By Samuel G. Howard in RIFuture.org
On Election Day 2012,
there were 785 candidates for all offices across Rhode Island, from U.S.
Senator to Town Sergeant. According to a list provided by the Secretary of
State’s office, the make-up was such:
·
301 Democrats
·
209 Republicans
·
116 Independents
·
3 Moderates
·
1 Libertarian
(Independent)
·
1 Vigilant Fox
(Independent)
·
154 candidates for
non-partisan offices
In evaluating partisan
strength, we need to put aside the 154 non-partisan candidates and the offices
they ran for. Including the federal offices contested (not including the U.S.
Presidency), there were 373 partisan officials elected in 2012 (not all offices
are contested in a given election year, the total number of offices in this
state is at least 505 and the 1992 Census of Governments by the US Census
Bureau put the total number of elected offices at 1186).
How did the parties
do? Well, of the 301 candidates put up by the Democrats, 244 of them were
elected; a win rate of 81.06% per candidate. The Republicans? Of their 209
candidates, just 96 of them made it to elective office, a win rate of 45.93%.
Political independents placed 33 candidates, winning 28.45% of the time. The
Moderates (and everyone else) had a win rate of 0%.
Basically, with no
organization behind them, political independents did about half as well as the
Republicans, despite that party’s over-hyped “Strike Force”, their poorly-constructed/conceived “Rhode Island sucks” website, and chairman Mark Zaccaria’s “less-is-more” strategy (which I criticized back in June). Deep organizational/strategic thinking or
cheap gimmicks?
The answer is clear
from the results: Republicans in Rhode Island were crushed in 2012. With only
11 members in the General Assembly, it is no longer tenable to think of Rhode
Island as having two major parties with minor parties like the Moderates and
Greens. Instead, we need to think of Rhode Island has having a primary party,
the Democratic Party; a secondary party, the Republican Party; and tertiary
parties like the Moderates.
Despite the insight to
the RI GOP’s issues provided here by Patrick
Laverty (running
inexperienced candidates for statewide office), he misses the deeper structural
problem for Republicans: they’ve largely ceded much of the state to Democrats
and independents (a problem exacerbated under Mr. Zaccaria’s time as chair).
If
you lived in all but one of Pawtucket’s six city council wards or House
District 46, after you completed the federal office section of your
ballot there wasn’t a single Republican anywhere down ticket.
Republicans may feel
strong in towns like East Greenwich, West Greenwich, and Scituate (towns where
the majority of voters voted straight Republican for President, U.S. Senator,
and U.S. Representative), but even in these towns, Democrats contested
town-wide offices and majorities of voters voted for the occasional Democratic
Assembly candidate (in East Greenwich, they picked Mark Schwager; West
Greenwich went with Leo Raptakis and Lisa Tomasso; and Scituate returned Phil
Marcello).
A strategic problem
for the Republicans is that they don’t appear to have a plan to actually fix
Rhode Island’s problems, and the only ideas they’ve expressed are an anathema
to the majority of Rhode Island’s voters.
Without an appealing plan or vision,
Democrats will continue to accrue the state’s new talent and fresh blood in
politics, while the Republicans will remain a party adrift and rudderless. The
only question is whether the party will finally drown under a tide of blue, or
find a way to reform and provide a serious challenge. It’s a project that will
take decades.
Samuel G. Howard - A native-born Rhode Islander, educated in Providence Public
Schools, went to college in North Carolina and a political junkie and
pessimistic optimist.