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Fresh off an exhilarating victory in a highly contested 2015
general election, Mayor Paula Hicks-Hudson has, because of
the state of the City’s finances, begun to focus on phase
two of her agenda and leadership strategy.
While the mayor’s attention is necessarily turned to the
budget process and the selection of a leadership team of her
own choosing, it makes sense for Hicks-Hudson and others to
also utilize the rear-view mirror for insights on
successfully navigating future legs of the journey occurring
in 2016, 2017 and beyond.
Here are five things we learned from the November 3, 2015
election that inform our future.
1.
The Power of Unity
For the first time in several decades, a
broad but unified Lucas County Democratic Party machine
coalesced around a single candidate to enable Paula
Hicks-Hudson to become the first African-American
woman to be elected mayor of Toledo. Although the coalition
of building trades unions endorsed
former Mayor
Carty Finkbeiner, they basically stayed on the sidelines and
didn’t actively campaign for any specific candidate.
Meanwhile, Ohio Democratic Party
Chairman David Pepper and
Vice
Chairman Nina Turner spent time
with the mayor and contributed critical support.
The Lucas County Democratic Party
headquarters was abuzz with phone and volunteer activity
from morning to night and months out from the election up
through election day. This massive volunteer effort and
Party support accrued almost exclusively to the benefit of
the mayor.
2.
The Power of a Professional Ground Game
Field work wins campaigns and Hicks-Hudson
had the best field game in town. The decision to pay for an
“adult professional campaign manager to perform
sophisticated polling and do the things that matter instead
of buying and distributing fingernail files” rescued what
many saw up to that point as a “non-functioning” campaign.
Taking a page out of the Obama play book, the
new “grown-up” Hicks-Hudson campaign utilized polling and
historical voting data to target likely voters and their
voting behaviors. The campaign was also able to attract
anonymous outside funding which helped to develop and test a
message that would move the largest numbers of possible
voters and get that message to the target audience. The
financial resources also enabled Hicks-Hudson to obtain more
TV media time than the other candidates.
The effective ground game
combined with the party endorsement, political support,
independent financial expenditures and the incumbency proved
too much for Mayor Hicks-Hudson’s political adversaries to
overcome in what ultimately became a war of attrition.
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Smart, Not Hard, Work Gets Results
Some candidates who were
more visible and appearing to work harder at campaigning
failed to obtain results commensurate with their efforts.
Old school tactics such as weaving through traffic at busy
intersections, blindly knocking on doors, flooding
neighborhoods with yard signs and other campaign methods of
the past often increase a candidate’s visibility but fail to
persuade voters to vote for them. However, contemporary
methods that “target” the 180,000 local registered or likely
voters and those known to actually reside in the City of
Toledo are much more efficient and effective.
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Peace in the Storm
The perfect storm that
included the passing of three former Toledo mayors within a
matter of months, the ecological and environmental threat to
our drinking water posed by the algae bloom, and the
potential looming economic storm of Fiat Chrysler’s
yet-to-be announced production decision reduced voters’
appetite for the loud, aggressive, divisive politics of the
past.
Instead, voters were
hungry for stability and the reasonable, calm political
style of Hicks-Hudson. Many voters, who had been undecided,
ultimately were influenced by her personal and political
consistency after such a traumatic 13 months and then the
eight months after the death of Mayor D. Michael Collins.
5. Pot is not Past
The overwhelming failure
of Issue 3 to pass on November 3 does not mean NO. Rather,
it means NOT YET. Ohio will eventually legalize the use of
marijuana, either for medical purposes, general use or both.
From a social justice
standpoint, the problems of the over-incarceration of people
of color as a result of racialized, targeted enforcement of
drug laws and killings related to turf wars still exist.
In addition, Responsible
Ohio, the proponents of marijuana legalization in Ohio, also
underestimated the amount of “non-theological” black
opposition concerning the impact of legalization upon the
underground economy, one which enables much of the
underserved community to survive.
“I think it
is really foul that so many of our brothers and sisters have
been incarcerated for marijuana possession until “somebody”
decided that they wanted to turn it into a legitimate
industry. So, "we" are criminalized, off ramped for
developing the underground trafficking systems... then
"they" come along, take them over with “clean records” and
are designated profitable business men and women. Simply
FOUL,” I have been told.
Perhaps Issue 3 was not
the right solution, but a solution to this and other issues
will have to be found if our continued journey is to be
survivable.
Contact Rev. Donald Perryman, D.Min, at
drdlperryman@centerofhopebaptist.org
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