In what may well get me taken off their e-mail list, Roll Call runs one of the dumbest stories on the Illinois Senate race. They compare the 2010 U.S. Senate race to the 1992 Senate race in which Carol Moseley Braun beat incumbent Al Dixon and Al Hofeld. The primary comparison being that there are two white guys and a black woman.
So who is the incumbent? There isn’t one running. So who is the multimillionaire white guy attacking the no incumbent–they allude to Hoffman, but Hoffman has little in common with Hofeld. Jackson is automatically Braun, but that’s not much of a comparison even. Braun had served in the State House, had been Recorder of Deeds, and had a fairly strong record including suing the Illinois Democratic Party for reapportionment–not that she turned out well, but she started from a very different place. Second, the dissatisfaction with Dixon was sparked by his vote to confirm Clarence Thomas and a general view that he was too open to compromise–and in this case the two white candidates are running to the left with both Alexi and Hoffman endorsing gay marriage.
So essentially all the article rests on is pure ethnic politics. No one should dismiss the ethnic politics angles of the story, but that is far from the entire story and certainly not necessarily defining of the race.
Now, what one might compare it to is Barack Obama’s 2004 primary race, but that falls apart with SEIU being a key element to that election and they have already endorsed Alexi. Obama won with a coalition of SEIU, African-Americans, liberals, and goo-goos as well as he’s working traditional trade unions hard. Alexi has strong efforts with SEIU, liberals, and goo goos and has made some inroads into the African-American community plus is following an important aspect of Blagojevich’s first win–a significant downstate strategy. He certainly won’t win the African-American vote, but in a primary it’s a competition over the margins. Jackson has little presence outside of Chicago and she has to catch up in a relatively short time. Hoffman is not well known anywhere and without knowing how his fundraising will go or if he’s willing to self-finance, it’s impossible to tell if he can be competitive. Neither is likely to do well with traditional trades and anyone attached to Blagojevich is going to have a hard time with AFSCME.
I think as the one thing the article gets right is that Alexi is the frontrunner with two big caveats. We don’t know good of a candidate Hoffman will be, but up until now he appears to be fairly lackluster, though he is laying out a good progressive agenda. Jackson has a base, but it’s hard to see how she expands on that base. She does have Emily’s list support and that’s can be positive, but the salience of women’s issues is far lower than in 1992.