14th District race may not be GOP rout
Eric Zorn | Change of Subject
February 14, 2008
(Chicago Tribune) The Republican plan for the far-west suburban 14th U.S. Congressional District has been transparent all along:
Time the resignation of incumbent Republican Dennis Hastert so that the special election to choose his successor will not coincide with any other election. This will all but assure low voter turnout, which generally favors the incumbent party.
The winner of that special election will then have all the advantages of incumbency in the November general election.
So far, it's working. By resigning last Nov. 26 instead of finishing out the final year of his 11th term, former House Speaker Hastert assured that the special election couldn't be held until after the presidential primary earlier this month, when the presence on the ballot of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, both with strong local ties, seemed likely to cause a big Democratic turnout.
Now the special election will be March 8, and Hastert's chosen Republican successor, dairy magnate Jim Oberweis, will get to face a Democrat who's making his first bid for public office.
But here's where the plan might go awry: The Democrat, Bill Foster of Geneva, is a get-out-the-vote geek. He's a knock-on-doors nerd who wrote the software program credited with propelling Democratic challenger Patrick Murphy to a narrow victory in 2006 over incumbent Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Fitzpatrick in a suburban Philadelphia district.
Foster said he looked at races all over the country before deciding to move to Pennsylvania for two months to volunteer for Murphy.
"It was pretty remarkable," said Nat Binns, a spokesman for Murphy's campaign. "He dropped in from nowhere and approached the get-out-the-vote effort as a scientific puzzle.
"He helped us crack the code and figure out where we needed to go and how to do it really efficiently," Binns said. "It was brilliant. We were able to knock on 140,000 doors on Election Day, which was a big part of why we won (by just 1,518 votes)."
Foster's unofficial title was "campaign physicist."
We like to think that elections are all about ideas and the will of the majority.
In fact, they're all about getting the people who support your ideas to go to the polls in greater numbers than those who support your opponent's ideas, no matter which ideas the actual majority of people support.
And the greater the number of registered voters inclined to sit out an election -- as they likely will be March 8, which is a Saturday -- the more important that effort becomes.
The 14th District, which stretches from Kane County nearly to the Iowa border, is traditionally Republican. But Foster told me he intends to apply the lessons he learned in Pennsylvania (though not the same software program) to entice a disproportionate number of Democrats into the voting booths.
"A lot of candidates just sort of close their eyes and trust their pollsters, and I'm not one of them," he said. "This election will be won on the ground."