Editorial: Suburban mayoral campaigns shouldn't cost this much

Yahoo

3 days ago

Inflation was perhaps the most pivotal issue on the ballot in November 2024, as we all know.
But it wasn't just the cost of everyday goods that was rising. Local politics got awfully expensive in our most recent campaign cycle, culminating with April 1 general municipal elections.
Wanna run for mayor of a Chicago suburb? If this year's consolidated election is our guide for the future, the tab in many cases will run well into the six figures for the most high-profile suburban races.
And that's striking when you consider what the top elected official in a suburb actually does. Mayors — or village presidents, as they're called in many suburbs — oversee local services, manage the budget, and serve as a community representative at ribbon cuttings, among other duties.
Local mayoral races aren't traditionally supposed to resemble high-stakes congressional battles — but judging by the last election cycle, they increasingly do.
We knew the village president race in Orland Park was hotly contested, but we were still stunned to see what those campaigns spent in the first quarter of 2024: over $580,000.
For a village president race. In a town of 57,000.
Orland Park Mayor Jim Dodge ran as part of a slate of candidates called 'Orland Park for All.' Dodge and his associated committees spent about $190,000 in the months leading up to the April 1, 2024, election, according to State Board of Elections data.
Dodge's opponent, former Mayor Keith Pekau, had a slate of his own called People Over Politics. Pekau and his associated committees filed reports showing nearly $400,000 in spending in the first quarter of the year, and pulled in donations from many local individuals. Notably, People Over Politics also recorded a nearly $15,000 donation from conservative megadonor Richard Uihlein of Lake Forest.
But what did all of this money get the people of Orland Park? A bitter, ugly local election that saw former neighbors become bitter political enemies.
And that's the problem we fear is taking shape: Municipal races aren't supposed to be referendums on the hot-button issues animating Washington.
Local politics should be different. These candidates are running to serve their neighbors. That closeness, both to one another and to the people they hope to represent, has traditionally encouraged a higher level of civility and respect.
Additionally, when it's expensive to run for office, fewer people do it even if they may be a good candidate. That's bad for local democracy.
The need for so much cash also heightens the risk of business interests like developers gaining more influence over local officials.
Orland Park's wasn't the only big-bucks local race. Skokie's mayoral election was costly, too, with candidates spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, according to a Tribune analysis of election filings.
And in Evanston, Mayor Daniel Biss — who now is running for Congress — and his opponent, Jeff Boarini, spent nearly $200,000 in the months leading up to the April 1 election, according to reporting from the Evanston Roundtable.
As people close to state and local politics have told us, one of the drivers behind the growing cost of running for local office is that increasingly politics — even practiced at the local level — is a business. Twenty years ago, say, a friend might have volunteered as an unpaid campaign manager and handled every aspect of a race. Good old-fashioned door-knocking is free. Today, it's more common, even in small campaigns, to hire paid staff and invest in media buys, mailings or other professional services.
'The nature of campaigns nowadays is you are competing with everything, and there is a lot of competition for people's attention,' Dodge said. 'You have to have enough communication to get through all of that.'
That's fair. But it's still a shame that it's led to the kind of polarized and high-cost local politics we're seeing more and more today. The cottage industry developing around local politics doesn't seem to be doing much to improve the quality of community discourse, even if it does help candidates get the word out — and it could be deterring good candidates from running for office.
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