(I originally wrote this with the hopes of getting it published in a more politically-targeted publication, but none of them got back to me. I guess if it's not COVID-related they're not interested. So I'm posting it here instead. Please share far and wide.)
I would like to tell you a story. It is a story about politics. About how politics works, and how it doesn't work. It's a case study in how, across the country, the very nature of our political system undermines democracy and keeps those in power, in power. But it's a story that also reveals the steps that can be taken to help fix it.
It's also, for me, a very personal story.
About Illinois Politics
The most important thing to know about Illinois politics is that there are only three people who matter:
- The governor. Sometimes it's a Democrat, sometimes a Republican. Currently it's Democratic billionaire J. B. Pritzker, who self-funded a campaign (of approximately $140 million between the primary and general elections) to defeat self-funded Republican billionaire Bruce Rauner. Said Republican billionaire was wildly unpopular with both Democrats and Republicans.
- The mayor of Chicago. Long synonymous with the Daley family, this job is currently held by recently-elected Lori Lightfoot. It's always a Democrat.
- Illinois Speaker of the House Michael Madigan. Nominally a Democrat, Madigan is the longest-serving state legislator in the country and has been Speaker for 36 of the last 38 years.
Most Illinois politics is based on the governor and mayor fighting over which of them is the most powerful person in the state, and Speaker Madigan chuckling to himself knowing full well that it's actually him. Madigan is extremely powerful: he controls what bills do and don't get heard; he controls committee memberships; as chair of the state party, he controls a sizeable amount of party campaign cash.
He's also perpetually at the center of corruption investigations, but never gets hit with one directly. As just one of the recent cases, as reported by Chicago public radio station WBEZ, former lobbyist and close Madigan ally Michael McClain was revealed to have potentially been involved in both a ghost payroll scandal and a rape coverup. (Ghost payrolling is the practice in which someone is technically employed, and gets paid, but has never and will never actually show up to do that job). That has sent the Illinois government into a tizzy, but, as usual, no charges have been made against Madigan directly despite his close connection.
In short, standard operating procedure. Madigan himself is widely loathed by Democrats across the state, except in his own district where he brings in enough earmarked state money and patronage work that he has kept his seat for nearly four decades. (He was first elected in 1969, helped write the 1970 Illinois Constitution, and has been Speaker since 1983, with one two-year gap in the mid 1990s.)
Basically, Michael Madigan is Illinois' own Mitch McConnell, and that is not a flattering description for either of them.
About the 12th district
Illinois' 12th state house district lies in the heart of Chicago's near north side. Even without gerrymandering (which is a problem in Illinois as much as anywhere else), it would be a solidly blue district. Its borders encompass Boystown, Chicago's major gay neighborhood, as well as Wrigley Field and the wealthy retirement apartments along Lake Michigan. If crunchy granola liberal could define a district, it's Illinois 12th. The Republicans usually don't even bother running a candidate at all.
As is typical for single-party districts (be it Democratic or Republican), the incumbent essentially has a job for life. Once established no one is willing to primary them unless they royally screw up, and the other major party doesn't bother tilting at windmills. That makes the every-few-decades primary the only meaningful election.
The seat was held by Sara Feigenholtz from 1995 until this year. In mid-November 2019, Illinois state Senate president John Cullerton announced his surprise resignation effective in January (setting off a wave of speculation as to why and what he was avoiding, although that's not relevant here). Cullerton's senate district includes the House 12th district, and Feigenholtz immediately declared her candidacy for the senate seat, with the very clear signal that she was angling to get appointed to fill the position mid-term.
Illinois is one of just four states that still has party bosses appoint people to fill vacancies rather than hold special elections. Chicago, in particular, has a rather sordid history of this tactic - resign/retire mid term, usually too late for anyone to file to be on the ballot in the primary, then get the party committeemen to appoint a pre-selected successor. That way, the successor is the incumbent, nobody can challenge them in the primary, they go on to win the general election, and have two years of fundraising and name recognition to fend off any challengers.
In this case, there was just over a week left until petitions were due to get on the ballot for the soon-to-be-vacant 12th district, so the race was on to get signatures.
The candidates
Despite it being 25 years since the district had even bothered to notice there was an election, six candidates managed to get on the ballot for the coveted "safe seat." One, Kim Walz, later dropped out, and two others, Ryan Podges and Marty Malone, barely mounted a campaign. That left three candidates worth mentioning:
Margaret Croke. Her main claim to fame is having been a campaign staffer for Governor Pritzker's 2018 campaign before taking a job with the state's Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity.
Jonathan “Yoni” Pizer. Pizer's main campaign point seemed to be that he was a gay Jew. (That tells you something about the district when that's a positive campaign platform.) His main advantage, though, was that he and his husband were tight with the Chicago political bosses; among many others, he and his husband had raised more than a quarter of a million dollars to Mayor Lightfoot's campaign in 2019.
James A. "Jimmy" Garfield. The other gay Jew in the race (it's that kind of district), and no relation to the former president of the same name, Garfield is a local attorney with years of experience working on campaigns, but not funding them. He is also, full disclosure, my brother.
On substantive issues, all three were more or less in alignment. In as deeply blue a district as this one there's only so much variation you can have on policy. By all accounts, though, Garfield's was the most robust and thought out. None had held public office before.
The campaign
What set the candidates apart, though, was Madigan. Despite the Speaker being widely hated, especially in the 12th district, Democrats have always been reluctant to break with their party chair. The logic is the same as why Republicans don't stand up to McConnell: It only works if everyone does it, and no one wants to be on the wrong side when a rebellion fails, so a rebellion never happens.
Even with the latest round of scandals surrounding Madigan, five of the six original candidates said they would still vote for him for Speaker. The one exception was Garfield, who made a splash by announcing that he wouldn't support Madigan but would instead support another Democrat for the job; even knowing it was a symbolic gesture (Madigan would surely remain speaker anyway), it was a gesture only Garfield was willing to make.
Garfield went a step further, however. His platform included:
- A call for disallowing state legislators from serving as lobbyists while in office (yes, that's legal in Illinois).
- Gerrymandering reform, of the kind seen in a number of other states and desperately needed in all of them.
- Term limits for legislative leaders (like, say, Speaker Madigan)
- Ranked Choice Voting for all state offices, which has been gaining support in the state senate already.
- Automatic Voter Registration.
- Special elections to fill vacant seats rather than political appointments.
Every voter we spoke to loved this reform plan. In fact, virtually without exception every voter who heard that Garfield would not support Madigan said "Great, he's my guy," without even bothering to ask about his other positions. He seemed like the obvious favorite on substance, and that won him endorsements from the Independent Voters of Illinois/Independent Precinct Organization (IVI-IPO) and the regional Democracy for America chapter.
The media took note, too. In a scathing editorial, the Chicago Sun-Times's Laura Washington called out Pizer, Croke, and Malone for declaring that Madigan needed to go, but they'd still vote for him anyway. "Hypocrites, all," she wrote, "They haven’t even been elected but are ready to surrender." However, Garfield managed only a passing mention as the lone exception to such cowardice.
Why?
Follow the money
From early on, it was clear who the favorites were.
Pizer, as mentioned, had a connection to Mayor Lightfoot. He was "her" candidate, and she "turned out the machine" to support him, as did many other local elected officials, including state representatives and local Aldermen (city councilmen). The amounts of donations to said local officials are available on the Illinois Elections Website. Just saying.
As mentioned, in Illinois, when there's a vacancy the seat is filled by the Party Committeemen of the area where the district is. That's why Senator Cullerton's seat was filled by Sara Feigenholtz mid-term by the sitting committeemen, which left her seat vacant for them to fill as well. Despite calls (including from several of the candidates in the race) not to appoint any of the candidates and thus taint the election with favoritism, the committeemen (by majority vote) went ahead and named Pizer to the seat 37 days before the election, allowing him to nominally run as an incumbent on paper. Pizer was the Chicago machine's anointed candidate.
Croke, meanwhile, had the support of her old boss, the governor. Pritzker transferred $57,800, the maximum allowed, from his own political fund to Croke's. He also air dropped her $300,000 for a PAC to bolster her campaign. He also created the “People for Women’s Empowerment” PAC to support her and backed it to the tune of $300,000. With the governor’s blessing, so too came the union endorsements, money, and manpower.
That meant the district was now a proxy war between the Mayor and the Governor. And what of the popularity of the anti-Madigan position?
While Croke and Pizer spent the campaign sending out glossy mailers in repeated drops to residents in the district, Garfield had to suffice with printed letters. His entire campaign budget was barely two thirds of the one-time transfer Pritzker gave to Croke; most of it was from immediate family, who maxed out our individual donation limits, a smattering of money from others, and the majority of Garfield’s own bank account.
While I and the rest of his friends spent our nights and weekends stuffing envelopes and making phone calls (it's a district that consists mainly of apartment buildings that make door knocking impractical or illegal), my brother spent most of the campaign on the soul-sucking, mind-numbing, ego-destroying task of calling everyone he's ever known to beg for money. Of course, most of his friends-and-family are not self-funding billionaires so most donations were small, in the $50-$100 range. It would have been far more efficient had he been buddy buddy with people who could drop the maximum $5800 limit on him without blinking, but not everyone is so lucky.
Anyone who's run for office knows this process, and those who have been working in the campaign reform field for years know it all too well. It has exactly nothing to do with governance, or policy, or democracy; our privatized election system doesn't pick the best candidate, it picks the best tele-marketer. And having a powerful mayor or rich governor on your side makes you a better tele-marketer.
The media, of course, knows that. Despite its editorial condemning all of the candidates except for Garfield, the Sun-Times proceeded to... endorse Pizer. They couldn't even spell Garfield's name correctly.
The Chicago Tribune, the city's other major paper, endorsed Croke.
We all know serious candidates have lots of money, so why bother endorsing a candidate who is, by definition, not serious? Better to endorse a hypocrite.
Walz backed out when it became obvious that the "fix was in". The Garfield campaign fought on to the end despite the long odds.
The election
Polling indicated that most residents were still undecided right up to the election. Early voting was up dramatically this year amid coronavirus concerns, too. Both of those meant that name recognition was crucial, and was a focus for all of the campaigns.
Of course, there's two ways to get name recognition: You can get it for free from the media, or you can buy it with ads and mailers. That's how campaigns work, and it's how money controls the result: Pure name recognition. And at 55 cents per stamp, name recognition can be very expensive.
With the massive financial support Pizer and Croke had, we knew the odds were not good (though we did hope and campaigned to the end anyway)
When the dust settled on March 17th, the results were in:
- Margaret Croke: 46.4%
- Yoni Pizer: 41%
- James Garfield: 6.1%
- Ryan Podges: 3.8%
- Marty Malone: 2.8%
The analysis
As Lawrence Lessig is so fond of saying, "we can't prove the money is the cause, but what we can say" is that the candidate with the biggest outside money won. In the proxy war between the Governor and the Mayor, the Governor won, and the Governor's candidate will now be the state representative for as long as she wants; that's how self-segregating single-representative districts work, regardless of party.
Would the result have been the same or different had the political sugardaddies not decided to put their fingers on the scale? I have no idea. Perhaps, perhaps not. We'll never know. And that's the problem. The vicious cycle created by our privatized election system means that campaigns can be bought through name recognition, and so whoever has the richest friends can afford the most name recognition. And it's all 100% legal, and overrides any question of policy position (on which, as noted, there wasn't much variation in this case).
What we can do better
There are two things we must do to address this problem, and allow future candidates to spend their time campaigning on equal footing rather than begging for money while knowing they likely cannot compete with a single check from political bosses.
First, public campaign funding, at the local level, the state level, and the federal level. While Presidential campaigns attract enough attention and have a large enough pool to draw from that very occasionally a small-dollar-donation campaign can be viable, that's simply not the case in smaller districts that get nowhere near the media attention. A single check from a single party sugardaddy can swamp an entire grassroots campaign. A single newly-created PAC or Super PAC can suddenly flood a district with funds, including from the same political donors who have already given as individuals.
I'm familiar with the arguments against public financing, most of which boil down to "but I don't want my tax dollars going to support that “Evil Other Party's Candidate”™. Which I get, really, but that is both grossly short-sighted and also factually inaccurate, depending on the funding model used. It's also completely irrelevant in this case; every single person involved is a dyed-in-the-wool liberal Democrat.
I would much rather see a few of my tax dollars end up funding a candidate I don't like than the election be decided not by the candidates, but by party bosses, billionaires, and corporations (who are often one and the same). Whether through dollar matching or vouchers, either one would be a vast improvement in restoring some sense of legitimacy to our election system.
Second, have a look at the results again. The three also-rans -- Garfield, Podges, and Malone -- together pulled 12.7% of the vote. That's more than twice the spread between Croke and Pizer. Would more than half of those people have preferred Pizer to Croke? Did Pizer actually have more support than Croke did across the whole electorate? We'll never know, because Illinois, like most of the country, uses plurality voting, which fails utterly in exactly this case. Rather, Illinois, and the rest of the country, needs to follow the lead of Maine and adopt Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) to allow Garfield, Podges, and Malone supporters to be counted, even if their first choice candidate didn't win. Or maybe not. We simply cannot know.
Fortunately there is a bill before the Illinois Senate to introduce RCV (SB 2267), with the support of groups such as Fair Vote Illinois (of which I am a member), that has more than 15% of the Senate as a co-sponsor. Of course, such a bill would be a much harder sell in the state House... thanks to its Speaker, Michael Madigan.
Would public financing and a more fair voting system have changed the outcome? I don't know. It's entirely possible that Croke would still have won an election with more equitable funding and a non-broken voting system. Or perhaps Pizer would have. Or maybe, just maybe, the only candidate saying the one thing the entire Democratic rank-and-file agrees on, that Mike Madigan needs to go, would have been able to get that message to voters and carry the day.
We will never know. But if we want to find out for the next election, we need to fix the broken way our elections work.
This is a story about Illinois. But it is also a story about America.