By Adam Pagnucco.
Part One discussed the methodology of this series, which summarizes my sources’ opinions on the most influential endorsements in MoCo elections. Soon, we will start hearing from them.
But first, a few comments from me.
I remember the first MoCo gubernatorial Democratic primary in which I voted. It was 2006 and I had just started helping my old neighborhood advocate for a new Metro entrance at Forest Glen. (Sadly, nearly twenty years later, construction has still not started.) I started meeting candidates, reviewing their websites and receiving a little bit of their mail. (Most candidates don’t mail new voters a lot.) I was trying to be a diligent voter but I had a problem: it was hard to tell them apart.
Yes, I could detect differences in gender, race, age and biography. The latter is important to me, in part because it tells me how they served the community before running for office. But their policy platforms were mostly identical. They wanted to improve schools, fix traffic congestion (good luck with that!), protect civil rights, uphold progressive values and so on. But how were they different, particularly in what they would do for me, the voter?
Endorsements were one way I could tell them apart. I had not heard of most of the local organizations. I liked union endorsements because, at the time, I worked in the labor movement. I knew who the Sierra Club was. I respected teachers. Mostly, I saw an alphabet soup of logos on some websites, a handful of logos on others and few or zero on more than a few. I figured if a candidate couldn’t get any endorsements at all, they probably had no shot to win. It was my first election, so what did I know? But endorsements meant a little something to me because it gave me a hint of who these folks aligned with.
Years later, my hierarchy of endorsements depends on what they bring to the table. The best of them come from organizations that are 1. Known to voters, 2. Capable of generating field activity and 3. Able to contribute money to candidates or to independent expenditure campaigns. As for the latter, don’t be fooled into thinking that public campaign financing has cracked down on interest group political spending. All it has done is divert that spending into independent committees. (I discussed that in my series on public financing.) If an endorsement possesses one of the above three assets, it’s useful. If it has two, it’s more than useful. And if it has all three, well, you’re going to really want it. The consensus of my sources is in rough agreement with that hierarchy.
Many of my sources not only picked what they believed to be the most influential endorsements – they also beat up on what they believed to be the least influential ones! Those comments made for fun reading, but maybe I should save them for a different series. (Yeah, I know you’re going to tell me I’m a joy killer!) I thought this source was on target:
Montgomery County political discourse is mostly ~500 people talking to each other. Most organizational endorsements are just circulated among this group and persuade very few. The actually influential endorsements break through the bubble to members of the community who aren’t plugged in and rely on those endorsements to make their choice.
Yes, pretty much. That’s the point of this series: with so many individuals and groups endorsing, which ones can really break through the bubble? My sources will start naming names in Part Three!