McClure Should Stick With His Party on Health Department

It seems to be a foregone conclusion that Democrat Lamont McClure will help Ron Angle and the tea party-aligned Republicans kill off the  for good at next Thursday's Northampton County Council meeting.

This would be a mistake.

Mr. McClure is up for reelection this November. To win, he needs to turn out a larger number of Democratic voters than the number of Republican voters who turn out for his opponent, race car driver Matt Connolly.

Municipal elections are known for very low turnout - much lower than midterm elections or Presidential elections. The smaller electorate tends to be much more partisan, so the best strategy for municipal candidates is to focus their efforts on turning out their base of core supporters. 

Whereas there is some evidence that strong partisanship can hurt (conservative) candidates in contests with higher turnout,  the best way to win a low turnout election by playing to the base. 

So it is very strange that Mr. McClure seems to believe that adopting Ron Angle's unpopular position on the Bi-County Health Department will motivate Democrats to vote for him.

 illustrates the folly of this way of thinking.

The Health Department is popular among all groups (68%), but especially among women (). 

This likely underestimates the number of supporters, since most of the respondents drastically overestimated the value of the Health Department's services at between $100 and $500 a year.

The actual cost will be , or about 86 cents a month.

If the number of supporters looks similar in District 3, there is no political risk for Mr. McClure in voting to save the Department. 

Even if Mr. Connolly tries to draw a contrast with Mr. McClure on this vote, he will only succeed in pushing more voters into Mr. McClure's camp.  Attacks on the Department will only energize voters already inclined to vote for Mr. Connolly.

Rather than worrying about the opposition, Mr. McClure needs to worry about energizing Democrats. And the way to energize Democrats is to champion the political goals that Democrats care about.

In recent years, the Democratic political agenda has been focused on expanding access to quality health care, protecting the environment from dirty energy pollution, and reducing inequality.

If you look at the services the Health Department would provide, you will see that it advances all of these core Democratic priorities.

While everyone in the Lehigh Valley will certainly benefit from these services, the groups with the most to gain are the same groups who make up the core Democratic political coalition: single women and moms, middle class families, people of color, economically-disadvantaged people, college students, and anyone without access to preventative health care. 

This would be a huge accomplishment Mr. McClure can sell to the Democratic voters he needs to win reelection.

He will be able to say that he created a high-impact service that will help fix . The region's health care system does a good job at making sick people healthy, but . Preventive health care services are badly needed. 

Not only should Mr. McClure cast the deciding vote to save the Health Department next Thursday, he should run his campaign on it.  It's an easy way for him to establish his progressive bona fides with the Democratic base and put his opponent on the defensive.

Mr. McClure is never going to persuade conservative voters that he's more anti-government than a race car driver, so he shouldn't even try. He will get much more political traction pressing Mr. Connolly on his indifference to the County's .