Prairie Greens in Illinois: Running on a strong local platform
Sent in by Tom Abram, the Champaign County Greens in Illinois are hoping to build on a growing green trend at the home of the University of Illinois. With three candidates running for County Board, they have a strong local platform, good candidates, and…a commercial!
By Tom Abram:
The Prairie Greens are a local based in Champaign County, Illinois – home of the University of Illinois. We’ve been running candidates locally for the election cycles. In years past, we’ve run candidates for County Board and State Representative, with encouraging results. In 2004, our three County Board candidates established the party in those districts and received as high as 19% in a three way race (from a 19 year old college student no less!) In 2006, we ran another three County Board candidates and a State Representative candidate. The percentages climbed higher, with a maximum of 25% against two incumbents for two seats. We’ve also contributed significantly towards statewide petitioning efforts, including Rich Whitney’s run for governor.
This year, we’re focused on winning some County Board seats and think we have a good chance. Joe Futrelle, who received the highest vote percentage in 2006, is making another run. This time, the incumbent has stepped down and he’s facing a Democrat with little political experience. Mike Lehman is a former union organizer and coordinated a successful living wage campaign. He was recently endorsed by the local AFSCME union. He faces a conservative Democrat without much support from the party. Neither Futrelle nor Lehman’s opponents are doing much campaigning. Walter Pituc is a student at the University of Illinois running against two Democrats and two Republicans for two open seats. The dynamics in the race are unpredictable, with a large portion of voters unhappy with at least one of the Democratic or Republican choices. There has been some indication that Walter might benefit from this dissatisfaction by picking up the second choice, in addition to his own supporters. Yard signs for our candidates populate the neighborhoods and in some areas it’s difficult to find our opponents’ signs. We are also hoping to tap into the student population, which will be voting in much higher numbers in this cycle than the last one.
Some of the main issues we’re focusing on is curbing urban sprawl, expanding mass transit, restoring social justice in our courthouse, keeping the county nursing home public and fiscally sustainable, and transparency and accountability. We’re surrounded by prime farmland which keeps getting trampled for sprawling suburban developments. There’s been a lot of problems with our county board not being on the level with the citizens and allowing problems to escalate. They go into lots of closed sessions meetings and we want to open those back up to the people and actually encourage them to participate in the political process. What a concept! Our candidates have been consistently attending meetings to express their opinions on these issues and to further understand them.
All three of these candidates have a great chance of winning and we’ve really been campaigning hard this year. We’ve pounded a lot of pavement, reaching the door of most voters in their districts. We’ve been collecting voter information to use for GOTV and future efforts. The campaigns are doing direct mailings, radio ads, blog ads, interior bus ads, and probably a few print ads as well.
However, the most exciting effort is our cable TV ad! We’ve produced a joint campaign ad that will run on several cable channels in the last throes of the campaign, including during the Colbert Report and Daily Show. It turns out, cable ads can be relatively cheap allowing us to show our ad nearly 150 times. No other local candidates in Champaign-Urbana will be airing commercials and there’s been few federal campaign commercials with Illinois solidly for Obama.
You can watch it on the YouTube, so please check it out. Make sure to select high quality (below the video, above the views).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISxFSQiGQco
If we get more donations, we’ll be able to play more ads! It costs as little as $2 with an average of about $8 to purchase an additional ad. Any little bit will help us push towards victory!
Donate here: http://www.prairiegreens.org/act/donate.html
Find out more about the candidates and campaigns here: http://www.prairiegreens.org/vote/
Thanks to Pat Schmitz for putting this ad together!
