Connolly’s mistakes: Focusing on one issue and playing nice
The funny thing about elections is that the moment they are over we look back and regard their results as inevitable. Actually, we do this with much of life. It was hardly inevitable that the Red Sox won the 2013 World Series. But for a few well-timed hits (particularly a three-run homer by Gomes in Game 4), the Duck Boats wouldn’t have been rolling on Boylston Street. But now in our mind’s eye we think the Sox a team of destiny.
The same is true of Boston’s mayoral race. Loser John Connolly says
he has no regrets — “I would run it the same way” — but, with a margin
of only 4,908 votes separating him from winner Marty Walsh, the result
was hardly foreordained. There are two big lessons to be drawn from the
Connolly-Walsh matchup. One is that single-issue candidacies are
perilous. The second is that playing nice is no formula for success.
The one thing almost all voters knew about Connolly was that he would be the “education mayor.” Education had been his theme ever since he entered politics, and he based his entire candidacy around the need for dramatic reform of Boston’s schools. That’s great and worthwhile, but it’s not enough.
Education reform is like environmental protection: Everyone agrees with it in general, but there are a lot of disputes about the specifics. As bad as Boston schools might be, there are many people — and a lot of them Boston voters — with a stake in the current system. That includes school teachers, administrators, and even those with children in the system who, having figured out how to make it work for themselves, don’t want to rock the boat. Small changes are fine; wholesale reform scares them.
Then too, there are a lot of folks unmoved by the issue. Cities and towns around Massachusetts frequently try for overrides of Proposition 2 ½ to boost school spending. Almost always, the vote cuts across demographic lines: people with young kids vote yes, those without kids — or those whose kids are grown up — vote no. Senior citizens, for example, are one of the biggest and most reliable voting blocs in Boston. For them, education reform was far down the list; they could legitimately worry that spending more on schools would mean less spending less on their own needs.
Connolly had probably already won over the city’s young moms and dads back when he first announced in February. A better approach — and one that Walsh took in the final — would have been to drop the unrelenting focus on education and start playing interest-group politics. Identify voting blocs, find out what they wanted, and woo them. It’s not necessarily the most inspiring strategy. But coalition-building wins elections. Just ask the mayor-elect.
Winning campaigns are also unafraid to put on brass knuckles. Walsh was the beneficiary of an enormous amount of outside spending. That spending got him a lot, from TV ads to paid pollworkers, helping Walsh get his message out and also allowing him to go negative without actually seeming to get his hands dirty. (His hands were dirty though; no one involved in politics really believes that independent expenditures are truly independent.)
Connolly should have done the same. In August an outside group, Stand for Children, announced it would spend $500,000 on Connolly’s behalf. After some dithering, Connolly stood on principle, saying outside money shouldn’t be involved and forced the group to back off. It made a good sound bite, but unless your opponent plays by the same rules, it’s more like unilateral disarmament. Money matters in elections. All things being equal (and these were two remarkably equal candidates) the guy with the most money wins. Put differently, consider this: Could a half million or more of additional spending have swayed 2,455 voters? My guess is yes — and if so, Connolly would be the one taking office in January.
I know. All of this sounds a bit cynical. Why not run on grand issues like education? Why not take principled stands in favor of clean and positive elections? The answers lie in the results. Connolly’s campaign was a test case for those approaches, and he lost. Future candidates take note.
This column originally appeared in The Boston Sunday Globe on November 10, 2013.