POLITICS
HOW THE RUNOFF WAS WON
WILLIAM ALATRISTE
LETITIA JAMES’ GROUND OPERATION AND LABOR SUPPORT STEERED HER TO VICTORY IN THE PUBLIC ADVOCATE RUNOFF
Democratic public advocate nominee Letitia James celebrating with supporters after her runoff victory.
BY NICK POWELL
R
unoff elections have a tendency to be unpredictable, with outcomes depending entirely on a slice of the voting population that pays better attention to electoral politics than most. With that in mind, most prognosticators foresaw a tight runoff between Democratic New York City public advocate candidates City Councilwoman Letitia James and state Sen. Daniel Squadron, but when the results rolled in James won by 19 points. The surprising outcome provokes the question: How did a candidate who consistently struggled to raise money throughout the campaign, and lacked the name recognition of her opponent, step up her game so late in the race to win in such a commanding fashion? Let’s rewind to late June, when one of the only public polls of the race was conducted, showing James essentially tied for the lead with her Democratic opponent Cathy Guerriero, and well ahead of Squadron and former deputy public advocate Reshma Saujani. James was unequivocally the labor candidate in the field, with every major union, both public and private, giving her their endorsement. James, however, was suffering from poor fundraising, especially compared to the well-heeled Squadron and Saujani, who had raked in money from real estate developers and Wall Street, respectively. “Tish’s Achilles heel the entire campaign 36 OCTOBER 7, 2013 | cityandstateny.com
is that she could never rub two nickels together,” said a source close to James. “She could never quite figure out the operation to expand her fundraising base beyond the fundraising base she’s had for her entire political career. When you’re in that situation, you’re in a triage situation, every single dollar becomes, ‘Do we spend it on this?’, or ‘Do we spend it on that?’ as opposed to, ‘Do we have a solid fully funded media plan and a fully funded field plan?’ You’re constantly, on a daily basis, making choices between the two.” Campaign observers also say that James’ sluggish primary campaign was partially a byproduct of the splintering of the city’s unions in the Democratic mayoral contest. Even though James had a deep well of labor support, tapping into the unions’ resources was difficult with their interests focused primarily on electing their preferred mayoral candidate. And with the public advocate race being a distant third priority for labor, James was fighting an uphill battle trying to get the unions to devote resources to her campaign. As a consequence, on Primary Day James did not have the benefit of a fullforce, get-out-the-vote operation on the part of the unions—their most powerful weapon. Even so, she pulled off a tight 36 percent first-place finish, though she fell short of the 40 percent threshold necessary to avoid a runoff. With James’ fundraising still lagging, sources say her campaign realized it would
have to shift strategy to pull out a win in the runoff. “[The James campaign] recognized that this was about ... picking pockets of turf [where] they could run a substantial ground game and drive up turnout in certain portions of the electorate where Tish was strong,” said Nathan Smith, a founding partner at Red Horse Strategies, a political consulting firm hired by the campaign to help coordinate their field operation during the runoff. “The question was how are they gonna do that? A coalition of folks kind of came together.” Those groups included, most notably, the Working Families Party—James was first elected to the Council on the party’s line—SEIU 32BJ, and the activist 501(c)(4) Make The Road Action Fund, with further assistance from Red Horse and Metropolitan Public Strategies, a consulting firm run by Neal Kwatra, the former political director for the Hotel Trades Council. In less than two weeks, these various players essentially divided the city up into sections based on high concentrations of African-American and Latino voters, hoping to drive up turnout in areas that would benefit James. The Working Families Party, with its reputable ground game, played a leadership role in James’ field program and coordinated some of her canvassing efforts. Red Horse ran an African-American voter canvass for the last ten days of the campaign, sending 60 people every day to neighborhoods in central Brooklyn, south-
east Queens, the Bronx and Harlem. “In a low turnout election like this if you can talk to 10,000 voters, that’s 5 or 6 percent of [the runoff] electorate that showed up,” Smith said. Make the Road and 32BJ focused on turning out Latino neighborhoods. 32BJ President Hector Figueroa noted that while Latino voters were less familiar with James during the primary, his membership— which is largely Hispanic—warmed to her thanks to some solid voter education. “When we started supporting Tish, one of the things we learned was that Latino voters who learned about her record and became familiar with the kind of issues she was fighting for, responded very, very well,” Figueroa explained. To that end, Figueroa leaned on voter data from past elections in 2005 and 2009 to determine which voter blocs were most likely to vote in the primary, while also directing canvassers to call and remind some 25,000 32BJ members to vote. Of course, the James campaign was also helped by a late gaffe from the Squadron campaign regarding an anonymous robocall that attacked James for allegedly failing to donate her Council lulu to charity as she had promised she would. Squadron at first brushed aside being behind the call when asked about it in a televised interview, but later in the same interview seemed to admit that he was responsible for it. While the dust-up might have been too “inside baseball” for the average voter, it helped fuel the perception that James was building steam in the final days of the campaign. “[The robocall] certainly backfired and was something we used to energize our team and build on that,” said Matt Rey, a junior partner at Red Horse. The rest, as they say, is history. James cruised to an easy victory over Squadron, defeating him largely along ethnic lines, sweeping the city’s African-American and Latino neighborhoods, and picking up votes in Squadron strongholds such as brownstone Brooklyn and pockets of the Upper West Side of Manhattan. On the heels of de Blasio’s victory in the mayoral primary, Figueroa observed that the profile of the public advocate’s position has grown. However, he insisted that for most voters it was James’ narrative as an agent of change—a message that has proven particularly resonant this year— which brought them out to support her. “Working people, low income, people of color, women, feeling like they had a stake in this election,” said Figueroa, “I think that made a big difference for her.”