39%

Since my post in March, I filed to run as a candidate in my local Utah House district. The Utah Underground, as it were, emerged into the light.

I did so reluctantly. I had been serving as the legislative chair for the district and was tasked with finding a candidate to run. No one stepped up, and my limited efforts proved fruitless. Halfway through the week I told my county chair I'd run if I couldn't find anyone else. I didn't, so I did.

People start to crowd around you and say crazy things when you put yourself in that position. My opponent was a ten-year incumbent who was in leadership, and who had a reputation for being fairly nasty, ill-tempered and vindictive. One of the earliest things I was told was that a major political group in the state wanted to make sure that someone ran against him, because, they claimed, some significant scandal was going to emerge that would make him look very bad. Another group with aspirations to political influence contacted me early on, with their executive director assuring me that he would come up and knock on doors himself to make sure my opponent didn't get re-elected. Needless to say, neither group lived up to their promises, with one of them actually endorsing my opponent after giving me strong signals for several weeks that they liked my positions better.

For my part, I did the math early on and settled on a get out the vote strategy, concluding that if just 45% of my GOTV segments turned out to vote, while Republicans turned in a standard mid-term turnout, I would win. So all I really needed to do was to get Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters out to the polls.

In a year when Democrats are frustrated with the president and when Republicans are riding a tidal wave of enthusiasm.

The problem is, I've never really connected very well with people. Two years ago, I knocked on hundreds of doors for our previous candidate, and all we managed to do was increase our percentage by three points. When I was on my LDS mission, I worked as hard as any missionary, and was still spectacularly ineffective on doorsteps. During my campaign, I knocked on hundreds of doors, introduced myself, and typically asked the potential voter what their take was on the election. In over 90% of cases, the voter shrugged and said they didn't know much about the issues (immigration came up occasionally early on, but faded into non-existence toward the end). I'd then smile and encourage the voter to read my literature and go vote.

Hardly an approach destined to get people excited to vote, much less vote for me.

Sure, I raised over $5,000, spent it on too many signs and flyers (we've still got dozens of signs and hundreds of flyers), sent out a mailer to the our GOTV voters, placed over 4,500 flyers in the local newspaper, and ran a bunch of ads on cable TV. Oh, and I had a bunch of t-shirts printed, which I and my small handful of supporters wore when we knocked on doors. But on that crucial moment, door after door, when I had the chance to win over a voter, I'm afraid I likely fell flat.

Now, I did choose a message that the party gurus advised me against: raising our school spending levels to somewhere north of our current lowest in the nation levels. Apparently, while Utahns want to fund their schools, it's not a message that typically moves voters. One of my law school professors, who had run (unsuccessfully) for Congress a few years ago, advised me early on to run on the message that was important to me, and not the message the "experts" wanted me to run on. It felt right to me to run on education, and I couldn't think of a better message that I believed in (and which would have a chance of resonating with moderates and our brand of Utah conservative Democrats), so I threw a message together and ordered the flyers.

On the bright side, my family's name in the city where I live does carry no small amount of respect (due, in very large part, to my father's decades of service in the high council of our LDS stake). In fact, a lot of folks actually believed (and may still believe) that it was my father who was running and not me. One of the few intelligent decisions I made was to put up signs featuring my last name throughout town.

And for that, I give myself a better margin in the final tally that my anemic efforts would otherwise merit. As of the night before the election, early voting shows 37.5% of voters hailing from Democratic base and GOTV segments. Honestly, segment turnout two years ago overpredicted the ultimate result (Dem segments in 2008 constituted 44% of the vote, while the actual result gave the Democratic candidate 38%). Still, I'm going to assume substantial cross-over vote from my community and peg my result at 39%.

Will I be disappointed? Almost certainly. I'm actually bracing for 32%. Running a campaign on the hope of high voter turnout, during a midterm election, in a state whose voter turnout is one of lowest in the nation was never a good idea.

The problem is I still, at age 33, believe in people. I can't get over my initial assumption that folks should be well-informed, and therefore probably are. When the economy is at its worst since the Great Depression, when property taxes are likely going to be raised, it strikes me that it really shouldn't take much to persuade people to take twenty minutes to go to the polls and cast a ballot. Maybe a more persuasive candidate could have accomplished it, but I could not.

Of course I couldn't. That's why back in March before I embarked on this campaign I was hanging in the Underground. And that's where I'm going twenty four hours from now when the final results are posted and I learn whether I lose badly, or lose very badly.