As stated last time, we have a political ground war scale problem in Illinois. Not nearly enough people are being recruited and trained to man the precincts and help oversee early voting, election day voting, and post-election vote counting.
Will the donor class and those who run the Republican Conservative Industrial Complex (RCIC) here wake up and realize it? Probably not. Key donors continue to get a thrill up their leg by giving millions to the same people who have shown that they have no clue how to win in Illinois. Worse, they employ gatekeepers that are proven failures many times over. But boy are they slick!
What is not arguable is that failure of the Illinois RCIC to win governing majorities continues to result in real pain for Illinoisans. From the gas pump to property taxes, from lost job opportunities to families being geographically split up due to so many being forced to leave the state. Illinois is also now the abortion center for the Midwest. Makes you proud, doesn’t it? And thanks to Republican Bruce Rauner, taxpayers will pay the bill.
Let that “pain” sink in. All those highly paid and experienced politicos—whether they’re consultants, candidates, office holders, those who run well-funded organizations, or members of the RCIC celebrity class (that give donors the aforementioned a thrill up their leg), they bear the responsibility for that pain. They are the generals in this fight.
The RCIC failure here is not because Republican and conservative donors haven’t stepped up to write checks to both campaigns and organizations. The political right in Illinois easily spends over a hundred million dollars every election cycle—and that is plenty of money to build what is needed to effectively fight the political ground war.
To my knowledge, no one but yours truly has an actual plan to accomplish mass mobilization at the political ground level. While many might be doing more this year, it is just more of the same that will not produce victory as needed to save the state. Should anyone know any big donors who might be questioning the effectiveness of their donations, feel free to reach out to me.
I suspect that those who are raising and spending many millions of dollars have the donors convinced that the political arena in Illinois is some mysterious thing, and that they are experts at reading the tea leaves or animal entrails. Donors should know that there is no mystery about how to win. Democrats show us daily. They get the work done.
More Americans need to engage. But they will require effective leaders to be successful. At this point, our Illinois class of political “generals” is clearly lacking when it comes to basic competency. I can think of no better proof of that than to point out that there was no group of heavyweights on our side to go meet with Ken Griffin and talk him out of listening to his lieutenants and their friends who wanted him to back Richard Irvin for governor.
Instead, several of those who might be considered “heavyweights” supported Irvin. Those who knew better failed to, as a group, go and meet with Ken Griffin (who is no dummy) and talk him out of wasting over $50 million dollars in the primary.
The winner of that race, Darren Bailey, won the support of our state’s other mega donor Richard Uihlein. Uihlein`s money was not spent building the infrastructure needed to help oversee elections and challenge the Democratic Party’s control over vote counting.
I’ll close with just a comment about the never-ending bugaboo regarding “suburban women.” Conventional wisdom is that downstate will go red, Chicago will go blue. The suburbs, then, are the deciding factor. In the suburbs, the most important factor is the women’s vote.
Evidently it is believed that, whether or not women are feeling the pain at the pump or the impact of inflation; whether or not they’re happy with what might be going on in the schools, or that Illinois is one of the highest taxed states in the nation, no, none of that matters to these ladies as much as Donald Trump’s mean tweets.
Suburban women think Donald Trump is so much worse than the average politician. They’re so wrong. I’ve been around these politicians for decades. Trump is just more honest and straightforward. The reason he accomplished so much in only one term is because of his take-no-prisoners approach.
When a voter, any voter, doesn’t agree with a policy position, or doesn’t like the personality of our candidate, there has to be an effort to win them over—not cater to them.
Hey big donors, contact me if you want to see Illinois red.
Image credit: The Federalist.
The Ground War ongoing series of articles can be found here.
