The first signs that Rod Blagojevich had succeeded in his strategy to win the Democratic nomination for governor came very early on a February morning as the congressman sat in his office at the U.S. Capitol nervously awaiting the results of a poll.
The son-in-law of a Chicago ward boss had bet his political fortunes on developing a huge following in, of all places, the farmlands, coal mines and small towns of Downstate Illinois. And the crucial first barrage of television commercials introducing him to those rural voters had been on the air for a little over a week.
As Blagojevich was taping the commercials the month before in the gritty river city of Rockford, he turned to his media adviser to ask about the backup plan, in case the ads failed to move voters. The answer was succinct: “You lose.”
And just hours before he received the poll results, U.S. Rep. William Lipinski (D-Ill.), a powerful political supporter, had sidled up to Blagojevich on the floor of Congress to warn him that those poll numbers had better show improvement. Otherwise, Lipinski said, reporters would begin to write him off as a failure, donors would abandon him and political backers would lose their enthusiasm.
So the 45-year-old congressman, mired in third place in a three-man contest, anxiously eavesdropped while his political director, former chief of staff and frequent jogging partner John Wyma, mumbled each candidate’s percentage as the results finally came in over a cell phone: “24, 24, 30.”
“I thought, `Oh good, I tied [Paul] Vallas. Then I found out I was the 30,” Blagojevich said.
That sudden surge in the polls was the turning point of a campaign that benefited from an energetic and disciplined candidate, enormous financial resources, overwhelming organizational backing and astute professional political advisers. But above all, the campaign’s victory was constructed around a central insight: The three primary candidates were all Chicago residents well-known in this region, so the most fruitful ground for winning new support would be Downstate.
Blagojevich had an “in” with many ward organizations, thanks to the influence of his father-in-law, Ald. Dick Mell (33rd). That said, his vote totals from the city and suburbs ultimately proved disappointing. What took him over the top was the Downstate vote, of which 55 percent went to Blagojevich, just enough to eke out a 2-percentage-point edge over Vallas.
The approach that the son of an immigrant Serbian steelworker decided to take outside the Chicago area was subtly influenced by the events of Sept. 11.
Before that, the campaign had considered launching ads to introduce Blagojevich to voters that would make light of his hard-to-pronounce surname. They retooled the approach to conform to the more serious political atmosphere.
The new focus of the introductory ads was on a “sense of community” that campaign officials sensed after Sept. 11. The idea was a natural fit for the theme of “opportunities for working people” that the campaign already had developed to appeal both to economically depressed Downstate communities and traditional Democratic constituencies in the Chicago area.
So Blagojevich debuted Downstate with commercials stressing his family’s immigrant roots and the phrase, “My name is Eastern European, my story is American.”
Well before the commercials began airing in late January, the campaign also lined up statewide organizational support from the AFL-CIO and the party’s county chairmen. And Blagojevich’s intensive early focus on fundraising gave him the resources to drive his message.
The wrinkle that worried the Blagojevich camp was that Vallas might pre-empt their Downstate campaign with his own television ads or at least quickly match him with commercials to blunt the congressman’s growth in the polls. Such a counterattack would be risky given the Vallas campaign’s limited resources but potentially decisive if the former Chicago schools chief developed momentum and won financial backing.
“We’d kind of wake up every day, checking the [television] buys, asking, when is that shoe going to drop?” said one Blagojevich campaign adviser.
But the Vallas campaign waited too long. Vallas eventually won the endorsement of Glenn Poshard, a former southern Illinois congressman who was the party’s nominee for governor in 1998. But most of Poshard’s key supporters already were aligned with Blagojevich by then.
