Election Tests 6 Campaign Commandments

(News analysis) John DeStefano is doing what successful candidates have always done. Jeffrey Kerekes isn’t — partly out of necessity, partly on purpose.

When the votes get tallied in their contest for mayor Tuesday night, the outcome will reveal whether the unofficial How To Win Campaigns bible needs a revision in the modern age of social media and citizen-revolt politics.

Democrat DeStefano is running for his tenth two-year term as mayor in the election. He has already broken the record for longest-serving popularly elected mayor. If he wins Tuesday, he’ll surpass old Elizur Goodrich, a legislature-appointed mayor who served two centuries ago. DeStefano’s name is a household word in New Haven.

Kerekes, an independent, is staging his first run for public office this year. He’s struggling to get his name out.

DeStefano has institutional endorsements, months of polling data, and a fleet of ward-level vote-pulling teams working with finely honed lists of ​“1“s ​“2“s and ​“3“s (ranking of likely sympathetic voters). Kerekes doesn’t.

DeStefano has campaign flyers that look and read like those of incumbents anywhere in the country facing largely unknown challengers; Kerekes’ general-election message departs from the playbook for such challengers.

DeStefano has raised 16 times as much money.

As much as they disagree on the central issue in this campaign — DeStefano’s record on crime, schools, and the city budget — the two candidates agree that in 2011 the electorate is angry and unpredictable enough to throw into question the campaign calculations that have driven decades of New Haven elections.

Those calculations — combined with the advantages an incumbent has with name recognition and the ability to make news with daily official government events — would make DeStefano a shoo-in Tuesday.

To some, the anti-incumbent mood sweeping the national suggests otherwise. DeStefano won the Democratic mayoral primary with only 44 percent of the vote. (On the other hand, Kerekes, one of three challengers who ran in that race, received just 22.7 percent of the vote. Kerekes also secured an independent ballot line for the November general election.)

“I always felt this was going to be a competitive election cycle across Connecticut. There were powerful issues of dissent across America, which we see on the Green [at Occupy New Haven], with the grandmas outside Bank of America,” DeStefano reflected on the campaign trail this week. ​“I don’t take anything for granted.”

The campaign has proved it.

1st Commandment: Thou Shalt Pull Votes With An Organized Army

Through the Democratic Party, DeStefano plans to mount ward-pulling operations in at least 20 out of New Haven’s 30 wards, he said. In the September primary, he had only five or six. (However in that race the DeStefano team had a citywide slate of aldermanic candidates pulling voters in contested elections. On Tuesday only five out of 30 wards have aldermanic elections at all, and only three are seriously contested.) One of the new DeStefano operations is in East Rock, where Kerekes beat DeStefano in the September primary.

The DeStefano campaign has a paid staff along with several hundred volunteers. It has also engaged consultants and pollsters since the beginning of the primary season. At this point the campaign is focusing on bringing out its base (voters ranked ​“1” and ​“2” on a scale of five) and ensuring voters don’t change their minds; the mayor said he is targeting some 3s as well. ​“Persuasion is done at the door,” he said. His team has been out for weeks knocking on those identified voters’ doors and flooding their mailboxes with flyers and phones with calls.

Kerekes said he does have 100 or so volunteers. He has no paid staff. He said he’s not sure if he’ll have any ward-level vote-pulling teams with pruned lists of likely voters. He has spent long days walking door to door himself throughout the city, as have some of his loyal volunteers.

He said he’s hoping to have at least a ​“presence” in every ward encouraging people to vote on Election Day. But he has relied largely on free media in the general elections — holding press conferences and otherwise getting covered by local news outlets.

“I believe we can win” without a vote-pulling army, he said. ​“The honest [answer] is, we’ll find out.” New Haven has seen an upsurge in local news coverage after years of decline, he noted. ​“The people who know there’s an election have [largely] made up their minds,” he said.

DeStefano said a large, well-financed vote-pulling organization can make a big difference in aldermanic races, when so few people vote; he cited the sweeping victories of labor-affiliated challengers in the September aldermanic primaries. He said he’s not sure how vital that is in a citywide election. For Tuesday’s general election, the DeStefano team is focusing just on voters it thinks it has already convinced. ​“Ninety percent of this vote was cast before I had an opponent,” DeStefano said. Organization can make a meaningful dent in getting to that important last 10 percent, he argued.

2nd Commandment: Thou Shalt Collect Beaucoup Bucks

Ads. Or at least weeks worth of mailed flyers. Robocalls. Polling. Consultants. Paid staff. Election-day workers. Phone lines. Office space.

That all costs money. DeStefano has lots of it. By his own estimate, he will have raised and spent $700,000 for this year’s two election cycles (primary and general) by year’s end.

Kerekes had around $32,000 at his disposal in the primary, in part thanks to the city’s public-financing Democracy Fund. He raised another $11,000 for the general election.

DeStefano said he spent more than half his money on the primary; that’s because he took out TV ads (about $200,000 worth, including airing and production costs). He had three opponents in that race, representing more than one constituency in town, so he needed TV, he argued. In the general election campaign, with just one opponent, he can more directly pitch a one-on-one comparison message to a targeted group, so he has foregone TV for repeated targeted mailers to people’s homes.

Kerekes had money for exactly one paid mailer in the general campaign. No paid staff or consultants. DeStefano pays rent on a downtown office headed by a veteran campaign professional from out of town. Kerekes bases his campaign at home; his wife Pie Ye is in charge.

No one any longer believes that candidates win elections simply by spending more money. Dan Malloy proved that when he defeated Ned Lamont in last year’s Democratic gubernatorial primary. Dick Blumenthal proved it when he defeated Linda McMahon (and $50 million of her personal wealth) in last year’s Connecticut U.S. Senate race. But Malloy and Blumenthal still had millions of dollars for paid TV ads and paid staffs and consultants and polling, to get their message out, identify voters, and pull them on Election Day.

The question that remains to be answered is: What is the point of diminishing returns for well-financed candidates? What is the threshold challengers need to raise to be competitive?

The internet helps underfunded candidates overcome some of the money gap. Kerekes has distributed a regular email newsletter during the campaign. His supporters (like DeStefano’s) are active on news site comments pages and on social networks.

“If [DeStefano] was a popular 18-year incumbent, I don’t think it would be possible” to beat him ​“without much more money,” Kerekes said. But ​“part of people voting is going to be a vote against DeStefano.” DeStefano sort of agreed: ​“This election is more a referendum about how people feel about me.”

3rd Commandment: Incumbents Shall Strike First To Define Unknown Challengers In Voters’ Minds

4th Commandment: Unknown Challengers Shall Present A Positive Message, Not Just Bash The Incumbent

DeStefano has religion when it comes to Commandment 3. Three, four flyers a week have come into voters’ homes branding Kerekes an inexperienced ​“tea party” candidate who wants to throw everyone out of work and nuke the public schools. His campaign spokesman has amplified that message, throwing in references to the nutty ​“birther” movement. For good measure the DeStefano team has blanched unflattering Kerekes photos, then distorted and even ripped them up to make him look like a zombie emerging from the graveyard in Night of The Living Dead. (Read about all that here.)

“This is a one-on-one campaign,” DeStefano said. ​“You cannot make a clearer comparison.”

Those third-commandment attacks may have backfired, Kerekes claimed. ​“That’s hurt him based on what I’m hearing. I’ve heard a lot of people say, ​‘This is extreme.’ The birther thing was totally over the ledge. He seems desperate.”

Kerekes, meanwhile, has ditched Commandment 4, which is based on the premise that anti-incumbent voters already know they don’t like the mayor, but they need a reason to vote for the challenger rather than just stay home.

Kerekes has used little of the limelight in the general election to tell people why he’d make a good mayor. Or who he is. Or what he’d do as mayor. He does have a story and a list of ideas (hybrid elected-appointed Board of Education; gang task force and more walking beats for the police; public referendum required for tax hikes; a ​“Come Back Home” plan to lure city workers back into New Haven houses). Instead, his press conferences and major public statements have centered on criticisms of DeStefano.

“That’s been a big debate among people in our campaign for sure,” Kerekes said. The verdict: ​“People have a short memory. There are a lot of things people forget about DeStefano. You still have to remind people about how bad things are and how he’s responsible.”

Also, he said, he learned in the primary that most media outlets will cover stories only if they involve controversy. For instance, when he announced his ​“Come Back Home” plan in June, only one news outlet showed up at the press conference and wrote about it in detail. When he blew the whistle last month on DeStefano hiding the fact that Police Chief Frank Limon packed up his office and left town, Kerekes won free time on all three network TV news affiliates for two straight news cycles. He got out a message that continues to resound on the trail.

He’s trying to fulfill Commandment Four with shoe leather.

One recent afternoon found him on Stevens Street in the Hill with a volunteer who lives down the street. They knocked on the door of a retired truck driver named Roberto. The three talked about education reform and bringing jobs to young people in the city, among other issues.

“I’m leaning towards Kerekes,” said Roberto (pictured at center), who declined to give his last name. “[DeStefano] has been here forever and he hasn’t done anything,” he said.

“The last straw” for Roberto was Limon’s abrupt departure from the force. ​“The mayor said he was going away for a few weeks,” Roberto recalled. ​“You can travel the world in a few weeks…I knew he was never coming back.”

On the trail, Kerekes said, he has found that people want to see a newcomer up close to get a measure of him. On Thursday, accompanied by three volunteers, he offered that face time to customers outside Stop & Shop on Whalley Avenue.

He spent close to a half hour explaining his positions to one undecided voter, Bruce Larkin of Westville. They covered the budget, democracy, personal experience. ​“Tell me about crime,” Larkin said at one point. Click on the play arrow to watch the response.

5th Commandment: Thou Shalt Make Alliances

Candidates need friends — organized friends who have troops to pull votes. That’s the concept.

DeStefano has put that concept into overdrive. He got the white-dominated firefighters union to back him, even though its leaders had been fighting him all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court on hiring practices. Then he got the black firefighters organization, which has been fighting with the white firefighters, to endorse him, too. He got primary rival Tony Dawson to endorse him. He got a slew of unions to endorse him, even though earlier in the year union leaders had branded him anti-labor for pursuing health and pension givebacks.

Kerekes has received no institutional endorsements. (The police union came close to endorsing him after he impressed them at a meeting, according to President Arpad Tolnay.)

He distributed a pledge to campaign workers early on his campaign stating that no one will come under consideration for a government job or contract in return for working on the campaign should Kerekes prevail in the election.

“We wanted to stem off the calls and diplomatically deal with the fact that we’re not giving the city away” with the kind of deals that ​“have paralyzed” New Haven, Kerekes argued.

Traditionally, campaign work has been seen as a ticket to government work. The argument, especially in cities, is that that was one way for groups of people to advance in a democracy; early generations of Irish and then Italian immigrants, for instance, broke into the labor market through government in return for supporting political candidates.

Another argument: That to govern, let alone win elections, you need to build coalitions and work with people, often through their civic alliances.

Kerekes said he’s not sure how helpful those endorsements are anymore on election day. He questioned whether rank-and-file firefighters, for instance, even agree with the DeStefano endorsement. More broadly, in today’s New Haven, ​“people now come together more around trying to make the city better” rather than pushing an agenda of institutional self-interest and personal advancement. He cited the rise of community gardens and farmers markets as examples.

6th Commandment: Thou Shalt Seek Black Ministers’ Endorsements

That is perhaps the most cardinal commandment in successful New Haven mayoral campaigns for the past few decades. The argument is that the black vote disproportionately follows the calls of ministers. And Kerekes acknowledges that he must win at least 50 percent of the black vote to prevail Tuesday.

Kerekes has been spotted extensively campaigning in the Hill and Newhallville and Dixwell — on foot, alone, door to door, sometimes with a few key supporters. But he hasn’t gone after reverends’ support, he said.

DeStefano has. He has made the rounds to black churches, where he’s known well. A black clergy group endorsed him. It’s widely believed that strong support in the black community, especially among clergy, helped him stave off his last serious challenge, in the 2001 Democratic mayoral primary against state Sen. Martin Looney.

Kerekes was asked about the theory underlying commandment number six, that black reverends are the ticket to the black vote.

“No. Absolutely no!” he responded. ​“Read your paper, the comments. Talk to people. They’re unhappy. They’re absolutely livid about DeStefano.”

The Fun Factor

DeStefano reflected on that anti-incumbent mood, in New Haven, across the U.S., as he drove to a campaign event on Dixwell Avenue Wednesday.

It can feel lonely at the top these days. Or at least hot. DeStefano has retreated from some of the public give and take in which he has reveled in past campaigns. He refused, for instance, to debate Kerekes publicly in the general election campaign.

He contrasted the 2001 primary campaign to 2011’s. ​“The nation was running budget surpluses [then]. [President] Clinton had added 16 million jobs. People’s ideas were bigger. Their ambitions were bigger” then, he noted.

He got out of his Prius and started walking two blocks to the campaign event. He got a friendly greeting from a man on Dixwell.

“How you doing?” DeStefano asked him.

“If I had a job,” the man replied, ​“I’d be doing better.”

He hears that all the time, DeStefano said. ​“People are hurting. People are [feeling] tighter. They’re less optimistic. They’re frightened. They’re anxious. I understand. These feelings are real. The situations are real.”

He bemoaned a political climate when ​“big visions” run into a demand for less spending, less government. He deals with that partly by pursuing other kinds of ​“ambitions” — like school reform, he said.

The climate has also produced a harsh political atmosphere. He has been the subject of continual ire and personal attacks in New Haven the past two years.

Then something happened as he got closer to the event. And when he walked back to his car afterwards. Strangers from the neighborhood stopped him and broke into grins. ​“I know you! You’re the mayor!” They told him he’s doing a great job. They thanked him.

One driver even slammed on her brakes and ran out of her car for a hug. One of numerous hugs he received on his two-block promenade.

[I promise I’m not making this up. I saw it.]

DeStefano’s mood brightened, too. The campaign veteran — he’s been running for office for 22 years, since he was 33 — remembered that it can actually be fun, invigorating, to run for office. Even when every day seems to bring a fresh barrage of criticism.

“You ask how I feel?” he asked after one hug. ​“Most people are great.”

Neena Satija contributed to this story.