By Rob Cruz, Opinion Contributor
It’s November 8, 2022, and it’s 7:00 pm – and the political witching hour begins as the numbers start to show up on the big and little screens alike. As the chips begin to fall in place, the blood, sweat, and tears come down to what feels like the longest three hours of the campaign season.
As the data trickles in, a pattern begins to form – every Democrat candidate seemingly has a 2 to 1 lead over every Republican candidate.
And this is where elections are lost – it’s hard to win when you’re in a constant catchup mode. The signs were always there, we just ignored them.
According to Crain’s in an article just four days before the election, they wrote,
“Thanks to early voting and vote-by-mail, 1 million ballots have been cast so far in Illinois.”
The translation for Republicans: game over.
Many Republican candidates will tell you that we won the Election Day vote, but making up the difference from early voting and mail-in-ballots in a single day proved to be an impossible task.
Now let’s take a look at Florida.
According to statistics, over 2 million registered Florida Republicans voted early or by mail this past election!
That’s 2,168,758 Republicans compared to 1,870,486 Democrats.
Now let’s take a look at one of the most liberal states in America: California.
In California, ABC News was reporting on November 9th that 5.1 million mail-in votes were counted during the midterm election.
At first glance, and judging by the early votes coming in, it looked like the Democrats were going to dominate California’s midterm election. But three weeks after the election, the LA Times reported that,
“Several California races were decisive in the GOP’s successful effort to seize House control.”
In other words, the Republicans beat the Democrats at their own game – and in Orange County, 700,000 Republicans voted by mail compared to 725,000 Democrats.
And what a difference that made – and the GOP has control of the US House because of it.
New York GOP candidate for governor Lee Zeldin understood the importance of voting early, saying,
“I would strongly encourage anybody who cannot vote in-person to make sure they request an absentee ballot and get that ballot in…”
Early voting and mail-in voting are here to stay in Illinois. We can choose to ignore it or we can choose to apply ourselves to it. And according to election law, mail-in voting is now permanent in Illinois – so we must adapt or become extinct. It’s one or the other.
So, here’s a thought for the Spring elections in 2023.
The grassroots can use that electric energy that we saw throughout the campaign and during the December 10th state central committee meeting and help their friends and colleagues take back local school boards, library boards and village trustee positions. Let’s organize a team that can use the laws that are on the books to counter the large deficits we are seeing now as election night rolls around.
It’s time to work out the kinks in April and develop a mail-in-ballot initiative so we can be ready for November. It will take some time, but we need to start now.
And one final thought to our grassroots folks – are the kids worth changing our perspective and adopting a mail-in-ballot strategy? Because they will be the ones to pay the price if we don’t.
Rob Cruz is an entrepreneur and small businessman. He served on the Oak Lawn Community High School Dist. 229 School Board. In 2022, he ran for US Congress, IL-6.
