Election results no big mystery
Kootenai County Reagan Republicans huddled Thursday to determine what went so very wrong for their candidates in the Nov. 5 local elections.
Jeff Ward, co-founder of the organization and co-owner of Strategery - a business that consults with and assists Republican candidates with their campaigns - concluded that the Reagan Republicans' message was not conservative enough. He also accused the media, namely The Press and Spokesman-Review, of being biased in their reporting. Ward recommended that Reagan Republicans need to send stronger, even more conservative messages in future campaigns.
Ward helps support his family with the money he makes through Strategery, so it could be said he has more to lose than anyone if his assessment is wrong. For the sake of open discussion and - we hope - less partisanship in local elections in the future, we offer several observations.
Strategery for years has relied heavily on delivering its messages via direct mail to Kootenai County residents who have voted Republican in the past. The lower the turnout, the better Reagan Republican-endorsed candidates fared. Not so anymore.
In the Coeur d'Alene School District elections last spring, the RR-backed candidates all lost. On Nov. 5, every single RR-endorsed candidate lost - almost all of them by substantial margins. (Betty Ann Henderson, who won re-election to Post Falls City Council, was endorsed by the Reagan Republicans but rejected that endorsement because the elections are supposed to be nonpartisan.)
Partially in protest, the RR- and Strategery-backed candidates avoided advertising in the region's two daily newspapers, relying instead on direct mail and, in the case of mayoral candidate Mary Souza, a print campaign in the Nickel's Worth. The Nickel's Worth is owned by the Cowles family of Spokane - the same family that owns the Spokesman-Review, which endorsed Souza's opponent, Steve Widmyer. With help from Balance North Idaho and its marketing arm, Range, the winning candidates all advertised in The Press and on cdapress.com. That's not a sales pitch; it's a fact.
More fundamentally, an increasing number of residents don't want local elections mired in the political muck that has made such a mess of partisanship-poisoned state and national elections. Conscientious voters want to know what individual candidates have done and how they think, not what party they belong to. Is it remotely possible the winning candidates were victorious because they're more qualified?
We doubt that our analysis will elicit more than scowls and scorn from certain parties. That's OK. Ward can tune us out, but he should heed the wisdom coming from within his own group.
At Thursday's debriefing, highly respected former Idaho legislator Gary Ingram offered this salient synopsis: "People don't like to be around angry people."
The difference between winning and getting your rear kicked could be as simple as that.