Democrats in Northeast Philly, what are your votes worth? A lot, to some people.
The primary election in the 5th State Senate District held on April 26, 2016, in which the incumbent John Sabatina, Jr. defeated the challenger, State Representative Kevin Boyle, cost more than $1,516,175.12. According to campaign-finance filings searchable on the Pennsylvania Department of State's webpage, that's how much these two candidates and the outside groups supporting them spent between March 8 and May 16, when the bulk of the bills generated by the primary campaign likely came due. Since 34,209 total votes were cast, a minimum of roughly $44.32 was spent for each vote.
I say "more than" and "a minimum" because these numbers don't include any money spent on the election by or on behalf of either candidate prior to March 8, 2016, Due to the way Pennsylvania's campaign finance reporting requirements are written, pre-March 8 spending won't have to be reported until candidates and the outside organizations and PACs that make independent expenditures on their behalf complete their annual filings months from now. Also, some outside groups might not have reported their spending on either candidate's behalf yet.
Even $1.5 million, though, is a lot of money, both in absolute terms and relative to what is commonly spent in similar races. And the spending isn't over. Sabatina will continue to spend money to defeat a Republican opponent, Ross Feinberg, in November. Boyle ran for his State House seat even as he challenged Sabatina for the Senate. That act of cowardice may have cost Boyle the close Senate election by losing him the votes of people who don't like cowards. But it also means that Boyle, too, will continue to spend money on his House race against a Republican in the fall.
It's a disgrace that more-- possibly a lot more-- than $1.5 million had to be wasted to decide between two totally uninspiring and unappealing political insiders. Households in the district received lots of expensive cardboard mailers and leaflets from both candidates, along with a bunch of annoying robocalls, This rush of advertising was supposed to convince people that Boyle and Sabatina are hardworking (a favorite buzzword of both candidates) and very much like the people they're supposed to serve.
In fact, both Sabatina and Boyle owe their careers to family connections. Both are followers in the state legislature rather than leaders. Neither has been the moving force behind any broadly significant adopted legislation. Both claim to pride themselves on the constituent services they provide at their local offices. In reality, they're great places to stop for free state maps, but if you aren't a campaign contributor, don't expect much help with other problems. Literally every politician in the state does the same thing; there's nothing special or particularly good about either Boyle's or Sabatina's offices. Their offices' main purpose is to let them hand jobs to their favorite toadies. For all their backbreaking hard work, both Boyle and Sabatina look like they need to hit the gym. At the end of the day, a corporatist acceptable to rich donors was going to win no matter which one came out on top. Why was it necessary to throw so much money down a rat hole?
The reason has nothing to do with any difference of principle between the candidates. It was hard to tell what issues, if any, separated Sabatina and Boyle. Rather, upwards of $1.5 million had to be wasted because of a power struggle between two cliques of Far Northeast Philly Democrats. One is led by Congressman Brendan Boyle and his brother Kevin. The other is led by Sabatina, his father John, Sr., who is a ward leader, and Lieutenant Governor Mike Stack, III.
Make no mistake: neither of these factions in any sense consists of reformers. Both are entrenched groups that depend upon keeping others off the ballot rather than upon their own appeal to voters. If voters were permitted other alternatives, there's a good chance both of these worn-out factions would be defeated. The differences between them boil down to a contest between two smug, self-centered groups who feel entitled to run things. Both groups consist of pay-to-play men who sell access and votes to campaign contributors.
Each faction has its toadies. If you live in the Northeast, you might know one of them. If you do, but you're unsure who pats them on the head and pays them beer money for standing at the polls on Election Day, ask their opinion of the Boyles, Stacks, and Sabatinas. They're likely to tell you how good one clique is, and how bad the other is. Hearing that ought to tell you something about these toadies. They can be bought for beer money.
Alas, the Boyle faction may not have had enough toadies to help sell out their neighbors in the recent primary election. Kevin Boyle's campaign reportedly had a talent agency issue a casting call for actors to stand at the polls and pretend to support him. Sabatina, by contrast, was helped out by some rich friends in Washington, where a PAC called the Turnout Project is based. They spent more than $180,000 on his behalf, making them the biggest single contributor in the primary.
The other principals in this wasteful dispute don't look any better. Brendan Boyle managed to get out of his seat in the state legislature and into Congress shortly after voting for the huge state gas tax increase that explains why gas prices in Pennsylvania seem much higher than in other nearby states. Now that Boyle is in Congress, he has sat idly while a Federal program, the Housing Choice Voucher Program (Section 8), gradually turns neighborhoods in his district into grim, poorly maintained, absentee-owned, renter-occupied areas with sinking property values. Boyle could propose laws to reduce or divert the impact of this program, but he might well believe that the program benefits him electorally by changing the demographics of his district. As for Stack, he seems to have bailed on Northeast Philly, leaving his family's perennial ward leader post last year. One wonders whether his uneventful tenure in the State Senate in what is now Sabatina's seat had more to do with learning about potentially lucrative property investments like the ones down on Beach Street in Fishtown than with any higher motives.
None of this makes either the Boyle or the Sabatina-Stack faction different from, or worse than, other Philadelphia politicians. Nor is there any reason to think that the Republicans would do a better job. But it's pretty discouraging to see so much money spent on a race in which voters have no real choice. The Northeast badly needs new leaders to emerge both within the Democratic Party and beyond it who can provide an alternative to these two failing groups.
Until that happens, I wish both factions would stop wasting money at election time. Instead, they should put all of the money they raise together, and mail a check to every voter who bothers to waste their time showing up to vote for either group's lackluster candidates in an amount no less than $44.32. Everyone might as well get some beer money from these two rotten groups.
