Perilli: All Buddy’s Money Can’t Buy Him Providence Again
Thursday, July 24, 2014
No matter how much money Buddy Cianci raises, he will have a hard time putting it to good use, believes John Perilli
These are important questions for Providence mayoral candidate Buddy Cianci, who looks to ride his way back into City Hall on a wave of cash. Before a court ordered him to drain it, Buddy Cianci’s campaign account peaked at over $600,000 while he was in prison, and it looks well on its way to coming back. A recent $1000-a-head fundraiser reportedly banked Buddy over $100,000 in one night, and his campaign expects to raise over a million dollars by the time November arrives. This would make him by far the best funded candidate in the race.
But can money alone return Cianci to his old corner office? Or has Providence, with a younger and more diverse electorate than the one that brought him back the first time in 1990, left Buddy behind?
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Among the reform-minded, money in politics is a sore subject. Depending on which races you examine, the better funded candidate wins eight or nine elections out of ten. This is such a scary statistic that it leads to a number of facile generalizations about the candidate with more money having inflated chances of winning. Correlation, in that deadliest of statistical sins, becomes causation. As the big second-quarter filing deadline approaches, and campaigns up and down the ballot begin to reveal their harvests, these generalizations will no doubt make a return.
But how, exactly, does a candidate with more money execute their victory?
They do this by using their money to capitalize on two things: time, and potential support. Time is the great equalizer in electoral politics, but campaigns with more money can afford to use it more efficiently. Potential supporters are anyone who would vote for a candidate if only they either knew they aligned with the candidate’s positions or were encouraged by the candidate to vote.
Campaigns can use a number of methods to take advantage of their time and potential support. They can run advertisements to inform voters about themselves and their platform. They can hire field staff to find, persuade and turn out willing voters. They can conduct polls to find out which issues to discuss, and which words to use when they discuss them. These are any campaign’s bread and butter, and they are how most of that cash gets put to use.
Nothing Left to Buy
When we look at these steps, though, even Buddy Cianci’s well-funded campaign starts to run into problems.
First, let’s consider advertising. A good campaign ad informs voters about a candidate’s personal story and issue positions, but who in Providence doesn’t know the whole sordid story of Buddy’s rise and fall? Similarly, who would be willing to trust Buddy after two trespasses against the public trust? Buddy Cianci’s ad campaign will inevitably run into a single fatal roadblock: There is no convincing left to do. Unless he embarks on a total reparation of his image, there is little a Cianci commercial could do, and even the cleanest reputation fix can’t hide everything.
Then, there is canvassing. An effective field operation works because it turns out supporters who might not otherwise have voted, but what happens when there are no voters to turn out? Buddy Cianci is facing a radically different Providence than the one he cajoled into granting him a second chance in 1990. For one, Buddy’s older, white ethnic base has been dwindling. Providence was 70.2 percent white in 1990, but only 49.8 percent white in 2010. Less obvious is Providence’s changing median age, which dropped from around thirty years in 1990 to 28.5 years in 2010. This is a small but important shift: Providence voters are, in all likelihood, not getting any older. The amount of people who have supported Buddy in their lifetime is decreasing. If Buddy wants to win, he’ll have to make new friends, a tall task against a young, solidly Democratic general electorate.
In short, Cianci’s war chest might well be worthless.
Buddy might raise a campaign trove that would be the envy of the field, and we all might give him better odds for it. But let’s not take leave of our analytical senses. Cianci is going to have to spend all that money, but when he does, he’ll find that he has nothing to spend it on. Buddy could have all the money in the world, but purchasing forgiveness wholesale is a tough thing to do.
John Perilli is a native of Cumberland, RI and a rising senior at Brown University who consults for state and local Democratic candidates. The opinions presented in this piece do not represent the opinions of any organizations John Perilli is affiliated with.
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