It’s our election wrap-up program. Being a Thursday show, we have the luxury of an extra day to reflect on What It All Means, so we assembled Carol Felsenthal (Chicago Magazine and The Hill), Ben Joravsky (Chicago Reader) and Kyra Kyles (Jet Magazine) for the conversation.
Some highlights:
Carol: Romney ran a twentieth-century campaign in the 21st century. The Adelson money should have been spent on the ground-game instead of on insulting commercials. In the end, the Super-PACs meant nothing.
Kyra: “There were a lot of bigoted comments, there were a lot of comments about taking the country back. You had Donald Trump come out and say we need to wage a revolution. It’s inflammatory.”
Referring to Republican efforts to combat voter fraud, which was widely interpreted as an attempt to suppress voter participation in minority communities, Kyra cited her mother and people of her mother’s generation. “That’s like a flashback. You know, when you would go to the polls and someone would try to dissuade you from voting. It triggers a visceral reaction, it really does.”
Ben: “This is the second election in a row where they sort of targeted black people as a voting mass. Instead of trying to win a black voter over, they just say well, we’re gonna try to deter you from voting, implying that in black areas there’s overwhelming fraud. Just by virtue of the fact that it’s a black area.”
Carol: The news today that Jess Jackson Jr. might have “bought a $40,000 Rolex for his girlfriend, that will stay in your mind forever. That kind of detail. That’s twice as much as the house I grew up in in West Rogers Park.”
And Ben has a suggestion for a Republican who could reunite the Illinois party and get votes from Democrats. “George Ryan”, he says. “A lot of Democrats in my family still like George Ryan.”
