Elections Move-Up in Illinois

Campaign season starts earlier than ever

By Nate Hoekstra
nhoekstra@dailyherald.com
Posted Monday, July 02, 2007

SPRINGFIELD — The opinions of Illinois voters now carry new weight in the national political arena, thanks to a new law that moves the primary elections to Feb. 5 from mid-March.
But the same law could make suburban voters wonder if their newfound political juice is worth the proverbial squeeze.
On one hand, for the first time in recent memory, your presidential primary vote will matter. On the other, campaign season begins before most suburban families send their children back to school.
On Aug. 7, politicians will be able to start circulating petitions to get their names on the ballot. That’s when they, or their volunteers, start knocking on your doors or pestering you for signatures at train stations and shopping malls.
Fliers filling suburban mailboxes and those campaign ads that the public claims to loathe won’t be far behind.
Cindi Canary, director of the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform, expects Illinois voters to have a bad case of election fatigue by the time they actually go to the polls.
“By dragging it out longer, we will see more and more people being increasingly burnt out. Soon, it’s going to feel like it takes forever to get to Election Day,” Canary said.
It’s new ground for Illinois politics, which, in the case of the presidential primary, ceased being relevant years ago because the nominations were sewn up before the Illinois vote. As a result, few candidates bothered to come or campaign here.
Now the Illinois primary is jammed in with numerous other key states on Feb. 5 for what in all practical terms will be a national primary election. And of course there’s the added attention from the campaigns of U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, a Chicago Democrat, and Hillary Clinton, a Park Ridge native now in the Senate from New York.
And the earlier date means campaign season now officially extends to 15 months long — August 2007 to November 2008. Additionally, this campaign season runs hand-in-hand with the holiday season.
And that presents its own issues given the tone of recent campaigns.
“I don’t think it would play well to say ‘Candidate X is a thieving S.O.B.’ during Jingle Bells season,” Canary said. “The very thought is kind of appalling.”
She and others said it would be bad for candidates to be running attack ads alongside toy commercials. Instead, political observers expect the heavy stuff to hold until after Christmas. But come January, the bottom drops out.
State Sen. Terry Link, a Waukegan Democrat and head of the Lake County Democratic Party, said he expects the first five weeks of 2008 to be a blitzkrieg of campaign advertising the likes of which Illinois has never seen.
“I think the month of January, you’ll be seeing a lot of campaign ads, but I’d hope they’d have the foresight to leave the month of December to families,” Link said.
This also should easily be the most expensive campaign season in state history. One only need consider this: Super Bowl Sunday is two days before the primary election here, creating the possibility for the single most expensive weekend of political advertising ever and bringing a whole new spectrum of potential Super Bowl ads.


Election timeline

Illinois’ earlier primary on Feb. 5 means campaign season moves up significantly. Some key dates:

Aug. 7: Candidates can begin circulating nominating petitions
Oct. 29-Nov. 5: Petitions due in at state elections board
Oct. 31: Halloween
Nov. 22: Thanksgiving
Dec. 5: Hanukkah begins
Dec. 25: Christmas
Jan. 1: New Year’s
Jan. 7: College football national championship game
Feb. 3: Super Bowl Sunday
Feb. 5: Primary elections