LaRouchies don't win Illinois Democratic primaries in 1986

"Good Lord, we have a problem here."
--Democratic national chairman Paul Kirk, after the 1986 Illinois primary

Political observers were stunned by the results of the Illinois Democratic primaries of March 18, 1986, where followers of Lyndon LaRouche defeated the Democratic organization choices for the positions of lieutenant governor and secretary of state. LaRouche candidate Mark J. Fairchild defeated party regular George E. Sangmeister (then a state senator from the Joliet area, later a congressman) for lieutenant governor https://www.ourcampaigns.com/RaceDetail.html?RaceID=262788 and LaRouche candidate Janice Hart defeated party regular Aurelia Pucinski (daughter of one of Chicago's most powerful aldermen, ex-Congressman Roman Pucinski) for secretary of state. https://www.ourcampaigns.com/RaceDetail.html?RaceID=262333 This was not a case where a political extremist won a primary because he or she was unopposed, as in the IL-03 Republican primary this year. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/02/how-a-nazi-made-the-ballot-in-illinois/552758/ Rather, the LaRouchies defeated candidates who were considered certain to win.

Just how did the Illinois Democratic Party get to a situation where two of its candidates apparently believed that Elizabeth II was behind the world drug trade, that the B'nai B'rith had founded the Ku Klux Klan, etc.? The conventional answer has been that for some reason the party did almost nothing to publicize the candidacies of Sangmeister and Pucinski--the party leaders seemed to think they were unopposed. Downstaters, not knowing anything about the candidates, decided to opt for candidates with more "American" names like Fairchild and Hart. In the Chicago area, the name Pucinski was well-known--but detested in the black community, because Roman Pucinski was one of the leading members of the "Vrdolyak 29"--the bloc of white (and Hispanic) aldermen who were strongly opposed to Harold Washington, Chicago's first African American mayor. Blacks, like downstaters, voted strongly for both Hart and Fairchild. (I have even seen it suggested that anti-Semitism may have played a role here, in that some voters may have mistakenly thought that Sangmeister, a German-American, was Jewish...)

It is in any event pretty clear that Fairchild's and Hart's votes did not reflect approval of the LaRouchies' views of the world. (And they did not reflect any huge LaRouchie campaign, either--the LaRouchies claimed their total campaign expenditures were only in the hundreds of dollars!) The LaRouchie candidate against gubernatorial candidate Adlai Stevenson III for example got only seven percent of the vote. https://www.ourcampaigns.com/RaceDetail.html?RaceID=262324 Likewise, whenever there was a three-way contest between the Democratic regular, a "respectable" opponent and a LaRouchie, the LaRouchie came in a poor third--which suggests that the LaRouchie vote was partly a protest vote by people who may not have known who the LaRouchies were but *did* know they were opposed to the regular candidate (contrary to the conventional wisdom that they didn't know who the regular candidate was).

In any event, if it had been only Hart who had won, the results would be merely embarrassing to the Democratic party. (To give an idea of *how* embarrassing: "Less than two months after the primary, a Cook County circuit judge issued an arrest warrant for Hart when she failed to appear for a hearing on a 1985 disorderly conduct charge. Later that summer, Hart was fined $500 for presenting a slab of raw liver to the Roman Catholic
archbishop of Milwaukee. She claimed it was to protest the archbishop's support of the International Monetary Fund." https://web.archive.org/web/2012020...departments/poli_sci/state/state/larouche.htm) Nobody expected the Democrats to win the Secretary of State's race anyway--incumbent Jim Edgar (later governor of Illinois) was popular, and would have defeated even a respectable Democrat. True, even a Hart victory alone would have made it harder for the Democratic leadership to urge people to vote straight Democratic tickets (as they did in the "Punch 10" campaign of 1982 which almost led to Adlai Stevenson III defeating incumbent governor Jim Thompson, despite a bad campaign on Stevenson's part and a huge Thompson lead in the polls). But the real problem was Fairchild.

The reason Fairchild was the real problem is simple: In the general election (though *not* in the primaries), the governor and lieutenant governor were elected as a team. In short, you could not vote for Adlai Stevenson III for governor without putting Mark Fairchild a heartbeat away from commanding the Illinois National Guard. Given that the LaRouchies had talked of having "tanks rolling down State Street" this was probably not an attractive prospect...

Stevenson realized that he did not have any chance to win with Fairchild as his running mate. So he resigned as Democratic candidate for governor and set up his own Illinois Solidarity Party--which none of the other Democratic candidates was willing to join. This led to a curious situation where the Democratic Party had candidates for every office except governor--arguments by the LaRouchies that with Stevenson's resignation, the nomination should automatically go to the LaRouchie candidate were rejected by the courts, which also declined to force the state Democratic central committee to name a new candidate. So the Democratic ticket for the two top offices was No Candidate plus Fairchild.

In any event, the Democrats were reduced to urging people to vote Democratic for every office except governor, lieutenant governor, and secretary of state--for these offices voters should vote Illinois Solidarity. This strategy was hopeless (given the number of Illinois voters who were used to voting straight tickets, and in any event did not want to vote for third parties) and was seen to be so at the time. Stevenson had a hard time focusing on issues (like Thompson's having raised taxes) or getting financing. Even the Illinois AFL-CIO endorsed Thompson. The final results in the governor's race were:

Thompson (Republican): 52.7%
Stevenson (Solidarity): 40.0%
"Democratic" (i.e., "no candidate" plus Fairchild): 6.6 percent. https://www.ourcampaigns.com/RaceDetail.html?RaceID=36719

(For the secretary of state contest, Edgar won easily with 67.2 percent, with the Illinois Solidarity candidate coming in a distant second with 16.7 percnet, and Hart coming in third, but still with about 15.3 percent of the vote. https://www.ourcampaigns.com/RaceDetail.html?RaceID=113408)

So here is the what-if: Suppose the Illinois Democratic Party had been more alert to the LaRouchie menace, had spread the word about the LaRouchies (as it would do successfully in future primaries) and as a result Fairchild and Hart had lost? (In OTL they only defeated Sangmeister and Pucinski narrowly. And Rod Blagoevich's overwhelming downstate showing in the 2002 Democratic primary for governor--however unfortunate its consequences--at least put to rest any notion that downstaters won't vote for candidates with long or "foreign" names--provided a real effort is made to sell the candidates to them, as was not done in 1986.) Could Stevenson--as candidate of the Democratic Party and with the party able to launch a "vote straight Democratic" campaign like the "Punch 10" one of 1982--have defeated Thompson?

It's hard to say, but the fact that Thompson got only 52.7 percent of the vote suggests he was vulnerable. IMO most of the 6.6 percent who voted for "No Candidate plus Fairchild" would have voted for Stevenson as a Democrat. Most of them (and most of the 15 percent or so who voted for Hart) were not LaRouchies but simply people who were used to voting a straight Democratic ticket, and would not cease doing so even under these bizarre circumstances.

True, even if you add the Stevenson and "Democratic" votes together, Thompson would win 52.7-46.6. But this ignores how the very fact that Stevenson had to run as a third party candidate drastically changed the dynamics of the campaign--in terms of morale, financing, endorsements, etc. The widespread impression that Stevenson could not possibly win as a third party candidate crippled Stevenson from the beginning. Moreover, Stevenson's whole handling of the LaRouchie issue--why hadn't he done more for Sangmeister *before* the primary, etc.--left a bad impression and no doubt led some potentially Democratic voters to vote for Thompson.

So it's at least possible Stevenson would have won. Suppose he did? Would this have had consequences for national as well as state politics? Maybe, but I have a hard time seeing Adlai III on a national ticket--he was not the sort of man either Dukakis or Clinton was looking for, nor do I see much chance of him successfully running for president himself. (His best chance to be on a national ticket was probably 1976, when he was mentioned as a possible running mate for Carter.) There was something elitist about him, something that rubbed people the wrong way. Still, he did easily win two Senate elections (1970 and 1974), and almost won the governorship in 1982, so you cannot really rule him out for national office.

There was one other effect of the fiasco--it focused attention on the LaRouchies and made future "stealth" victories by them in the Democratic primaries less likely. Ironically, though, the Illinois Solidarity Party, whose founders no doubt intended it to die a speedy death after the 1986 election, survived for a while and became the electoral verhicle for Lenora Fulani, who worked closely with Fred Newman--who for a while had been associated with LaRouche... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidarity_Party_(Illinois)
 
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The LaRouchies are an interesting combo of large-scale public works advocacy and kooksville conspiracy theory.

I do think we underestimate what percent of people in general tend to understand the world through conspiracy theory. And this has been a back echo all through U.S. history. We could almost start with the Declaration of Independence in which a fair percentage of Americans seem to think the King was deliberatively impoverishing the colonies, and Thomas Jefferson pretty much stated that such was the case in the Declaration.

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The LaRouchies are an interesting combo of large-scale public works advocacy and kooksville conspiracy theory.

I do think we underestimate what percent of people in general tend to understand the world through conspiracy theory. And this has been a back echo all through U.S. history. We could almost start with the Declaration of Independence in which a fair percentage of Americans seem to think the King was deliberatively impoverishing the colonies, and Thomas Jefferson pretty much stated that such was the case in the Declaration.

Americans may be fond of conspiracy theories, but it is unlikely that most Illinois Democrats who voted for Hart or Fairchild were attracted by the peculiar conspiracy theories of LaRouche. First of all, they were almost certainly unaware of them--the LaRouchies spent almost nothing on the primary campaign. Second, the particular *kind* of conspiracy theories embraced by the LaRouchies don't seem to be particularly popular--they are largely based on Anglophobia, which has been steadily declining in the US. See John E. Moser, "The Decline of American Anglophobia Or, How Americans Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the English." http://personal.ashland.edu/~jmoser1/anglophobia.html Third, if the voters were at all attracted to LaRouchie theories, conspiracy or otherwise, why did the LaRouchie candidate against Adlai Stevenson III get only 7 percent of the vote?

I think the obvious reasons were dislike of some of the organization candidates--or at least of their names--which led people to vote for the only people running against these organization candidates. I don't think attachment to LaRouchie ideas had anything to do with it, or that voters had any idea that the candidates running against the organization were in fact LaRouchies.

(It may be objected that Janice Hart got 15 percent of the vote for Secretary of State in November, even after it had been widely reported that she was a LaRouchie. But she was after all the Democratic candidate, and large numbers of Illinois voters were used to voting the straight Democratic ticket.)
 
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