HOW DID JOHNSON WIN?

Here at Clerk of Court Watch we have analyzed how Barbara Johnson won a 6th term after having such a dismal 20 years in office. How could this happen? She had an opponent in Steven Schaeffer who had a very well thought out and planned course of action of what he would do to fix that office (to bring it into the 21st century) if he were elected. Unfortunately, his election to that office did not happen.

Why?

Well, there are several reasons and hopefully future opponents will heed this analysis to promote their campaigns.

Johnson is a very difficult person to beat because:

1) She’s an incumbent: This is nothing new, but incumbents are VERY difficult to unseat. This seems to be true the longer they are in office (Remember former Judge Anne Maschari?). So with Johnson’s 20 plus year reign, this was a very big hurtle for any opponent to jump over.

2) She’s a woman: People tend to be more sympathetic and forgiving towards a
woman and when you have a man running against her, this becomes a reality.

3) She’s black: blacks who were previously not registered voters turned
out in droves to register and vote in the 2008 election. Why? One name: Barack
Obama. As a result, these voters (who normally would not be out voting) also voted for Johnson.

4) Johnson is a democrat and Erie County is a highly democrat county. The truly sad part of that is the fact that Erie County is so democrat, that many of them vote strictly party line; going into the voting booth and just looking for the big “D” instead of voting for the person who is the best for the job. This kind of “blind voting” hurts the citizens and the government, because these voters do not vote for the best candidate. This “blind voting” is not what our founding fathers had in mind because they thought that we would vote with our brains, not our “party.”

5) Name Recognition: She does seem to have name recognition. This goes hand in hand with being an incumbent. However, before the 2008 election, if you ask the average Joe Schmoe on street to name the current Erie County COC, probably only about 1% of the population would be able to do so. If you ask anyone by the end of this year who the current COC is, even those 1% probably won’t be able to tell you. The same holds true for County Auditor, Treasurer, Recorder; they just are not high profile offices like Commissioners or the Prosecutor are. Anyone who runs against Barb will need to get their name out EARLY & OFTEN. This includes, but not limited to getting in as many parades and other public events as possible.

One more interesting thought that our friends at Firelands 411 touched on in their article on May 11, 2009 “Getting Ahead of the Campaign Curve.”

In the article, Firelands 411 makes the following excellent point, “An election turn off (for me anyway) in local elections is feeling like I don’t really know the candidates. This is ironic because you’d think that because it’s a local election we’d be more familiar because the candidate is from our area……locally if you don’t personally know the candidate, chances are you’re casting a vote because you were hooked by name recognition, campaign literature or one of their friend’s obligatory letter-to-the-editor. (Do I really care what his friend says? I don’t know him either.).”


6) Campaign stradegy: While other candidates that run against Mrs. Johnson put their campaign signs out 2 months before the election, it seems that Johnson need only put her signs out 2-3 weeks before (being the procrastinator that she is), and she still wins! To some extent, this has to do with name recognition that we mentioned above. I must say, that her procrastination did help her campaign in a HUGE way when she sent out a mailing (her campaign brochure) to every home in Erie County the Saturday before the election. This probably did a lot to keep her name fresh in the voters mind. For once, her procrastination paid off!


There are a few other points to consider as well:
1) Just because the Sandusky Register and the Morning Journal endorsed Schaeffer and wrote other articles in favor of him, this really didn’t mean anything to the voters. I don’t know if it’s because people reading these newspapers don’t value (or don’t care about) their endorsements, or that the people of Erie County don’t really read politics in the paper.

2) There was a lot of blogging going on in the comment section on the SR articles. I have a suspicion that many of those bloggers posted comments under different names numerous time making it look like it was many different individuals. However, in reality, I don’t think that many people read the comment blogs on the SR web site.

I have a few other points as well that I would be willing to share with any individual that would be running against Johnson in 2012. If interested, contact me at votejohnson.out12@yahoo.com . I don’t want to share too much information with Johnson as I am sure she or her campaigners read this blog to get as much information as possible.

This is not an insurmountable task. After all, Judge Tygh Tone defeated long term incumbent and woman, former Judge Anne Maschari. However, to do that, Tone implemented many of the tactics mentioned above and more.

Next weeks article: “Is Johnson Robbing the Tax Payers?”