Now that elections are over for 2021 (all but the recounts and mail-in ballots, but more on those later), it seemed a good time to add some observations following the first 100 days of 2021…..
Every vote counts: You hear this in the media every now and then, and political organizations and candidates push the issue routinely. However, this has been demonstrated in numerous local elections – and in an race where there is 12% or less turnout, the weight of EVERY vote can become enormous. In 2015, the WCRCC pressed all its efforts in a mid-term election for a Rockford city council spot – and our candidate won by 8 votes. This year, that particular race was decided by 42 votes. In a township election years before, a race was decided by 4 votes!. Elsewhere, one village election for president was decided by 15 votes; in another race, a Rockford school board seat was flipped after mail-in ballots were added to the total (and more may alter that result yet again!). In the last general election, John Cabello lost his bid for re-election by 239 votes out of over 53,000 votes cast. Now that Illinois has early-voting and absentee voting for no reason, it is imperative anyone who knows they may be elsewhere on election day (vacation, surgery, even inclement weather) should cast their vote early – if they don’t, they may be dismayed at an election result that could have changed with one vote!
Some votes are very costly: Speaking of John Cabello’s race, it has been noteworthy to watch over the past decade just how much our votes cost Michael Madigan & his Chicago/union leader cabal. In 2010, hundreds of thousands of dollars were funneled in from Cook County and other non-local donors in an attempt to unseat Dave Syverson. The remainder of the 2010 decade was spent by Madigan and his ilk trying to buy a seat in the House by attacking Cabello with candidates bankrolled by his cronies, union leaders and other insiders. In 2018, over $500,000 was spent by John’s opponent in an attempt to unseat him – the overwhelming majority courtesy of Democrat-machine sources.
Based on information from the state election website, during 2020 (January – December), Cabello raised around $300,000 …. and spent it attempting to quell the Madigan-machine tsunami once again. During that same time, his opponent raked in over THREE TIMES that amount (a staggering $1,000,000) – and he too spent that sum in the race. In kind donations were similar – Cabello’s “receipts” were less than a 1/3 of what his opponent recorded. Again (no surprise), the vast majority (90%) of the money funneled to the opponent came from non-local politicos or Madigan affiliates – including nearly a dozen providing the maximum $57,800 in a single payment!
So to recap: by sheer numbers, after factoring in the “in kind” contributions during that time period, each vote for Cabello “cost” $14.63, while each vote for his opponent cost nearly $54! (somewhere there is a joke about Republicans being frugal and the other party spending lavishly, I am sure). Perhaps a better analysis is to calculate the value of each of those 239 votes that cost us a Republican seat in the 68th – if you zero out the funds allocated to Cabello’s votes and deduct that same amount from his opponent, the net result is that each of those 239 votes cost Madigan and his minions over $4,450!!! So, the next election cycle (when we will be under a re-districted map – i.e. worse map) where Chicago liberals try to steal another seat here in the Winnebago County area, be sure we keep in mind the base price of $4,450 and force them to go higher!?
