Gov. Bruce Rauner is putting tens of millions of dollars of his personal wealth into campaigns to swing some Illinois General Assembly seats to the Republican side, and Democrats are tapping their big donors -- unions and attorneys -- to match.
A lot of the money is going into small races that you normally wouldn’t hear a lot about.
Almost all the money is flowing to just a few races that are actually competitive -- like the 23rd State Senate district in DuPage County, just south of O’Hare Airport. It was a Republican seat for a long time, until Democrat Tom Cullerton won the seat four years ago.
“I was probably the number one target the moment I won this seat,” Cullerton said. He’s being challenged by Republican Seth Lewis.
Both are going pound for pound when it comes to bringing in the money.
Lewis has brought in $1.7 million in the past three months. He says he’s spending a lot of it to get his name out there.
“There are more people to hear our message so that when we go to the door, people know who Seth Lewis is,” he said.
In that same time period, Cullerton has brought in $1.5 million. That’s almost 10 times as much as he raised in the final months of his campaign four years ago when he won.
“Obviously we’re able to get our message out a little bit better this time,” he said. “Mail is something we’ve been able to invest in.”
Mail. In the internet age, a lot of the campaign money is devoted to mailboxes.
Steve McKee, an Uber driver waiting for riders at the Roselle Metra station recently, doesn’t even look at campaign mailings.
“It goes from my mailbox to the garbage,” he says. “Doesn’t even make it in the house ... it’s a waste of time.”
He says he also tunes out TV ads.
But actually talking to someone face-to-face? That’s something he’s closer to remembering – although he wasn’t sure whose campaign sign he agreed to put in his front yard.
“I’m trying to think,” he laughs. “I see the sign every day so it’s ... I’m thinking Mellman.”
Possibly Mussman?
“Mussman, yeah,” McKee agreed. “She’s a state representative. She goes to Springfield.”
Democratic strategist Tom Bowen says that actually walking the district and talking to voters is widely seen as the most effective use of a candidate’s time.
“The winner of campaigns for state rep and state senate are the candidates that not only knock the most doors, but are the best in those interactions with voters,” he said.
But a candidate can’t physically knock on 80,000 doors -- which is why mailers, TV ads and the money become so important.
Considering how many credit solicitations a person receives, Bowen said, mail isn’t as crazy as it may seem.
“When you go tear up those credit card applications,” he said, “these are the biggest corporations in America with the largest budgets to spend and they still do it, right? That’s ’cause it works.”
Bowen says that. even if a voter like Uber driver Steve McKee only sees the mailer for a second before pitching it, it’s still a second that’s spent thinking about the message the campaign wants to send.
“At the end of the day, mail is extremely well-targeted to the exact number of voters who will show up in the election,” Bowen said, “and, with modern advances in our voter files, we have a pretty good idea of who the swing voters are so we can target it even better.”
And the TV ads are similarly targeted, although you may have seen ads for candidates you don’t know or don’t live in their district -- and yet they’re advertising throughout the entire region.
That may seem like a waste of money, but Bowen says more people in the district will see those ads than almost anything else.
And this is where the campaign spending will remain, at least for the near-term.
“Until that sort of changes, where you know, on Netflix or something like that, you can run an ad on it,” he said, “TV is still gonna be the medium that we choose to communicate.”
TV is still what voters see and absorb, even more than ads on Facebook or your favorite website.
That means that, even if you’re tired of seeing political commercials on TV, the campaigns are only doing it because they know you’re still watching.