Owen Elected to Owosso City Council! by Ben Steele III, Campaign Manager
On November 6, Libertarian Party of Shiawassee County
Chair Mark Owen won his bid for the Owosso City Council,
placing fourth among 10 candidates for four four-year terms.
Mark received 559 votes, just 26 more than the fifth place
candidate. This win comes on the heels of the successful
repeal of Owosso's Historic District, an effort which was
lead by Owen and the LPSC.
In December of 2000, the Owosso City Council approved a
plan to designate an area of town an "Historic District."
Homeowners in that area would have been forced to have
improvements to their homes pre-approved by a
council-appointed "Historical Commission." The plan also
included taxpayer-funded subsidies for home improvements by
Historic District homeowners.
A substantial number of Owosso citizens, both in and
out of the designated Historic District, opposed the
ordinance, but no real organized effort was underway to
repeal it. Mark Owen organized a meeting and set up a
campaign committee named the Owosso Residents for Property
Rights. The group included both local Libertarians and
non-Libertarians, including some of Owosso's most
influential business owners and politicians. Mark was named
the group's spokesperson. We set about collecting petitions
to force a referendum.
A special election was scheduled for a renewal of the
county's library system millage, and the Historic District
repeal was added to the ballot in the City of Owosso. On
August 14th, the voters of Owosso rejected the Historic
District ordinance by a 70% margin.
With the Historic District battle behind him, Mark
decided to use his increased name recognition and the new
relationships he had formed during the referendum effort to
run for-- and win --a seat on the Owosso City Council.
Of 10,366 registered voters in Owosso, 1,906 voted in
the Historic District referendum, with 1,324 voting to
repeal and 582 voting to keep the district. Among those
running for the four open council seats were two strong
incumbents, including the Mayor. Another candidate was a
local government "insider" and was very likely to win a
seat. That left one seat up for grabs, and seven candidates
fighting for it. We knew that we would need as many as 500
votes to win this seat.
Thanks to his hard work on the Historic District issue,
Mark had a distinct advantage over most of the other six
candidates in terms of name recognition. We settled on a
simple strategy of focusing on Mark's leadership on the
Historic District referendum and targeting those voters who
voted in the special election to repeal the district.
Knowing that over 1,300 of those 1,900 voters were on our
side on that issue, we felt we could count on that group to
get the votes we needed to get Mark on the council. We got
a list of the voters who voted on August 14th and began
discussing tactics for reaching them.
A fundraising letter was sent to Libertarian donors
statewide, and another was sent to the local donors who
funded the Historic District referendum. Contributions also
came from The Liberty Leadership Council PAC and from the
Libertarian Victory Fund PAC. Yard signs were ordered and
brochures were printed.
The absentee voters represented a large block-- almost
a third --of the Historic District voters. We mailed to the
entire list of almost 700 permanent absentee voters, timing
the mailing to reach their homes within days of their
ballots.
The rest of the list was reached through aggressive
door-to-door campaigning. A half dozen volunteers focused
on doing targeted lit drops, working from the list of voters
who went to the polls in August, while the candidate knocked
on doors and spoke personally to as many voters as he could.
One hundred yard signs were placed throughout the city,
particularly in the former Historic District area.
Volunteers passed out candy to children and campaign
brochures to their parents during the City of Owosso's
"Downtown Trick-or-Treating" event on October 27.
Newspaper ads were placed in both major newspapers in
the county, reminding voters that Mark was the one
responsible for the repeal of the Historic District and
touting endorsements from several former City Council
members, a School Board member, two nationally published
authors, prominent business owners, and the one incumbent
City Council member who had stood up against the Historic
District ordinance and had worked with the Owosso Citizens
for Property Rights.
By election day, we had distributed 2,500 brochures to
Owosso voters, including all 1,900 on our Historic District
voters list. But we weren't done yet. The candidate and
volunteers hit the polls on November 6, meeting the voters
and distributing photocopies of the newspaper ads we had
run. We covered the most active polling spots in the city,
taking care to follow local election laws regarding distance
from the polls.
After the polls closed, we headed down to City Hall and
waited for the results. Doing our homework paid off; the
three candidates we had predicted to easily win took the
first three seats, leaving only one of the four seats open.
Only one of the remaining candidates gave us any real
competition, due to name recognition by virtue of a family
name and a stake in several local businesses. However, when
the last precinct was in, our hard work made the difference.
The Mark Owen campaign was unquestionably the most
well-funded, well-planned, and aggressive campaign for the
Owosso City Council and the results showed in the end.
Without the Historic District issue and the name
recognition and political alliances created from it, Mark
Owen probably wouldn't have been able to win this seat over
several candidates who have lived in the city longer and
have deeper roots in the community. Without the support of
prominent, non-Libertarian locals, we might have come close,
but not close enough. The difference in this race was the
hard work, networking, and planning that was done long
before candidate paperwork was ever filed.
It is not often that a local government hands us a
perfect issue to leverage into success at the ballot, but
when it happens, we have to be prepared to take advantage of
it. That is the great lesson of the Mark Owen for Owosso
City Council campaign.
Please allow me to thank every one of you who helped
this campaign with your donations of money and time.
Doesn't it feel great when it all pays off?
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People Vote Emotionally by Ghazey Aleck
One of the hardest things for most people to understand
when they become candidates is that people vote emotionally.
This is especially hard for libertarians to understand.
Libertarians are thinkers and have a disciplined
philosophy. We can go on for hours in a very logical
fashion about how things out to be, but the typical voter
won't stand still long enough for a libertarian treatise on
public policy, so we are not very successful.
All that may be changing a bit now with libertarians
like Jeff Steinport, Mark Owens and Andy Lecureaux's
figuring out how to win elections. Each of those campaign's
must have found a way to connect emotionally with the
voters--or at least connect better than their opponents.
Next year the LPM should be fielding a large group of
candidates. Hopefully, there will be a large number of
active campaigns. If you are one of those people, I urge
you to take the time to consider what makes people vote for
a candidate. Talk to our winners, talk to our campaign
professionals and talk to your family, friends and neighbors
about why they vote the way that they do. I think you will
find that most people vote because it feels good to them to
vote for certain candidates. The candidate connected better
with them or campaigned more professionally. But the bottom
line is that the right emotional button was pushed.
This is why candidates wrap themselves in red, white
and blue, get professional smiling photographs and look for
emotional issues to trumpet in their campaigns. Emotion is
the key.
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