seniors to carry and read and use to mark their ballot. It was a very clever piece of political advertising and evidently it worked, because even before the morning was half over yesterday, I had told myself that more democrats in [the retirement community] were going to vote them in any previous elections. And evidently they did!
I went through the exercise of sharing this with you because it represents a broader problem we faced in this election. The governor sought to present the Special Election as a simple “us versus them” scenario, a “vote for me if you want to live” sort of thing. Unfortunately the issues presented in this election were a lot more complicated than that. The Democrats realized that a lot of Californians would not be able to figure all these initiatives out and used that knowledge to design a mailer that simply voted NO for them.
Proposition 73 would have required abortion clinics to inform the parents of minor children 72 hours prior to performing an abortion on their child. Although the sponsors raised enough money to get the initiative on the ballot (no easy feat I might add) they did not plan for selling it to voters once it was scheduled for a vote. Of all the initiatives on the ballot, Prop. 73 had the least amount on money spent on it. Yet, all the way up to the week before the referendum 73 was polling like it would pass. Then the pro-choice Nazis got to work on it. First they released a brilliant television spot that challenged the viewer to figure out if they were as cynical as the creators of this initiative were. “I trust my daughter and my daughter trusts me”, was the line in that ad that grabbed you. Then a last minute auto-dialed, recorded message phone campaign told horror stories of daughters turned away by their parents seeking back alley abortions… You get the picture. We hurt Prop. 73 by not giving it the same budget for advertising as Prop. 77 and the others.
But this election is over and soon we will have the exact numbers of who voted and for what. As a grassroots campaign manager, I will be pouring over that data and will be working with the folks upstairs to come up with a comprehensive plan for reshaping our campaign efforts for 2006 and beyond. I won’t get into details here, but voter registration, a better media presence and the use of a sniper rifle rather than a shotgun when it comes to choosing issues and candidates will be among of the solutions we employ.
One sentiment I keep hearing from my fellow conservatives is that GOP voters stayed home as a repudiation of the soft-core politics of the Pete Wilson-era GOP that has been the agenda for Arnold’s Special Election. As one GOPer said in an email to me recently, perhaps Arnold will learn from this election and will, for his re-election campaign, embrace a meatier agenda, say illegal immigration and the border.
BTW, this is
not the way to move forward.
House leaders late Wednesday abandoned an attempt to push through a hotly contested plan to open an Alaskan wildlife refuge to oil drilling, fearing it would jeopardize approval of a sweeping budget bill Thursday. CRO
Other great reads on the November 8th 2005 elections:
ELECTION RESULTS ARE A WAKE-UP CALL [Larry Kudlow]
