Victory and Defeat - When it's in Your Hands... and Mark Kirk's

Reflections – and a bit of a primer – on Illinois’ next U.S. Senate race…

Oh, not always; there’s a lot that political parties do that makes them deserve everything said about them. The Democratic Party, for example, is now so uniformly socialist that, when asked on-camera to list any differences between a modern Democrat and a socialist, DNC Chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (D, FL) was unable to identify any.

The Republican Party isn’t that easy to categorize. The GOP is the only major party to the right of the Democrats, so it basically gets not only conservatives, but also everyone who can’t bear to lower themselves to admit to being socialists. So the GOP has a “big tent” – not so much because the GOP leadership has planned it that way, but because of how unacceptable the modern Democratic Party is to all non-socialists.

This odd transformation over recent generations – the transformations of the Democrats into a purely socialist party and of the Republicans into a catch-all for everyone else – has warped our politics in ways that vary from state to state. While it’s relatively easy for Democrats to share a platform nationwide, the Republicans have a much harder time of it. Texas Republicans are mostly conservative; Connecticut Republicans are mostly liberal. Illinois Republicans are an even mix, ranging from solid Reaganites to people to the left of what used to be known as the Weicker/Rockefeller wing.

This makes it harder to be a party official in the Republican Party than to be one in the Democratic Party, so we should give GOP leaders a bit of a break sometimes when they appear to be confused or conflicted. They do have a good deal more complexity to weigh in the balance in their party than Democrat leaders do in theirs.

That being said, however… there are some things that only a party is empowered to do. While the adherence to a consistent platform may be more of a challenge in a big tent like this one, the Republican party does still have considerable control, and therefore influence, due to its apparatus.

The campaign finance rules used to be more skewed in favor of the parties, but even today, parties have considerable sway over political funds. Parties advertise in all media; they acquire and place volunteers and interns. Parties organize issue updates and provide research services; they do their own polling on races, on issues, and on people. Parties have regular organizations of volunteers to populate a campaign or a movement. And parties put people together; they arrange meetings and luncheons and conferences that make the difference plain between which primary candidates have the party’s blessing and which ones don’t. Parties can grant legitimacy.

And when a party chair says “We wish our good friend Candidate X the best of luck in his important reelection next year,” that sends a clear message to potential donors, even if there’s no formal endorsement… a very different message than one sent by the statement “Next year will be a very challenging year; we look forward to the primary/caucus voters making a thoughtful decision as they pick our nominee!”

Which approach to take – when to get responsibly involved in a primary and when to stay responsibly out – is one of the greatest challenges for any party official. A difficult decision, but often utterly critical to the end result in the General Election in November.

Because, after all, while the individual candidate’s job is to be a good public servant if he wins, and the ideologue’s job is to advance his ideals, a party’s job is to win elections. These may all be related goals, but they are nevertheless distinct.

One of the many jobs of a political party is to consider the electorate and factor it into the year’s plans. For example, we have a lower turnout in a non-presidential year (known as a midterm election) than in a presidential election. Thus it is that the GOP did spectacularly in 2010 and 2014, but relatively poorly in 2012, even though the economic, social, and foreign policy indicators have been equally poor (and therefore, equally valid campaign issues) throughout the Obama presidency. (No, this is not to say that the different makeup of the electorate is the only reason for the presidential loss, just that it is among the reasons).

The party must therefore respond to these conditions and affect the nomination process, to the extent that it can, in a direction that helps the party select the most winnable nominee(s) for the general election in November.

One could argue that there are two kinds of voters – those who care about most or all of the races, and those who care only about the most highly publicized ones. So it is that one of the key jobs of a party is to attract its base to the polls, and to attract other voters to its side of the aisle, largely by focusing on what’s known as “the top of the ticket.”

The goal of any party is for its nominee for the top of the ticket to have “coattails” – meaning that the popularity and excitement associated with the party’s most important race in the cycle generates infectious enthusiasm, bringing in voters to vote for the candidate’s colleagues on the ballot in “less important” races too. You don’t just show up to vote for the president and leave; you hopefully vote for the state rep and state senator and county commissioner of the president’s party too, while you’re at it. Even if you don’t know them, because those races may not have registered on your personal radar screen, you don’t want to waste your trip to the polls; while you’re there, you vote for them too.

And if the top of the ticket hadn’t drawn you there, your critical votes for those other down-ballot races wouldn’t have been there to be cast either.

Different states schedule things differently; some states, like Louisiana and Virginia, hold their state constitutional officers’ elections (governor, attorney general, secretary of state, etc.) in the November of an odd year, just before the presidential primaries; others, like Illinois and Wisconsin, hold theirs in the even midterm year, halfway between presidential elections.

As a result, for such states without constitutional offices on the ballot in a presidential year, there is a president at the top of the ticket, and then perhaps a senate race if they’re lucky; otherwise the next race to generate any enthusiasm is the Congressional one.

In Illinois in 2016, every voter’s ballot will have just such precipitous drops as these: the president first, then the senate second, and then the congressman third. In Illinois, most Congressional races are in safe districts thanks to gerrymandering, with relatively few being truly contested.

But here’s the key problem: Illinois is considered – rightly or wrongly – to be a deep blue state in a presidential race. No Republican presidential candidate has carried Illinois in a generation. As much as activists (including this author) may insist that Illinois would be in play for the right candidate, the fact is that most Illinois voters don’t believe it’s possible that their vote will really matter in the presidential race.

So when it comes to the question of a “top of the ticket” that draws in voters, the senate race is the whole ball of wax in Illinois. Unless the GOP nominates a really exciting candidate for president, one whom people will vote for just for the joy of it, even if they don’t think he’ll win their states, the Illinois nominee for the U.S. Senate is the real key to bringing people to the polls for all those other races too.

If anyone wants voters to show up and support county commissioners, state reps, state senators, and all the other races on the November 2016 ballot in Illinois, he’d better hope that the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate seat currently held by Mark Kirk is perceived as exciting enough and winnable enough to draw voters to the polls.

Normally, the easy choice for a party – if it has an incumbent in the office – is to support that incumbent, and discourage challengers. This makes sense, as the incumbent usually has an immense advantage in name recognition, fundraising, contacts, organization, and respect.

But sometimes there are reasons why an incumbent is weak. History is replete with examples of incumbents recognizing that the odds are against their reelection, and stepping back to avoid the embarrassment and failure of losing the seat in November. Lyndon Johnson recognized it only after the primaries had begun in 1968; Jimmy Carter never realized it and went down to a well-deserved defeat in 1980.

This has happened repeatedly in Illinois’ U.S. Senate races, in fact. Incumbent Senator Peter Fitzgerald knew he’d have difficulty holding his seat in 2004, so he stepped aside (not anticipating how the party would blow it that summer and deliver it to future president Barack Obama). Incumbents Chuck Percy in 1984 and Carol Moseley-Braun in 1998 were both warned by others in their party to step aside for a stronger candidate; both refused, and went down to defeat in the fall.

2016 will be another such year. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, Illinois’ U.S. Senate incumbent is the Republican Party’s weakest candidate for 2016, not its strongest. Mark Kirk’s negatives – always high, but this year off the charts – virtually ensure loss of the seat if he wins re-nomination, as he seems determined to attempt, against all sane counsel.

Mark Kirk is an experienced legislator and veteran. Having served in intelligence and also as a staffer on the Hill to his mentor, former Congressman John Porter, Senator Kirk has exactly the resume that one one would expect to be a winner. His contribution to debate on foreign policy and military matters, in both the Senate and House, have often been thoughtful and positive.

Throughout his fourteen years in the legislature, Senator Kirk has always allied himself with the moderate/liberal caucus of the Republican Party. For a Chicago north shore representative, this much isn’t shocking. Illinois’ GOP has a very big tent indeed.

But unlike most legislators, Mark Kirk has gone out of his way to drive a wedge between himself and the conservative ranks. From casual comments to scripted speeches, he has made his disdain for those who hold the party platform in high regard painfully clear. His legislative voting record has earned him a miserable 57.54% ACU rating, indicating that he votes against platform conservatism almost as often as he votes for it, putting him among the worst Senators in the GOP caucus.

Again and again, he has voted wrong, not just on minor issues, but on huge ones of importance to the base, from his support for a Global Warming inspired Carbon Tax scheme at the beginning of his Senate career, to his position as the sole Republican vote against defunding of Planned Parenthood when the baby organ selling scandal broke.

Kirk has spent his career causing conservatives who “always come home to the party nominee” in November to question whether this enemy of the party and the people should perhaps be an exception to that rule. He makes good Republicans wonder whether his undependability properly puts him in the same bucket as such former senators as Arlen Specter and Jim Jeffords, people so dangerous to the cause that we’d actually be better off with a Democrat holding the seat.

For many, the party loyalty argument goes an incredibly long way, and perhaps rightfully so. But Mark Kirk himself voided that argument in 2014, when he refused to support the GOP nominee against his seatmate, Democrat Whip Dick Durbin.

In a move that amazed political onlookers of all stripes, Mark Kirk refused to support Illinois State Senator Jim Oberweis in his bid to unseat Dick Durbin for the other Illinois seat in the U.S. Senate.

Instead, Kirk amazingly endorsed Durbin for reelection. It hardly needs mention that it is utterly inconceivable that the uber-partisan Durbin would return such a favor. Kirk’s apostasy on this matter forever lost him the support of all those who had only been voting for him out of party loyalty all along; not just conservatives but Republicans of all stripes shook the dust of the Kirk campaign off their sandals over a year ago, and will never consider supporting him in any way again. And rightly so.

Mark Kirk won his Senate seat in 2010 with a minority of the vote. He defeated Democrat Alexi Giannoulias with a margin of only 48% to the Democrat’s 46%... third party candidate made up the remaining six points.

Monday morning quarterbacking is of course always imprecise and sometimes unfair, but there are certain lessons from this example. Kirk was then an ethically-unblemished five-term Congressman and veteran; Giannoulias was a Chicago pol known even to the liberal mainstream media as “the mob’s banker.” Unusual for the mainstream media in modern America, the press actually sided with Kirk in 2010, and he still couldn’t make it to fifty percent against a Chicago Democrat tarred with a two-bit role on the wrong side of the banking crisis!

In addition, remember what a year 2010 was. We’re talking about the same day that Republicans captured the governorships of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Republicans took eleven governorships away from the Democrats across the country that day, but Mark Kirk couldn’t even get to fifty percent with the media’s help.

The party leadership – which had successfully talked other big name Republicans out of the primary in 2010 on the argument that Kirk was the strongest possible choice – has to admit that they were wrong. Their argument was based on the theory that with Mark Kirk on top of the ticket, he’d have coattails, helping win the governorship and hopefully one house in Springfield. That certainly happened elsewhere in the country that day… but not in Illinois.

Mark Kirk is a loner in politics. He is a man without coattails… in a year and a state in which coattails are a critical prerequisite. The Republican Party of Illinois cannot afford people at the top of the ticket who don’t work as a team with the rest of the ticket and bring downballot victories along in the wake of their victories.

This is a difficult issue to discuss, because an analyst must be fair… but it must be said: Mark Kirk is not healthy enough to run a vigorous campaign. He was elected at the prime of health, able to live the challenging life of a statewide candidate, traveling, walking, and giving speeches from dawn until late at night. This is no Rhode Island or Vermont; Illinois is a big state with a lot of ground to cover; a candidate must be healthy to run a campaign.

But Mark Kirk’s stroke took him out of the senate for a full year, and while his recuperation has been worthy of compliment, it is far from complete. His speech isn’t fully back, his energy will obviously never return, and he’s lost even the limited filter that he previously managed over his sometimes outlandish commentary.

His opponent will be able to mop the floor with him in debate, but even besides that, the normal day today rigor of a campaign is simply beyond him. A one-term senator cannot run a rose garden campaign, and that, frankly, is all that he is now capable of.

Nobody is as conscious of his health challenges as Kirk himself, as he struggles to talk and walk every hour of every day. His insistence on running this Quixotic campaign is therefore inexplicable, unless he thinks himself to be the 21st century version of New York’s Jacob Javits… but there is no similarity. Illinois is bluer than New York was in those days, and even wheelchair-bound, Javits was a far stronger campaigner than Kirk has a prayer of being in 2016. And Javits lost his race when he was still in better health than the much younger Mark Kirk is today.

Mark Kirk deserves to retire on disability. Whatever a voter may think of his voting record and his frequent alliances with the Left, all must acknowledge that his legislative and naval service entitle him to a dignified retirement.

But they don’t entitle him to a renomination certain to go down in flames in November, possibly taking the majority with him in what is sure to be terribly challenging year for the GOP’s U.S. Senate prospects.

The issue is clear: The Republican Party needs to nominate someone else in Illinois in 2016. One question is who… but first, an earlier question must be resolved: will it be with the party’s support or over the party’s proverbial dead body?

At this writing, both the national and state Republican Party apparatus are all-in for a Mark Kirk re-nomination. There are many possible reasons why, some too depressing to contemplate, but it’s worth stressing that the state and national party’s reasons may indeed be very different.

The national party tends to take its cue on such matters from the state party. The farther you get from Washington, the more likely the RNC is to assume that locals can better gauge the lay of the land than they can. And yes, in most cases, this is probably true.

But not in this case. For whatever reason the state party is still discouraging challengers, the fact is that a Kirk nomination will both doom the seat and deny everyone downballot of every a prayer of their needed coattails effect. The national party needs to overrule the state in this case, and send out the word, to PACs and other donor databases, that Illinois needs an open primary.

The donors will come… and so will the candidates… but only when the party sends out the word that it’s okay. Maybe it shouldn’t be that way, but we’re living in Realville, so let’s acknowledge the fact.

The question is therefore how to get there? How do we send the word that Kirk is unacceptable and a primary is needed?

The logical way is for the party’s grassroots to make it known. Illinois has 102 counties. Many of those counties, particularly the most populous ones, have party organizations at the township level.

If we want to have a chance at holding this Senate seat in 2016, each and every party organization needs to vote on a resolution, short and sweet:

“Resolved; in the interest of holding Illinois’ sole seat in the U.S. Senate, this organization calls for a vigorous primary to select a new nominee – other than the incumbent – who can win in November.”

It becomes plainer every day that a new nominee is needed, and it has now become clear that this is the only way to get the national party to see reason on the matter. The national party cannot possibly deny such a call from dozens – or hopefully even a majority – of the party organizations across Illinois.

Grassroots have been responsible for many of the key electoral victories that Republicans have enjoyed. Remember that the party leadership stood in the way of Illinois’ favorite son, Ronald Reagan, until the grassroots won him the nomination in 1980 so he could win us his two landslide elections.

John F. Di Leo is a Chicago-based trade compliance expert and writer. A former movement conservative activist during the Reagan era, he served in leadership roles in the Maine Township Republican Organization in the 1980s and as Milwaukee County Republican Chairman in the mid 1990s.

Permission is hereby granted to forward freely, provided it is uncut and the IR URL and byline are included. Follow John F. Di Leo on Facebook or LinkedIn, or on Twitter at @johnfdileo, or on his own page at www.johnfdileo.com.

My mom told me she’s gonna ask a newly elected State Rep she knows from pro-life circles to run against him, Peter Breen. He beat RINO State Rep Sandy Pihos last year to win his job.

I doubt he’ll leave it to tilt at Kirk though.

Superb analysis, and well written..

“The national GOP apparatus is all in for Kirk”...and that’s a perfect example of the hypocrisy rampant inside the Beltway. Joni Ernst, who introduced the bill to defund Planned Parenthood, and was one of its most passionate advocates, is also a Vice Chair of the NRSC. So now she, along with Tom Cotton will will be allocating resources and money to Kirk’s campaign. That’s disgusting, and total madness. There are so many other races we should be focusing on.

Kirk is obviously scum, and everyone knew it all along. But would it really be better if Alexi Giannoulias was the Senator in Illinois? At least Kirk is good for an occasional vote.

Do you live in Illinois ? The Combine is the corrupt bipartisan cabal that has effectively controlled state politics for decades. It dictates who will run for office and who won’t, who will be allowed to win and who won’t. When the rare instance that a non-Combiner wins a race (such as Sen. Peter Fitzgerald in 1998), their mission is to destroy said candidate and either defeat them or run them out of office (or the state). Fitzgerald faced 6 straight years of non-stop attacks from Combiner thugs (led by “Republican” Ray LaHood). He opted not to run for a second term in 2004 because he was fed up with having to fight both the mostly Combiner Democrats and the Combiner-infested corrupt GOP. This paved the way for Zero to get his Senate seat and then the Presidency. LaHood’s reward for doing so was a Cabinet seat, given to him by Zero on a silver platter for running Fitzgerald out of office.

Without the Combine, you’d have never had Zero end up as President.

I agree that Sen. Kirk should lose. On June 6, Ron Wallace, a conservative, who has lived in Northbrook and Wilmette, announced that he’s running in that race. Since then, he was interviewed on a Bloomington radio station, and he got some county coordinators. Unlike Kirk, Wallace is pro-life, pro-gun rights, anti-illegal alien, pro-tax cuts, and pro-spending cuts. If you use facebook, please like his page, “Ron Wallace for U.S. Senate.” If you use twitter, please follow him @Vote4Wallace. He has about 27,000 followers.

You’re right. Just looked at Heritage. Duckworth got an 18% rating and Kirk’s was 17%.

http://www.heritageactionscorecard.com//state/state/il

Pretty sad when the rat has a higher rating as a conservative. I noticed that Kirk is already running commercials, he can blow all the money he wants it won’t change a thing.

It it weren’t for the combine we could primary him out.

Problem is that we need an independently wealthy individual to run, someone who is willing to take on the bipartisan corruption (a la Trump). If they don’t have any $$, you can write them off. Who in IL is up for said challenge ?

Ron Wallace, a conservative who has lived in Northbrook and Wilmette, announced, on June 6, that he’s running for the U.S. Senate. Since then, he was interviewed on a Bloomington radio station, and he got some county coordinators, including for Lake, Will, and McLean Counties. The Aug. 5 issue of the Glenview Journal has an article about him. On Thurs., he was interviewed by the Daily Herald political editor. I don’t know how much money Ron has, but, since he’s lived in rich suburbs, he probably knows some rich Republicans who will donate to his campaign.

If you use facebook, please like his page, “Ron Wallace for U.S. Senate.” If you use twitter, please follow him @Vote4Wallace. He has about 28,000 followers.

I’m sure he’s a fine man, but he’s going to need probably in the range of $10 million, perhaps higher, in order to be remotely competitive (and that just for the primary).

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