Replies

the candidate chooses a campaign manager who finds staff and volunteers to run a statewide campaign.

Last Friday at the Crook County GOP Convention:

Oberweis fans Freeper DMZFrank Penn and Angel Garcia were everywhere as were others i don't know so well. Freeper ChicagoLady and Rick Beseida were positive to Oberweis.

Toopinka patronage were highly sophisticated and effective.

Bill Hogan was trying to help Brady, but IMO, not effectively. Brady's staffer Joe Beveridge seemed clueless as to what to do. A lot of doing nothing.

Rauschenberger was the only one I saw talking up Gidwitz. With the Gidwitz money, where was the staff? I don't even know who his staff are.

It's a Toopinka - Oberweis race. Toopinka has her vote. She can't gain or lose much from that static number. She knows precisely who they are. For example, she will get 95% of the absentee ballot vote and that will be 30% of her total vote. That is sophisticated organization.

Oberweis will have to do better down the stretch to win. He'll have to do better than 5% of the absentee vote...I'd say at least 20%... But I don't see it yet. He'll have to do better at registering many in his base who are not registered.

For example, the largest conservative event of the year, Pro-Life SpeakOut is Sat Jan 28. At a previous SpeakOut, I polled the attendees and found 33% were not registered to vote and another 33% had no clue who they were going to vote for in the primary despite them having a clear choice between a pro-life and pro-abort candidate. I suspect things can only be worse now. Pro-Lifers are notorious for not voting in Illinois. Oberweis needs to change that to win.

Jim Leahy is listed as the Oberweis grassroots organizer. He is a great guy. But so far, I haven't seen any results from him.

Gidwitz and Brady can only play the role of spoiler... or as the Palatine people aptly put it... the Warren Kostka role. Their only chance of doing even moderately well is if Oberweis continues to not "stay-on-message" and "frame-the-issue" and "set-the-agenda" which then results in a poorly phrased sound bite.

Gidwitz is a much worse candidate than he would be governor. He would be great on anti-corruption, taxes, spending, deregulation. He is pro-life on all the "fringe" issues that the state can touch. He is only pro-choice on the issues in the Roberts-Alito ballpark.