Scott County Republican Meeting — Bitter Assumptions

SMOKE RISES FROM THE BIG TENT TUESDAY NIGHT

Message to Scott County Treasurer Bill Fennelly — The only sure thing about the 2008 Auditor’s race is that you, me, Steve Ahrens, Scott County Republican leadership, Scott County Central Committee Members, low information Scott County voters,  “caused” the loss.

We begin here to flesh out some of the memorable aspects of Tuesday’s meeting.  The 2008 Auditor’s race seems to underlie much of the original animosity from local establishment Republicans toward anyone connected with the nominated by petition and ballot candidacy of Michael Elliott for the Auditor’s position. If Elliott is for it, they’re agin it.

As mentioned in the first post regarding the CC meeting, Scott County Treasurer Bill Fennelly erupted in a diatribe directly toward Michael Elliott as he was making an FYI statement about his efforts with the Republican Liberty Caucus. Elliott described his efforts to build support for new or re-involvement within the Party of disaffected libertarian leaning individuals, friends of the Tea Party and disenchanted Ron Paul supporters, and others including perhaps conservative Democrats.  Tuesday’s attendees were invited to attend the meetings, indeed join the group.

What could be more open and forthcoming? Nothing surreptitious as it was an open appeal for help and involvement from the largely establishment supporting audience in an effort that would lesson animosity and could swell Republican straight ticket voting.

But Fennelly seethed absolute disdain for Elliott and anything he had to say, pointing his finger the whole time. It was a fine show that I suspect Fennelly has long been laying in wait to launch into. But any sensible reading would be that Elliott’s appeal was a conciliatory gesture from a man who has been the whipping boy for about every thing the local powers that be want to shed blame for, for four years.

Michael Elliott violated the bylaws of the SCRCC when as a sitting CC member he chose to run as a petition candidate, essentially in competition with the Democrat candidate Roxanna Moritz  and the Republican candidate, Steve Ahrens.  That he was also in competition with the Democrat and the net effect of that has not been seriously addressed by Treasurer Fennelly or the Executive Committee.

By the way then Chairman Bryan Sievers nor the Executive Committee  pursued removing Elliott from the CC (I was a non-voting advisory member at the time).  I would be astonished that anyone did not suggest it, which raises the issues of the bogusness of somehow the Executive Committee being compelled to  bring a CC member up on charges before the full CC because someone complains about that person.   More on the committee members who were brought up on charges at the meeting in another post.

Was Michael Elliott responsible for Steve Ahrens loss? There were complaints aplenty about Elliott’s action and I was one of them, but all we had were superficial conjectures,  no hard data. Looking at it a little closer,our view is that his effect was indeterminate from what any one on the Executive Committee or Bill Fennelly  have put forth.

Elliott plausibly maintains that he pulled more from Democrat leaners based on his door to door efforts.  With certain people, the candidate not being a Republican is more important than being a Democrat (lingering animosities) or because they are proud of the “I vote for the person, not the Party” nonsense.  Or perhaps they did not like Moritz.  The translation of that to voting for Republican Ahrens does not automatically follow.  A lot of data could be crunched in an effort to lend credence to one view or the other, but it would still be indeterminate.

We will not get into what Ahrens might have done differently politically or how much harder his campaign people might have worked to make up for whatever problem they believed they faced with Elliott running.  Instead the blame-gamers like static analysis. So be it. Accordingly, what we do know is that Ahrens lost by 1898 votes in a county wide election and Elliott garnered 6253 votes, 7.76 % of the votes cast, an impressive amount for a petition nominated candidate.

If all those were supposedly, but for Elliott, Republican owned votes, does that not say something about serious dissatisfaction with the party nominated candidate when a petition candidate can do so well?  While other avenues existed for Elliott to see his policy concerns implemented, it is also true that other avenues existed for Ahrens to do better in spite of Elliott’s presence on the ballot.*

We know that there are 63 precincts in Scott County and theoretically 126 Central Committee members. If there were not 126 members whose fault was that? Anyway, Ahrens needed 1898 votes, divide that by 126 and one arrives at 16 whole votes. If each CC member had just turned out 16 more Republican votes in their precincts, Ahrens would be the Auditor.

Those 16 votes might have applied to other candidates as well. Was everyone really running absolutely flat out that election?  Maybe you and I thought we were but were we? Another 100 phone calls over a couple of evenings . . .  or maybe fifty door knocks on a weekend? I’m guilty for not doing it.  Blame me for my part of failing to provide margins for our candidates.

I note that Ahrens did not win the Seventh Ward that year, which by the way was his old aldermanic ward and coincidentally Bill Fennelly’s residential ward.  So these guys did not pull their back yards for this very important race they were hip deep in, and at least one of them wants to pin primary blame on Elliott on the static theory that the Elliott votes would have otherwise necessarily voted the race and that about 65% of  the Elliot votes belonged to and would have naturally otherwise voted for Ahrens ?

Using the vociferous critics static analysis, Moritz would only have needed about 35% of the Elliott vote to still prevail. But given Democrat prowess that year in Scott County, more than 35% of the Elliott voters if they voted the race arguably would have gone to Moritz. Removing Elliott splits the votes, they all do not all go to Ahrens and none to the Democrat.

The other self serving aspect to the criticisms of Elliott is that he was somehow obligated to do full personal campaign level work in service to Ahrens, but we as individual precinct leaders should not have any blame for not each turning out 16 more votes for all Republicans.

For all we really now Mike Elliott helped Steve Ahrens. In any event there was plenty of blame to go around including whereby a little more effort from a variety of people would have made the difference.  Bill Fennelly’s eruption strikes us as  more like an effort to deflect blame and pursue a grudge over something yesterday,  that is harmful to the Party today, rather than any defensible grievance.     R Mall

* this paragraph and the paragraphs following it were modified and added to after the original article was posted . R Mall

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