Chuck Redpath and Sam Cahnman —
Democratic candidates for the 99th House District seat — have
similar strategies going into the last leg of a race that no one
thought would even be close. Voter lists in hand, Cahnman, a lawyer and
member of the Sangamon County Board, is going from door to
Democratic door, plugging his proposal to bring open primaries to
Illinois. Redpath, a Springfield City Council veteran
with backing from the local party, as well as from House Speaker
Mike Madigan, is dispatching volunteers to knock on the doors of
potential Democratic voters. Both men have given up a lot to vie for the
seat. Redpath had to quit his job as an Illinois
Department of Natural Resources cop and says that he has used all
of his personal savings on his campaign. Likewise, Cahnman is giving up his spot as
18th District representative on the County Board and has lent his
campaign $30,000 of his own money. Whoever wins the nod will face popular
Republican state Rep. Raymond Poe, who beat his last Democratic
challenger by almost 13,000 votes. Redpath and Cahnman, however, are both are
confident that a Democrat can win the district. As a county board member who unseated an
incumbent Republican, Cahnman thinks that he’s the one to
beat Poe. Redpath, touting his 18 years of experience as Ward 4
alderman, representing Springfield’s North End, says that
he’s the party’s man. “I want to make sure that we get our
fair share in Springfield and bring home the bacon for
our area,” Redpath says. Philosophically, Cahnman identifies himself
as centrist, supporting women’s reproductive rights but not
Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s ban on assault rifles. Meanwhile,
Redpath calls himself socially moderate and “not a liberal,
in any sense of the word.” In addition to stemming the flow of jobs from
Springfield to Chicago, Redpath wants to direct 51 percent of all
new state revenue toward school funding, do away with burdensome
unfunded mandates, and require the support of a supermajority of
the Legislature to dip into the state pension fund. Cahnman wants to make the state’s
Freedom of Information Act laws stronger and stop the
revolving-door syndrome of state regulators who leave government to
work for industries they once regulated. Most of all, Cahnman is pumping his idea for
open primaries, which will also appear on the ballot in Springfield
as an advisory referendum. “To tell you the truth, how strongly
people feel about the open primary surprised me,” says
Cahnman, who added the idea to all of his campaign literature when
voters told him how much they liked the concept. He has also pumped
about $20,000 into television ads on WICS (Channel 20) and cable stations
Fox News Channel and CNN. In Redpath’s estimation, however,
spending a “whole heck of a lot of money” in a primary
contest won’t make much of a difference. According to
campaign-finance reports, Redpath has more than quadruple the
campaign cash, roughly $50,000, that Cahnman has. Democratic voters, ultimately, will just have
to decide which name they trust more. Until recently, Cahnman pronounced his name
“CON-mun” but changed to “CAN-mun,” he
says, because he wants people to think of him as the “can-do
candidate.” Redpath, he claims, has gotten a free ride to
this point because of his family name, a charge Redpath calls
“totally ridiculous.” “I’m proud of my name; I’ve
worked hard to get where I am,” he says. “I think
it’s an advantage.”
This article appears in Mar 16-22, 2006.
