From: bcapps@agora.rain.com (Brent Capps)
Newsgroups: soc.motss,soc.bi
Subject: Early conclusions from Oregon (Was: Re: What to do about Colorado)
Date: 7 Nov 92 16:35:57 GMT
Article-I.D.: agora.BxCu3y.17v
Organization: Open Communications Forum

miket@hermes.tcs.com (Michael Turner nmscore Assoc.) writes:

>In article <1992Nov5.224144.14823@ncselxsi.uucp> fisher@ncselxsi.uucp (Chuck Fisher) writes:
>>I was sad to hear about the loss in Colorado.  It was strange that we
>>had heard so much about #9 in Oregon and very little about Colorado.
>>Was it because everyone thought it had little chance to win?  Were
>>folks in Colorado complacent?

>Maybe the #2 people in Colorado had a different strategy: run a quiet
>campaign.  The #9 stuff was all over the news here in CA, in part because
>the #9 promoters were so inflammatory.

In Oregon our strategy was determined directly from lessons learned in our
'88 defeat, in which we ran a quiet campaign emphasizing fairness, etc.
We allowed favorable poll results (57 to 35 in our favor a month before
the elections) to lull us into complacency.  Then in the last couple of
weeks the OCA threw as much dirt in the air as possible in hopes some of
it would stick in the eyes of the voters.  We weren't prepared to respond,
and they won 53 to 47.  Moral: we thought that, just because the
OCA were right wing nuts, that everyone would see them as such and vote
accordingly.  Well, Thomas Jefferson nonwithstanding, these truths are
*not* always self-evident.

We learned not to underestimate these people.  This time we played hardball
and made crystal clear to everyone that the OCA was a fascist organization.
We decided early on the 'quiet' strategy was fucked, that we were going to
make a *lot* of noise and fuss, and focus the attention onto the OCA and
off of us.  It worked.  Our own people, inside the state and out, were
alerted to the sense of danger.  People instate came out to everyone they
knew.  People from outside the state generously made it possible for us
to outspend our adversaries by 4 to 1.  All the noise also helped us turn
out the vote for our side; people in the cities knew how vitally important
it was for them to show up at the polls and vote this damned thing down
by as wide a margin as possible.

We did make some mistakes, which fortunately we were able to overcome.
Of the many issues raised in the race, the most dangerous one was 
'you're trying to teach my child homosexuality'.  We should have hit
back harder against that lie in particular; next time we will.

>Another possible difference: Colorado is much more sharply divided,
>politically, into urban liberal sophisticates clustered around Denver
>(self-styled, anyway) and rural conservative ... uh ... is "rubes" too
>inflammatory?

>Oregon is similarly divided, but much blurrier.

No, that's not true, Oregon is very similar to Colorado demographically.  
Here it was also an urban-vs-rural issue, and we won because we carried 
5 counties in overwhelming numbers: the 3 Portland-area counties and the
two university counties where Eugene and Corvallis are.  

>                                                  Its diversity is more
>homogeneous.  The whole #9 issue, interestingly, came up there at the
>instigation of ex-Californian "family-values" right-wingers from around
>L.A., whereas I imagine that #2 in Colorado was more indigenous.  I have
>no doubt that some of the ex-Northern-Californian Oregonians played a
>significant role in defeating 9 there, as the north of our state is more
>liberal, generally, and sends lots of refugees to Oregon, many of them to
>relatively out-of-the-way places.  

I'm not sure what you mean by "its diversity is more homogenous".  Oregon
isn't diverse at all.  Outside of the cities there are almost no 
African-Americans, Asians, Jews, or Hispanics.  There's a huge bubba vote
in this state, and it showed up at the polls on election day (43%).

Oregon is a lily-white state with a ugly past of racism and intolerance.
The KKK flourished here, and for many years the state forbade the
in-migration of blacks by statute.  Portlanders in particular tend to
be in denial about this; they want to see this as a tolerant state, so
by God that's what they're going to see.  That's where the noisy campaign
was vital: it forced these people to take a good hard look at the reality
of bigotry and hate that's endemic in this state.  Once we made it visible
to them, they turned out to vote it down.

The ex-Californian issue helped in the Portland area, I think; I suppose
I'm an ex-Californian, having lived in SFO for a year, but we generally
think of ourselves as Oregonians now.  Hard to say what the numbers were,
though, as some of the ex-Californians I talked to were totally clueless
as to the politics of this state.

-- 
Brent Capps                          | 
bcapps@agora.rain.com (gay stuff)    | okay, but wash it first.
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