WHY WOULD anyone want to run for mayor of Dallas? The job offers constant aggravation and the munificent reward of a $50-per-week salary. The most commonly cited reasons for running for the office include a sense of civic responsibility, personal ambition and severe derangement. Whatever the rationale behind a candidacy, anyone seriously seeking the mayoralty of the nation’s seventh largest city must master an increasingly complex array of political tactics.
In any campaign, money is essential and is often determinative. In 1976, Bob Fol-som and Garry Weber each spent approximately $400,000 in a special election to fill a vacant mayor’s chair (surrendered by Wes Wise when he launched his ill-fated congressional campaign against Jim Mat-tox).
That seems an exorbitant amount of money to spend to win a job that pays $50 per week; to date, no other mayoral candidate has spent as much. But as the cost of campaigning rises, budgets for 1983 are approaching the extravagance of 1976. Spending in the 1982 concert hall bond campaign approached $300,000. Campaign experts now say that $250,000 is a base-line, austere budget for a citywide campaign in Dallas.
This fiscal criterion knocks a lot of candidates out of business even before they begin. If a person doesn’t have this kind of money or can’t raise it, the expensive essentials-direct mail, telephone banks, advertising -are out of reach. If all candidates are short on funds, the equality of poverty can keep the campaign interesting. But if one candidate has disproportionately more money than his competition, he almost always must be considered the front-runner.
The unpleasant but unavoidable importance of money is but one of the elements of a campaign. Ways exist to compensate for lack of funding; good organization and tactics can counterbalance spending (especially if that spending is not carefully planned). The impact of the available dollars is determined largely by the skill with which they are spent. It does little good to spend vast amounts on advertising directed at persons who are not likely to vote. One dollar used wisely is worth more politically than $10 tossed blindly into the campaign.
This is why targeting is so important. Depending on how you look at it, targeting is either smart politics or anti-democratic manipulation. The well-tested theory behind the concept of targeting is that most people don’t vote and those who do vote do so only if some sort of stimulus (such as advertising or a telephone call) is applied.
Any politician will claim that he wants everyone to vote. That, of course, is nonsense. He wants everyone who is supporting him to vote and hopes everyone else will forget about the election. Targeting is the process of identifying the “good” voters – those likely to vote the desired way – through polling, research of past voting behavior and study of an area’s socio-economic profile.
After estimating election-day turnout, a campaigner decides how large an electoral base is needed for the campaign. If the turnout is predicted to be 100,000, for example, the number of targeted households probably will be about 80,000-enough to win, plus an overrun to protect against un-predicted turnout or flaws in the analysis of voter sympathies. Then, based on the research, all 235 precincts in Dallas are ranked, in order of relative strength. For example, if your candidate is a conservative businessman like Starke Taylor, your top-ranked precincts will include those in affluent North Dallas with records of good turnout and strong voting for other conservative candidates. Working your way down this list (which will include the number of registered-voter households per precinct), you include as many precincts as necessary to reach your 80,000-household figure.
With the help of the computer, this process has become even more sophisticated. Each citizen’s electoral history- not for whom he votes, but how often he votes -is a matter of public record. Entrepreneurial campaign consultants can examine voting records and identify the “most likely voters”-those who vote in bond elections and other low turnout contests. With this information and the file of registered voters (available on computer tape for about $600 from Dallas County), anyone with adequate computer capabilities can create a list of Dallas voters annotated to indicate their likelihood of voting. Do you want a list of the 50,000 most frequent voters in Dallas? Your computer can give it to you.
This means that not only can entire precincts be targeted based on the collective performance of their voters in past elections, but individual “high performance” voters who live in “low performance” precincts also can be identified. Once targeted, these precincts and voters become the recipients of almost all the campaign’s mail, telephone calls and other politicking.
In Dallas, targeting has become a precise science. In the 1979 bond election, the art museum campaign carried 96 percent of its targeted precincts. In 1982, the concert hall campaign, which used both targeted precincts and targeted households, did almost as well.
This is the kind of help that campaign money pays for. But not every aspect of campaigning for mayor is a purely mechanical function. This year, mayoral candidates are particularly concerned about what minority voters will do. Conventional wisdom holds that blacks and browns simply don’t vote, except occasionally in presidential elections or when extraordinary efforts are made to turn out the minority vote.
As a result, most Dallas campaigns aim at the non-minority sections of town. The 1979 art museum bond proposition carried only three of the eight City Council districts-Districts 3 and 4 in North Dallas and District 5 in East Dallas, each with about 20 percent turnout (high for a bond election). But those three districts together contributed 66.5 percent of the total vote. Predominantly black Districts 6 and 8 voted heavily against the proposition, but their impact was negligible since voter turnout in those areas was only slightly more than 3 percent.
Politicians, however, rely on this poor minority performance only at their peril. Former governor Bill Clements recently learned this. Minority voting is over-whelmingly Democratic, and in November 1982, minority turnout in Dallas was remarkably high -approaching 50 percent in key precincts. This turnout rate was almost the same as that found in much of North Dallas.
So this year’s mayoral candidates cannot disregard minority voters. This fact alone can make 1983 a significant political year for Dallas. If minority voters again turn out in relatively high numbers, they will have their voting performance as a political bargaining chip and will possess the clout to ensure greater responsiveness from city hall.
Another major question concerns the voting booth effectiveness of Dallas’ neighborhood organizations. These groups have attracted a lot of attention recently through their crime-watch programs and because of issues such as the double-decking of North Central Expressway.
To date, few of these organizations have become directly involved in electoral contests. Some East Dallas neighborhood activists endorsed Gov. Mark White and several other candidates in November, which undoubtedly helped White. But will these groups rally behind a mayoral candidate? And if they do, will this pay off in votes?
So far, efforts to cast the 1983 mayor’s race as a “homeowners vs. developers” battle have drawn interest principally from the news media. If, however, this becomes an issue, the clout of the neighborhoods should not be underestimated. Many of these organizations have excellent communications networks that could convey endorsements and other political information. More important, these people are ready to vote. There are few people who are more politically alert than the homeowner who sees his property values threatened.
While these new forces emerge on the Dallas political scene, it is safe to say that a more traditional part of Dallas politics is fading away. The influence of the “downtown establishment” began to wane when sportscaster Wes Wise upset the Citizens’ Charter Association (CCA) candidate in the 1971 mayor’s race. The CCA withered soon thereafter. The Dallas Citizens Council, the remaining bastion of old-line political power, has only limited impact on races today. The Citizens Council can help raise money and find candidates, but as evidenced by the dearth of persons willing to run for City Council seats this year, these are hard times for recruiting. The Citizens Council membership, which includes many of the city’s most important business executives, remains quietly influential in the community’s decision-making process but has little direct effect on voting behavior.
All this is merely part of the continuing evolution of electoral politics in Dallas. There is nothing particularly dramatic about it; no carefully conceived “sweeping out” of the old guard and replacement by young insurrectionists is in the works. It is merely a matter of changing times and, more important, the changing nature of Dallas’ population.
This remains a principal challenge for mayoral candidates: Who is the Dallas voter? How interested in Dallas are young residents of the massive apartment complexes; do they care enough about the city to register and vote? How effective are the gay politicians who dominate several Oak Lawn precincts; can their endorsements turn out a substantial number of voters? What is the role of tangential interest groups such as DISD parents; will they consider it worth their while to become involved in the mayoral contest? What about the much-publicized “new Texans”; do they feel settled enough in the politics of their new home to participate in the elections?
The politician must face all these questions. At some point, the candidate must also worry about issues (although most candidates do their best to avoid such strenuous mental exercise as often as possible).
This year, transportation planning is both the most crucial and most complex problem facing the city. In the transit referendum scheduled for August, Dallas voters will have one last chance to choose between order and chaos in transit planning. Any responsible mayoral candidate must discuss this issue in the spring, outlining his or her position on the referendum and also providing his or her own ideas about long-term transit concepts and funding.
Crime is still an important issue. The Dallas Police Department remains understaffed and underfunded. Dallas’ neighborhood crime-watch programs were helpful in 1982, but these efforts do not replace the need for more police officers. The new mayor should have a clearly defined position on funding for the upgrading of the department.
A number of additional issues remain for the ambitious candidate to address: land-use planning, development of the Arts District, improved delivery of services to the poor, increased responsiveness to neighborhood interests. All these are but small parts of the composite profile of Dallas’ future.
Remarkable political fortitude is required to meet the political requirementsand to address the issues that comprise acitywide campaign. Candidates usuallychoose the path of least resistance. Theircampaigning will be only as honest andtheir approaches to issues only as realisticas the voters demand.
