Corey Dixon Mayor of Elgin? Not in this life!

Corey Dixon Mayor of Elgin? Not in this life!

Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.  –Martin Luther King, Jr.

The very first “So You Want to Win a Local Election” commandment, the hopeful candidate’s prime directive so to speak, is to pick an election you can win. Because, in this lightspeed 24/7 news cycle planet, if you commit the mortal sin of losing once too often, your political career will be over before it began.

The perfect example of what I speak – and one that’s highlighted in the book – is the late mayor of Naperville George Pradel. Oh! The challengers lined up to seize his throne, but no matter how much money they spent to beat him, George dispensed with them as easily as most of us swat away an annoying mosquito.

God Herself could’ve come down to run against George and She would’ve lost.

Why was George so unbeatable? Because he was Naperville’s Officer Friendly for years and those school children that grew up and stayed in the city fondly remembered those classroom visits, and those are the kind of “impressions” that win elections.

George wasn’t one to rest on his laurels, either. Despite that halcyon head start, the Mayor never missed an opportunity to wave at someone on the street, shake their hand in the grocery store, or have a conversation at a local event. After I managed to place in a Naperville 5k, George saw the award ceremony as he was driving by, he pulled over, he took the trophies right out of the race organizers’ hands, and he proceed to pass them out.

That’s how I finally got to meet George Pradel.

Elgin mayor Dave Kaptain may not exactly be George because no one is, but he’s a reasonable enough facsimile that he will hold that seat for as long as he wants it. That means, despite his vast delusions of grandeur, a pretender like city councilman Corey Dixon has no shot at wresting the gavel out of Dave’s right hand.

For reference purposes, Dixon announced his mayoral run Monday evening,

Rest assured, my pronouncement of Dixon’s impending electoral demise has absolutely nothing to do with my general disdain for the haplessly hypocritical and predominantly pandering councilman, and everything to do with basic sixth grade math. Because the best way to determine if a race is winnable is to review past election results and do a little number crunching.

So, let’s do just that!

We’ll specifically head back to Elgin’s 2019 mayoral contest pitting the incumbent Kaptain against city council challenger Carol Rauschenberger. Facing a multi-term incumbent is never an easy road to hoe, but Rauschenberger had two things going for her. She’s a white female and she owns the most politically recognizable last name in Elgin. But neither one of those factors mattered a whit as demonstrated by Kaptain demolishing her by a two-to-one margin – in Kane and Cook County. That’s no small feat.

The great Sparky Anderson aptly noted that baseball teams will win and lose a third of their games, it’s what they do with the middle third that makes the difference. It’s the same dynamic with elections. As long as they reasonably campaign, even the worst candidate will get a third of the vote simply for simply showing up. So, for Rauschenberg to do that poorly against Kaptain bodes even worse for Dixon who’s neither white, nor female, nor does he enjoy that kind of name recognition.

But it’s when you consider those fascinating Elgin 2020 census demographics that it gets even worse for our Quixotic candidate. Those ethnic/racial numbers break down thusly:

  • 47 percent Hispanic
  • 43 percent white
  •   7 percent black

Dixon will get 80 percent of the black vote, but when you consider Elgin’s infinitesimally small black voting bloc, it won’t be nearly enough to put any mayoral candidate over the top.

Conversely, Dixon will get 25 percent of the white vote – at best. Why? Because the average Collar County consolidated election voter is a white 62-year-old and old white folks don’t vote for overly woke minority candidates who persistently press a stilted progressive agenda.

Dixon’s unerring support for the disastrous citizen’s task force on policing, his consistent anti-police pronouncements, and his general capacity to put his foot in his mouth on the dais hasn’t helped his Caucasian cause much, either.

That means our intrepid mayoral candidate will need at least 60 percent of the Hispanic vote to win, and that possibility assumes that Elgin’s Latino residents will finally descend on the polls in significant numbers. They certainly haven’t done it yet, and if they continue with that tradition, Dixon’s done. But even if they do break the mold and vote en masse, he’s still done, because suburban blacks and Hispanics generally refuse to vote for each other.

As Ronald Reagan presciently noted and Ron DeSantis just proved, Hispanic are conservative who would never vote for a progressive candidate.

And that’s certainly going to be the case here because Dixon’s support of the black community to the exclusion of all others has aggravated the crap out of Elgin’s Hispanics to the point where they may turn out just to vote against him. The final nail in the councilman’s mayoral coffin came with police task force Chairman LeJewell Crigler’s infamous meeting explosion where she essentially said, “Bleep Hispanics. This task force is all about us!”

How do I know this? Because a slew of my Elgin Hispanic friends slammed me with PMs expressing their explicit outrage over her vast hypocrisy. I’d repeat some of those declarations here, but let’s just say they’re not fit for semi-polite company.

That means Dixon’s only path to victory is, god forbid, an errant asteroid taking Dave out sometime before the election. But that’s not exactly the kind of thing you want to hang your political hopes on, now is it?

Dixon may be duplicitous, but he’s not stupid. So, if he can’t possibly win, why is he running?

I haven’t used the term in a while, but I’ve previously referred to this affliction as “second-term itis,” a disease who’s symptoms include:

  • Consistently overestimating your political standing
  • The failure to realize you’re a damaged commodity
  • The failure to understand that winning an at-large city council race, where the top four candidates make the cut, is far easier than winning a one-on-one contest – against an incumbent, no less
  • The development of a bunker mentality as a response to regular criticism such that the elected official surrounds themselves with sycophantic yes men who convince them they’re incapable of making a mistake

It would’ve been far wiser for Dixon to run for state rep in 2024 when the presidential race will inevitably bring out the bulk of liberal voters. So, in the end, Dave Kaptain will beat Dixon by that same 2 to 1 margin and councilman Dixon’s political career will be teetering on the brink.

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