Grass-Roots Campaign Has A Prayer
Most of the delegates attending the Pierce County Republican convention didn’t get very far before bearing witness to the organizational army forming around one of the candidates for governor.
In fact, they were hardly out of their cars.
The sprawling parking lot next to the Tacoma Dome was manned by small teams of Ellen Craswell supporters who met arriving delegates. They offered greetings, brochures, stickers and even placards that could be placed in rear windows.
While it seems a simple thing to meet arriving delegates, it’s not. It requires something most candidates lack this early in a very contested primary: Numerous volunteers.
Craswell, a former state senator, is emerging as the choice of the GOP’s conservative Christian faction. Unlike any other group within the party, conservative Christians act on their support with both money and time.
While other candidates are scrambling to put together skeleton organizations across the state, Craswell already has directors in 43 of the 49 legislative districts. She’ll fill the final six shortly and add seven regional coordinators. Her volunteer list has topped 7,000.
Leslie McMillan, Craswell’s campaign director, said the strategy was to build a volunteer base. One reason Craswell declared her candidacy so early - November 1994 - was to give her time to gather an organization.
Her state Public Disclosure Commission reports show the benefits. She listed more than 900 donors in March alone. Nearly 80 didn’t give cash but instead donated the cost of postage, refreshments for coffee hours and copying charges for brochures and postage - the tools of the grass roots.
The cash donations ranged from $5 to $500, with most in the $25 to $50 range. Many were part of the Firm Foundation Club, people who pledge to give a little each month. One couple, for example, sent $7.50 each - raising their total for the campaign to $55.
They do more than send money. When the state Republican Party announced that it would hold a non-binding gubernatorial straw poll at the March 5 precinct caucuses, Craswell’s campaign decided to win it. When the votes were counted, she had 41 percent. Her closest rivals - King County Prosecutor Norm Maleng and House Majority Leader Dale Foreman - had 21 percent and 18 percent, respectively.
The other candidates dismissed Craswell’s performance, claiming they didn’t consider the straw poll significant. But they understand what it reveals about Craswell’s emerging organizational advantage. Most candidates can only dream of grass-roots support measured in the thousands that can be deployed quickly to do anything from attend a precinct caucus to greet convention delegates in the parking lot.
It is easy to dismiss Craswell’s candidacy as appealing only to a small-but-vocal fringe of the electorate. But with 10 serious candidates running for governor - six Republicans and four Democrats - the eventual winners may attract no more than 13 to 15 percent of the primary vote - no more than 175,000 votes.
Estimates of the voting strength of Christian conservatives vary. Dave Welch of the state Christian Coalition thinks it’s about 20 percent. But when pollster Stuart Elway has asked voters whether they tend to agree or disagree with Christian conservatives on social and political issues, one-third have said they agree.
If the Christian conservative voters stick with Craswell - that is, not be tempted by candidates like Foreman, Pam Roach or Nona Brazier - their numbers could well give Craswell a victory. Whether she could then appeal to a general electorate is in doubt. But that question is one her campaign won’t need to worry about unless it first wins the primary.
So far, it seems that Craswell has secured the Christian base in Washington. She is one of the founders of the movement, having been active in the Christian right since 1980. And she portrays herself as the most conservative candidate and as someone who won’t compromise.
“Sometimes I’m called radical,” Craswell told delegates in Tacoma last weekend. “When I heard that radical means getting back to our roots, I said, ‘Yeah, I’m radical.”’
On her Internet home page, Craswell repeatedly claims that the founders of the nation never intended that Christianity have no role in government - only that there be no official religion established by government. Featured prominently in her campaign material is a photograph of a statue of George Washington down on one knee with his hands folded in prayer. It sits in front of the Old Capitol Building in Olympia.
Her campaign takes on the image, then, of a crusade. And would-be crusaders are responding in waves.
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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Peter Callaghan McClatchy News Service