How the CCA Party won the 2012 election

Understanding the Charlestown Citizens Alliance, Part 2

By Will Collette

Click here for Part 1

Prepare yourself for a deluge of CCA Party lies and fear-mongering
For more cartoons by Joel Heller, click here

After the Charlestown Democrats failed to wrest control of Charlestown town government from the Charlestown Citizens Alliance (CCA Party) in 2012 despite a good slate and effective fund-raising, I spent a good deal of time thinking about how the CCA Party did it.

Town Democrats ran three candidates for Town Council and four candidates for the Planning Commission and managed to get one candidate elected for each body – Paula Andersen for Council and Brandon Cleary for Planning. 2012 was the first time since 2004 that Charlestown Democrats ran a serious endorsed slate (the Mageau slate in 2006 were not endorsed).

Rep. Donna Walsh was the town’s top vote-getter (2547 Charlestown votes), swamping her two Charlestown-based opponents Tina Jackson and Kevin Prescott, although it helped that both had extensive criminal records.

Charlestown went heavily for Cathie Cool Rumsey, helping her to defeat incumbent Republican Senator Frank Maher. Charlestown voted by large margins for President Obama, Senator Whitehouse and Congressman Langevin.

Democratic votes were great in three out of Charlestown’s four electoral precincts, where Paula Andersen, Donna Walsh, Cathie Cool Rumsey, President Obama, Sen. Whitehouse and Rep. Langevin won by good to excellent margins. 

Only Precinct Three which includes Charlestown’s wealthiest neighborhoods (East & West Beach, Quonochontaug, Shady Harbor, etc.) was a glaring weak spot for the Democrats. Ironically, Cathy and I live in the third precinct.

Looking strictly at the numbers, it was like that crass old joke about the Lincoln Assassination (“Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?”) because in the end, the CCA Party still firmly controlled all the levers of power in Charlestown. 

If you analyze the Charlestown elections in 2008, 2010 and 2012, you can pretty much figure out how the CCA Party plans to win in 2014 – through lots of out-of-state money, fear-mongering and lies, and an effective get-out-the-vote (GOTV) effort, especially in Precinct #3.

Democrats can win if they also raise money, though they can’t hope to match the CCA, but most of all if they can motivate Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents to come out and vote.

Let’s take a close look at the CCA Party’s keys to victory in 2012.

Charlestown's third precinct (#503) in yellow is the
CCA Party's stronghold. Democrat Paula Andersen won
the Council vote in the other three precincts

Old-line families and newcomers. One of the great advantages the CCA Party has is its roots in Charlestown old aristocracy, even though nearly all of their candidates are actually transplants, some of them fairly recent. Gentz, Slattery, Platner and Tremblay are all transplants. So are the Areglados and the Chambers.

That doesn’t seem to matter to the CCA base, so long as those CCA Party candidates understand whose interests they must serve. The CCA Party’s 2008 slate didn’t read that memo and it cost them in 2010 when they were excommunicated and then largely replaced by a new CCA slate consisting of CCA Party regulars.

The CCA Party has a solid, reliable base of support – maybe around 1000-1500 or so voters who are conservative, old-timers and true believers – who would vote for a yellow dog if the CCA Party endorsed it. This constituent core predates the CCA Party. 

Many were involved with the Shoreline Coalition and the Statewide Coalition, the Land Trust, the Salt Pond Coalition. Some come from the old families who took part in the land grab of 1882 after the General Assembly “detribalized” the Narragansett Tribe.

The CCA Party solidified its base, and won converts, through lies such as saying Democrats were in favor of high taxes, a casino, huge developments, incivility and environmental destruction, even though the opposite is the real truth. But the CCA Party told their lies repeatedly and with gusto.

My analysis of the 2008-2012 election numbers shows a Democratic base that slightly exceeds the CCA Party and numbers around 2,000 voters. But it is a soft base comprised primarily of working families who, unlike the well-to-do retiree core of the CCA Party, has to work for a living and is not very focused on town politics. It is a challenge to reach them, motivate them and turn them out.

Charlestown has been breaking bad since 2008. Time for a change.

Money. Even though Charlestown Democrats raised more money than all previous CDTCs listed in the Board of Elections database combined (over $12,000), it wasn’t enough to top the CCA Party’s ability to get its wealthy donors to write big checks and raise almost twice as much.

In addition to its Charlestown blue-blood base, the CCA Party also has a very large out-of-state donor base and they demonstrated how they will write the checks to fuel the CCA’s campaigns. Add to that thousands of dollars of donated printing by Cliff Vanover.

Here is how the CCA raised the $21,821 it had available to use for the 2012 campaign:

• $8,592 came in the form of $100+ donations from non-residents
• $6,669 came in the form of in-kind (donated) printing from Cliff Vanover
• $3,903 came in the form of aggregated donations of less than $100 (donor identities unknown)
• $2,657 came in the form of $100+ checks from Charlestown residents.

They include George Tremblay who gave $1000, Mal Makin, Harriet Allen, Peter Arnold, Dr. Lew Johnson, Faith LaBossiere and others.

They also used their money to press a relentless message of – to put it bluntly – total bullshit. The CCA learned a lot from the national GOP on how to do publicity. Just lie. Don’t worry about rebuttal. 

Don’t worry about backing it up. Just lie. And repeat as often as it takes. If you repeat a lie often enough and with enough conviction, you make it real.

By contrast, the CDTC publicity materials were carefully reviewed to ensure it was scrupulously honest and positive, although the final 2012 mailer did challenge the CCA Party on all the key issues. But it wasn’t nearly enough to match their relentless campaign of lies.

Incumbency. Incumbency cut both ways for the CCA Party in the 2012 election. It exposed the CCA Party to criticisms of the specific things they did wrong, such as their “pay-to-play” system of favoritism such as “Y-Gate” and their fear-mongering campaigns (the Battle for Ninigret Park). 

But incumbency also made the CCA core constituency even more supportive of their slate because many of them got what they paid for. And with incumbency came name recognition. But most importantly, the CCA Party’s shameless, relentless dishonesty in describing their failures as successes overcame Democratic efforts to tell the truth.

Civic involvement. Older people, especially retirees and especially well-to-do retirees, have lots more time to get involved in town projects, boards and commissions than people who have to work for a living. That basic fact of political life works for the CCA Party and against the Democrats. It has in 2008, 2010 and 2012 and will again in 2014.

Lies and fear. Charlestown Democrats have not been very good at telling their own story and getting their message out, especially when compared to the CCA Party’s propaganda machine. 

That was one of the reasons why Tom Ferrio and I decided to start Progressive Charlestown. We were frustrated with how hard it was to get a timely, hard-hitting progressive message out to counter the CCA Party. The CDTC, bound by a deliberative consensus process, just couldn’t do it.

So Progressive Charlestown was established as separate and distinct from the CDTC. No matter how often we explained the firewall between Progressive Charlestown, the CCA Party won the P.R. war with the repeated lie that Progressive Charlestown was controlled by the CDTC, or vice versa, or were simply one and the same.

I have resigned from the Town Committee mostly to preserve my health, but also to make it crystal clear that I am not a town Democratic mouthpiece. Despite that, it’s a safe bet the CCA Party will trot out the lie once again. I’m still waiting to see what my former CDTC colleagues will come out with.

All the while the CCA Party was claiming the high ground of civility, they fought dirty. They lied. They hid the actual source of their money. They painted their most awful acts as “achievements.”

Ron Areglado, candidate for School Committee, has been the
CCA Party Chaplain of Civility but has done some of the
worst hatchet jobs of any of them

These concerns actually mattered less in 2012 than it will in 2014. We had 900 voters turn out who will probably not vote in 2014. 

All the debate about image, who said what, who did what, who’s a liar and who’s a cyber-bully probably didn’t register with the extra 900 voters who came out just to vote for President and Senator since I think it’s fair to say they don’t pay close attention to town politics. 

But in 2014, without a Presidential race, turn-out numbers will be lower, but the electorate will consist of a higher percentage of voters who DO pay attention to local politics.

But those awful deeds are nonetheless there, on the record and well documented, at least within the pages of Progressive Charlestown. The story needs to be told by town Democrats if they are going to have any chance at all of winning control of the Town Council, the main seat of power.

The Democrats have already conceded the Planning Commission and Chariho School Committee by running no candidates, putting all their hopes and efforts into the Town Council. With Labor Day, it’s now the official start of the real campaign for the hearts and minds of Charlestown.

Let the real campaign begin.