Judicial races mostly go as expected
by Dan Heilman Associate Editor
Jane Ranum (left) and Gail Chang Bohr were among the winners of Tuesday's judicial elections. |
Related: 2008 Minnesota Judicial Election Results
Election: Judicial candidates were generally well-behaved
Incumbents win big; Bohr, Ranum take open seats
Election: Judicial candidates were generally well-behaved
The 2008 judicial races will go down as a time when incumbents faced unusual challenges, grassroots campaigning showed it can triumph, and nothing can be truly counted on until the polls are closed.
While few of the results could be called truly shocking, the judicial campaign resulted in several close races. The closest was the 2nd Judicial District race between assistant Hennepin County Attorney and former state lawmaker Howard Orenstein and Children’s Law Center of Minnesota executive director Gail Chang Bohr. Bohr prevailed by about four percentage points.
“It feels wonderful, and I’m actually not too surprised,” said Bohr of the outcome the day after the election. “I tried to run a campaign that had to do with qualifications. I urged people to do research and check us both out.”
Bohr, Ramsey County’s first Asian-American judge (and the state’s fourth), credited her win to her willingness to knock on doors, walk in parades, and generally do whatever she could to get her face and name in front of the voting public.
“I started out the campaign knowing I would need to establish name recognition,” she said. “I wanted people to know who I am, and I think people appreciated that I was taking the time to do that. You have to connect with people so they’ll remember you.”
In reflecting on the race’s outcome, Orenstein declined to speculate on what might have turned the tide in Bohr’s favor.
Bohr said one key to her campaign was enlisting the help of volunteers from all walks of life, and not just from within the legal community.
“I had a team of people from a number of diverse backgrounds,” she said.
Money isn’t everything
Another race that demonstrated contrasting campaigning styles was the contest for an open seat in the 4th District between assistant Hennepin County Attorney and former state legislator Jane Ranum and 4th District family court referee David L. Piper, won by Ranum by a margin of 10 percentage points.
Some estimates had Piper outspending Ranum in the race by four-to-one, putting about $100,000 toward his campaign. But Ranum , armed with the aid of a strong corps of volunteers and an endorsement from the Star Tribune, prevailed.
“This election was a test of whether a grassroots campaign could be won,” Ranum said. “I was frankly surprised at the margin [of victory].”
Ranum said she spent her money strategically, not printing lawn signs until after she’d won the district primary last spring, and being careful to get as much volunteer help as possible.
“[Piper] is a good man, and he just had so much money,” she said. “We knew that we couldn’t do things like drop 55,000 pieces [of campaign literature] without a lot of people being committed to the campaign.”
Bohr also spent plenty on her campaign, about $75,000, but said much of that came from a family nest egg.
“We live pretty frugally, and we do a lot of saving,” she said. “You save for a rainy day, and this was our rainy day.”
Some strange campaigning
The races at the appellate level yielded few surprises, with Supreme Court justices Paul Anderson and Lorie Skjerven Gildea winning along with Court of Appeals judge Terri Stoneburner.
Gildea, a first-time campaigner after being appointed to the bench in 2006, said she “thoroughly enjoyed” getting out and campaigning.
“It gave me a chance to meet people and talk about my job, and that’s easy for me to talk about,” she said. Still, she added, she’s looking forward to getting back to the work she’s been chosen to do. “I’ll be a better justice because of the campaign, but I’m looking forward to focusing completely on my work again.”
Bowman and Brooke managing partner George Soule, who managed the campaign of the victorious justice Anderson, said he saw “no big surprises” in the judicial outcomes, but also said he was struck by how some campaigns were run.
In Hennepin County, for example, incumbent Philip D. Bush faced a challenger, Alan Eugene Link, who ran no campaign to speak of. Despite Link's stealth approch, he received 35 percent of the vote.
Veteran judicial election watcher Charles E. Lundberg of Bassford Remele speculated that the relatively strong showing of two challengers who didn’t seem to take their races seriously might have reflected “a general anti-incumbent sentiment” among voters.
“There is plenty of anecdotal evidence indicating that some voters habitually vote for the non-incumbent,” he noted.
He remarked that those results and the thousands of write-in votes in many judicial races — more than 1 percent of the votes tallied, in some cases — might suggest that many voters not only don’t do their homework when it comes to judicial races, but don’t take the election process seriously.
