Campaign Debrief

In 2018, I ran for Congress in Washington’s Second Congressional District. This is to provide an overview of the District and the campaign and to offer observations that may be of use to future campaigns.

Characteristics of the District

In 2018, Washington’s Second Congressional District included all of the city of Bellingham as well as the cities of Anacortes, Marysville, Arlington, Everett, Mukilteo, Lynnwood, Brier and Mountlake Terrace. It includes Whatcom County south of Bellingham, all of Island and San Juan Counties, and the western portions of Skagit and Snohomish Counties. The distance from Bellingham to Mountlake Terrace is about 75 miles and can take between one and a quarter and two hours to drive on the Interstate, depending on traffic. Everett is the largest city in the District (110,000) followed by Bellingham (90,000).

In prior years, the Democratic incumbent, who has been in office since 2001, has received over half the vote in the primary. Most Republican candidates have averaged about 30% of the vote in the primary. Progressive candidates collectively had received about 9% of the vote.

Like nearly all of Washington’s Congressional (and Legislative) Districts, the Second is heavily gerrymandered to favor the reelection of the incumbent.

The total population of the district is about 740,000.

There are 420,000 registered voters in the District, of which Snohomish County accounts for well over half.

As in many other districts, older voters are far more likely to register, and if registered, to vote, especially in primaries.

The District’s economy is strongly dependent on war. Boeing is a major employer and two Navy bases are located there (Naval Station Everett and Whidbey Island Naval Air Station). The north-south Interstate I-5 is congested morning and evening with workers going to and from work.

Bellingham, with its peace vigil that has been being conducted weekly since the 60s and a City Council that has declared the city a “Troops Home” city, is something of an opposing pole. Western Washington University is another source of “left” opinion in the city. Bellingham has also undertaken a few, tentative initiatives to reduce dependence on cars with all their social, ecological and safety threats.

Campaign Timeline

The following table provides an overview of the events of the campaign. From start to finish the whole thing was just seven months.

How the Effort Began

I was first approached by Scott Thompson, a longtime friend from the Whatcom Greens, currently serving on the Washington Greens’ Coordinating Committee, in January of 2018. Scott and I discussed the possibility among ourselves and then with others among the Whatcom Greens, and I decided to proceed.

The Campaign Team

Ideally the campaign team would have consisted of a campaign manager, a treasurer, a field director, a social media producer, a database organizer, a volunteer-coordinator, and numerous volunteers for signature-gathering, door-knocking and phone-banking.  In practice there were many who did valuable specific jobs, but were unable to provide the sustained effort needed for a full-scale campaign. Among those who helped I would mention my daughter and her friends at Western Washington University who set up the social media. Doug Gustafson set up the campaign website and developed campaign graphics. My daughter, a mature art and design student at Western Washington University, also developed some good campaign graphics. Lizzy Anthony worked up the graphical side of the Twitter account and supplied some initial content.

The one who contributed the most to the campaign by far was Scott Thompson, who became de facto campaign manager, treasurer, and perennial support in door-belling and numerous other tasks. As I decided to stop using or even having a car in 2002, Scott was the one who transported me in nearly all cases to anywhere outside Bellingham itself. We spent a great deal of time on I-5 going to various places in Snohomish County.

By contrast, the incumbent corporate Democrat hired the first person for his campaign staff in October of 2017, and hired two more in June of 2018.

The Opposition

A notable feature of this election was that no conventional Republican filed to run. Marc Henneman, who was the Republican who had filed in 2016, told me that he had received no support from the Republican Party in that year and was unwilling to file in 2018 because he had received no indication that the Republicans would support him in 2018 either. This is perhaps a measure of how thoroughly the district is gerrymandered.

As a result, the candidates participating in the primary were:

My platform and Collin’s were very similar. At candidate forums, we often said that each would support the other if one of us became the incumbent’s opposition in the general election.

Brian Luke had also run in 2016, when he received 3.4% of the vote.

Campaign Strategy

The focus of my campaign was the August primary. The hope was to survive the top-two primary and be able to face off against the corporate Democrat incumbent in the general election.

What I hoped to do was inspire Post-Millennials and Millennials to register and to vote, building on the success of Bernie Sanders’ success with these age groups.

A major campaign tool was the Progressive Change Institute survey which showed that as much as 80% of likely voters across the political spectrum supported a long list of programs that neither Democrats nor Republicans in Congress were working to enact. The survey is attached. A few of the programs on the list:

• Fair Trade that Protects Workers, the Environment, and Jobs – 75%
• End Gerrymandering – 73%
• Medicare Buy-In for All – 71%
• Debt-Free College at All Public Universities – 71%
• Expand Social Security Benefits – 70%
• Green New Deal – Millions of Clean-Energy Jobs – 70%
• Free Community College – 63%
• Tax the Rich – 50% Reagan Rate – 59%
• Minimum Guaranteed Income – 59%
• Break Up the Big Banks – 58%

To reach the younger voters, I was advised to use social media. For one thing the bulk of voters of all ages were distant from where I live in Bellingham. For another, voters in these age groups were used to receiving information about the world by this means. My daughter and her friends at Western Washington University proceeded to set up accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, Tumblr and Instagram.

All of these were largely or completely unfamiliar to me, as was the technology for producing good quality video and audio as content.

One wrinkle in the use of Facebook is the possibility of paying a fee to Facebook so that your message appears as an ad to a wider audience in a given geographical area. The wrinkle is that when  Facebook detects a political advertisement it blocks the ad until the issuer goes through a verification process showing that the issuer is a US resident. I was not aware of the ad possibility until late in the campaign, at which point the complexities of the verification process were too great to overcome. There is a second question, namely, to what extent such a campaign would be successful.

Part of the message when speaking to students was to remind them that unless a student made special arrangements, her primary ballot would not necessarily reach her. Ballots are not forwarded by the post office. If a student registers to vote at the student’s university address, and then spends the summer elsewhere, the student won’t receive a primary ballot and won’t be able to vote even if she wants to. What students must do is call the County Elections Office and ask for the ballot to be sent to the address where the student will be staying when the ballots are sent. Then the ballot will be sent direct to that address instead of the address where the student is registered.

The Campaign

An initial stage in the campaign was gathering signatures to present in lieu of paying the filing fee.[1] We undertook the work of signature-gathering partly to avoid the fee, but mostly to begin talking to voters one-to-one about the campaign. The great bulk of the signature-gathering took place in Bellingham at public events like the Farmers Market. In the end, we had to pay the filing fee. Although we had gathered somewhat more than the necessary number we found that many of them were signatures of people who were not registered to vote in the Second Congressional District or were illegible.

Once I had filed for office in May, I began to be invited to candidate forums and other political meetings. These included various local Democratic committees (for example, the Whatcom Democrats, the Snohomish Democrats, and the 23d Legislative District Democrats). They also included the League of Women Voters in San Juan County, and groups like Our Revolution. Keeping in mind that, like Democratic and Independent voters, Republican voters supported nearly all of the programs in the Progressive Change Institute list, I also reached out to local Republican groups. None of these responded.

I made a few attempts to produce videos for all the social media outlets that my daughter and her friends had set up. As mentioned above, both the production of the videos and the operation of the social media outlets were matters on which I had little skill and little inherent inclination to become skilled. This is definitely an area where I would require continuous assistance if I were to run again.

In the area of earned media, the Cascadia Weekly published a very well researched and probing report. I was also interviewed on Everett public radio station KSER and by the student newspaper at Everett Community College. A reporter from the student newspaper at Western Washington University interviewed me, but her article was never published.  I also approached the editorial boards of major newspapers and broadcast media within the district, but received no response barring the ones mentioned.

The form of campaigning on which I spent the most time was doorbelling. This took place mostly in Bellingham. In addition, I and others conducted at least one session in each of the major cities in the District. Conforming to the strategy of inspiring voters who had not registered or who had registered but did not usually vote, our doorbelling campaign knocked on every door, not just the doors of frequent voters.

Fundraising

The explicit general fundraising that I did consisted of a donation facility on the campaign web page and a campaign kickoff.  A particular friend donated the filing fee when it became apparent that our signature-gathering would not suffice.

Larsen’s fundraising, perhaps predictably, came overwhelmingly from PACs and large individual donations. Only 5% of his funds came from small individual donations. Over 70% came from company and labor PACs associated with air transportation and defense.

The Federal Elections Commission website does not report fundraising for any of the other candidates. Presumably this is because none of them reached the FEC threshold for reporting of $5,000 raised or spent.

The Outcome

Brian Luke was the winner of the primary.[2] I came in last. Luke received 29% of the vote in the general election, a figure generally commensurate with what Republican candidates have gotten in the district.

Although I came in last overall, I came in second in Whatcom County with 9% of the vote. I attribute my relative success in Whatcom County partly to the fact that I was known there, having participated in several forward-thinking campaigns in the past, and partly to having campaigned primarily in Bellingham. Perhaps there was also a “favorite son” factor. None of these sources of votes operated significantly in the rest of the district.

Observations

During the campaign people frequently commented along these lines: “Greens keep trying to go straight to the top. They run for President or Congress without having established concrete political reputations at lower levels. They should start with local elections: school board, city council, and the like. Then they can get on the ladder to higher office.”

This was in fact good advice. If a candidate has not held office, she must at least have a history of political engagement well known to the public in the district where she is running.

From a certain point of view, my campaign was too handicapped in several ways. I had no prior history in most of the district to build on. What’s more, the campaign was too small in resources of people, money and duration to make up the difference.

These aspects meant that I was not able to produce a “win” – meaning coming in second place in the primary so as to be able to contest the general election. On the other hand, I was able to talk to many people about certain issues that would probably not have arisen otherwise. In particular I was able to point out that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans in Congress represent the interests of ordinary voters, and they are able to get away with this because of an electoral system that they have put in place and that makes possible rampant gerrymandering to protect incumbents. There were many in the local Democratic groups that I spoke to who “got” this, but the tribal sense of “our side” versus “their side” led them to vote for someone who could be a “winner” even if he would not represent the interests of the average voter.

What I Would Do Differently a Second Time

• Start earlier
• Be known in the bulk of the district in advance or have a practical strategy for becoming known quickly
• Either know and understand social media in advance or have continuous support in this area
• Be selective about which social media to use (so as not to undertake something beyond the campaign’s capacity)
• If gathering signatures to file in lieu of the filing fee, be rigorous about making sure that signatories are registered voters in the district.
• Not hope to change the voting and registering habits of Millennials and Post-Millennials by myself. Recent state legislation may assist in their participating more than they have.

[1] This is an option under Washington election law. Candidates must ordinarily pay a filing fee amounting to 1% of the salary of the office that they are running for. In the case of a Congressional candidate the filing fee is $1,740. To avoid paying the filing fee, a candidate must produce at least the same number of valid signatures, in this case 1,740. To be valid a signature must be the signature of a voter registered within the District.

[2] Because of the closeness of the result between Gary Franco and Brian Luke, there was a mandatory recount, leaving Luke the winner.