More than three million people will vote in next week’s midterm elections in Michigan. But hundreds of thousands will have voted days or weeks before via absentee ballot -- and many more could and possibly should do the same. Chris Thomas directs Michigan’s bureau of elections. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with him.
Back in 1980, Ohio Congressman Thomas Ludlow Ashley was one of the old bulls of the Democratic Party. He had represented a safe Democratic district centered in Toledo for many years.
That was the year that President Jimmy Carter was in what everybody thought was an extremely close re-election contest with Ronald Reagan. But in the last two days, something happened.
The nation decided it was tired of Carter, tired of the Democrats, and wanted a change. That morning, a reporter was with Ashley, who was running against an obscure banker. Ashley had won his last election by more than two to one, and was thought to be in no trouble.
That day, the congressman looked at voters standing in line, and turned a shade of pale. “I’ve lost,” he said softly. “I’m going to lose.”
The reporter didn’t think he had heard him correctly, and then said something like “are you crazy?” That night, when the returns came in, Ashley did not only lose, he lost by a landslide.
Somehow he felt it coming. That’s not to say that Joe Knollenberg, the longtime congressman in Michigan’s Ninth District, is going to feel that way on Election Day. The conventional wisdom, in fact, is that Knollenberg will win easily, with maybe a couple points knocked off his normal 58 percent score.
But the conventional wisdom also was that the Detroit Tigers had no chance in the world to even come near the baseball playoffs.
This just may not be a conventional year. Nancy Skinner is underfunded, but is otherwise an extremely attractive candidate.
She has no-nonsense but movie-star looks, a finance degree and a strong media background; her dad was a well-known and beloved Oakland County high school football coach. And she is saying the right things about rapping the knuckles of big oil and reinventing the auto industry.
If you had to bet the ranch, it might make more sense to be that the incumbent will hang on. And yet, here’s what the highly respected analyst Charlie Cook is saying about the national election.
Cook, by the way, is no Democratic partisan. He thinks President Bush won Florida fair and square in 2000. But this year he is saying Republicans could be heading to a loss of “30 to 35 or even a few more” seats in the House. That’s more than the Democrats lost the night Lud Ashley went down. Charlie Cook thinks something big may be building.
“In big-wave elections,” he writes, “analysts tend to underestimate the number of seats that the party in power will lose. And so far,no political analyst has figured out how to accurately predict the size of an electoral wave before it crashes ashore.”
We do know this, however. Two weeks from now, however it turns out, we will all be tempted to come back to our listeners and say “I may not have said this before, but just between us, I saw it coming all along.”
In Michigan's 9th Congressional District race, Joe Knollenberg has represented most of Oakland County in Congress for fourteen years, and the seat was supposed to be safely Republican. Yet Democrats have been doing better, and their nominee Nancy Skinner, says she intends to win. Joe Knollenberg’s office declined an invitation to talk about his candidacy with Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry, but Nancy Skinner did speak with him.
We like to think that the era of crafting images for politicians and selling them as if they were diet soda is something relatively new.
Actually, it has been going on as long as there have been politicians. William Henry Harrison was packaged as a hard cider-drinking Indian fighter who had killed the Shawnee Indian chief Tecumseh. Actually, Tecumseh was probably more of a hero and statesman than Harrison, who actually didn’t kill him personally.
Matter of fact, Tecumseh, who history ranks as more of a statesman than Harrison, was killed in Canada, after Harrison’s forces had chased him out of Detroit. But that’s politics.
And if you think that modern image making was invented on Madison Avenue, think about this. When Abraham Lincoln ran for president, he was actually a relatively prosperous attorney who had made money by helping railroads acquire land – sort of the eminent domain cases of the day. He loved technology, the more modern the better, and was the developers’ friend. Somehow, even back then, his handlers thought an image of “Honest Abe the poor rail-splitter” would be easier to sell than “Rich Abe, the railroad lawyer.” Imagine that.
In Michigan today, we have one candidate for governor who is attempting to sell the image of himself as an experienced businessman who can get the state’s bottom line back in order. The other is being presented as a caring and compassionate person who has the experience to make government work for you.
The voters I talk to have a great deal of cynicism about such images, perhaps understandably so. It is also fashionable to moan that thanks to television, we don’t get to see who these people really are.
But I think that may be wrong. We do get to see who they are, not in their slick commercials, but when they interact with the media or the public. We even learn something about them in these highly stylized joint press conferences that we call debates.
Certain revealing moments stick in the national consciousness – John Kerry saying he voted against the $87 billion before he voted against it. The first President Bush checking his watch when he was asked a difficult question during a debate, clearly wishing it were over. That was contrasted against the pure, people-loving warmth that the man who beat him, Bill Clinton, radiated all the time.
So are fleeting visual images of candidates an adequate guide to who to vote for? Certainly not. Sometimes the image packagers can fool us, as when they convinced even the hardened journalist Mike Wallace that there was a new Nixon in 1968.
And yet seeing these people does tell us something that has some meaning – whether we feel comfortable with these candidates,
We rely on intuition of that sort in our own lives every day, in everything from business deals to dating. Nobody’s antenna are perfect, but sometimes I think if we trusted our instincts more and ideology less, we’d usually be better off.
Election day is November 7th. We continue our election coverage with a look at how image makers are shaping perceptions in the race for governor. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with Nicholas Valentino studies political communication at the University of Michigan.
I know you’ve been following the election campaign, so let me ask you something. Are you going to vote for Cassandra Ulbrich?
How about David Porteous? Are you leaning towards Faylene Owen or Dee Cook? At this point, you may be saying, “huh?
“I thought this was Michigan Radio.” But don’t touch that dial. Those people are all statewide, major-party candidates for office here this fall. Millions will vote for them without having any idea who they are.
Cassandra Ulbrich is, by the way, running for the state board of education, and the others are all running for MSU trustee positions.
We elect members of the state board and the governing boards of our three major universities -- MSU, Michigan, and Wayne State.
So how do you, the voter, find the time to figure out which of these candidates are best equipped to make major decisions about education?
You don’t. So here’s what happens. These people get votes from those folks who vote a straight party ticket. If Dick DeVos wins a solid victory, almost all the Republican candidates for these jobs will win. If Jennifer Granholm wins, the Democrats will. Does that make sense? Is that the best way to choose the people who hire university presidents and set education policy for our state?
I don’t think so. I wouldn’t mind having a separate special election just for the top education jobs.
Not many people would turn out for such an election, but those who did would be the right ones – those who knew something and cared. But when you have people spending tens of millions fighting over who gets to be governor, everything else is drowned out.
Does this really matter? Indeed, and here’s an example. Last month a senior political figure asked me if I had noticed that the MSU board had quietly extended the contract of President Lou Anna Simon, which didn’t expire until 2008, all the way to 2011.
That seemed odd to me. “Here’s why they did that,” my source said. “The MSU board has a Republican majority. They think this will be a Democratic year, which means they will lose control of the board.
“And they don’t want the Democrats to install someone else in a couple years. So they staged a pre-emptive strike.” That isn’t any slur on Lou Anna Simon. Nobody is saying she is doing a bad job.
But was extending her contract that far out good public policy?
Here’s something else that is happening with these jobs. The parties are increasingly nominating board candidates with famous names to attract voters’ attention.
So this year we have Debbie Dingell, wife of the congressman, running for the Wayne State board, and George Perles, a former MSU football coach now in his 70s, running for that school’s board.
The parties have every right to nominate them. But I want to give notice that the day either party nominates Madonna for the state board of education … I’m moving to Indiana.
My guess is that if I asked Tim Walberg what he had in common with Bill Clinton, he would look startled, then horrified, and be tempted to blurt out “nothing!” But in fact, the two men are alike in one way.
They are great campaigners. They love to campaign. Neither ever seems too tired for one last rally. They kiss babies, eat charred ethnic food with apparent enthusiasm, and shake hands until their own paws are raw and sore.
I know two men with something else in common. Their names are Al Gore and Joe Schwarz. And they aren’t nearly as good at campaigning as the first two. Gore can do it, but most of the time, doesn’t appear to like it very much. Schwarz hates it.
Privately, he is the warmest and friendliest of men. Battle Creek has generations who know him simply as Doctor Joe – and adore him. But he doesn’t suffer fools gladly, or most of the time, at all.
You can analyze election returns till your eyes give out. But I think at the end of the day, it is no coincidence that Clinton and Walberg, the enthusiastic campaigners, won their most important elections, and Gore and Schwarz lost.
That is partly as it should be – and partly a tragedy. Politics has always been a fine balancing act between the skills needed to woo the voters, and the skills needed to govern. Our greatest leaders have both.
Those who are good only at campaigning leave no mark. Those whose skills are mostly in governing behind the scenes sooner or later get left by the side of the voting booth.
Over the years, I have had the chance to sit down with both Schwarz and Gore to discuss complex issues. Both are brilliant at analyzing problems and figuring out solutions.
In the state senate, Schwarz was a major force in putting together workable policy compromises. Yet his lack of campaign skills worked against him. He lost a race for congress he should have won in 1992, and did worse in a primary for governor ten years later.
In Washington, his maturity, intelligence, and intellectual sophistication made a remarkable impact for a freshman Congressman.
When Joe Schwarz lost in August, there was something akin to mourning in the Washington establishment. But on the campaign trail, he had been outhustled. That wouldn’t bother me so much if I thought it was really the will of the people. Yet I don’t think we know what most of them want. More than four out of every five voters sat on their hands. Meanwhile, more than $3 million was dropped on this primary race. More than a million of that came from The Club for Growth, a somewhat shadowy Manhattan-based group that wants to privatize Social Security.
One leading crusader for campaign finance reform was appalled, but said he had to believe the voters picked who they were most comfortable with. Maybe so.
But the vast majority of them didn’t bother to vote at all.
Election day is November 7th. We continue our election coverage with a look at the 7th District Congressional Race. Incumbent congressmen are very seldom defeated in primaries. But Timothy Walberg, a former minister and state legislator from Lenawee County, did just that when he beat Congressman Joe Schwarz. But can he win in November? Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with him.
If Sharon Renier somehow manages to get elected to Congress next month, she won’t owe her Democratic Party a thing. And if she loses, they have only themselves to blame.
Democratic National Chairman Howard Dean says he wants to commit his party to a strategy of trying to win at every level in every state of the country. That’s nice talk, but they certainly aren’t doing it.
A few days ago, the New York Times had a front-page story about Jim Marcinkowski, a Democrat who is challenging Congressman Mike Rogers in the neighboring Eighth District. Marcinkowski said the national party had enthusiastically wooed him to get into the race.
But he said once he did, they didn’t follow through on their promises to get him money, and wouldn’t even return his calls. He felt he had been left to sink or swim on his own.
To be sure, Marcinkowski is running against a popular incumbent who normally runs ahead of the rest of the Republican ticket.
The situation is entirely different, however, in the Seventh District, where Sharon Renier is running. There, the incumbent Republican congressman was ousted in the primary by Tim Walberg, whose views are generally seen as far to the right of most citizens.
While in the Michigan Legislature, Walberg was famous for voting “no” the vast majority of the time. He opposed raising the minimum wage. He voted against establishing a Rosa Parks Day, against a seat belt law, against a tax credit for donations to the Michigan Vietnam Veterans Memorial, against expelling kids who physically assault teachers and against tougher laws on tobacco sales to minors.
When the primary election was over, the incumbent said this was the first time in his life he couldn’t congratulate and work with an opponent. Joe Schwarz called his fellow Republican a liar.
He said Tim Walberg wasn’t intellectually or morally fit to serve, filed unfair campaign practice complaints against him, and said he wouldn’t vote for him. Republican Schwarz then said that Sharon Renier, who he defeated two years ago, is “a very credible candidate.” He said “she is pretty bright and has a good grasp of a lot of issues - not all issues, but a lot of them.”
You don’t have to be Karl Rove to figure out that this would appear to signal a considerable opening for the Democrats.
But apparently, the national Democrats can’t see it. They haven’t given Renier a dime, though she has asked. “We also asked them if they’d do some research for us, and they haven’t gotten back to us” she told me.
Democrats say they want to win back the House of Representatives. But here’s a race where the Republican candidate is against virtually everything Democrats stand for. The Republican Party is deeply split, and the Democrats have a candidate who is running fairly well in the polls, and wants very much to win.
And yet the national party won’t lift a finger to help her. If you can explain the logic of that, you are much smarter than me.
Election day is November 7th. We continue our election coverage with a look at the 7th District Congressional Race. The District got national attention when Tim Walberg upset incumbent congressman Joe Schwarz in the Republican primary. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with the democratic candidate – Sharon Renier. She is an organic farmer from Munith.
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