Democrats are wondering what happened to 27,723 voters as they try to figure out why the party lost the governor's seat they held since 1962 and what they can do to regain the governorship in 2006. ANALYSIS
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By Craig Gima
cgima@starbulletin.comThe 27,723 votes are the difference between the 204,206 people who voted for the winning Ben Cayetano-Mazie Hirono ticket in 1998 and the 176,483 votes cast for Hirono and Matt Matsunaga in this year's election.
Linda Lingle received 5,343 fewer votes than in 1998, but the 193,609 votes cast for her this year were still enough to give her a majority of more than 51 percent of the vote.
"The Republicans were able to get their vote out," said Democratic Party Chairwoman Lorraine Akiba. "We fell short of our target in some areas."
Over the next few days, Democratic strategists will be looking at voting patterns from each precinct in the state and comparing them with the 1998 race to see where the drop-off occurred and if it can be reversed in the next election.
Among those interested in the analysis will be potential candidates in the special elections for Congress later this month and on Jan. 4 and those who might be interested in running for a U.S. Senate seat in 2004.
Akiba said there were a number of factors that led to the Republican victory, including being outspent.
"It was obvious that the campaign was heavily influenced by spending," Akiba said.
Hirono's campaign manager, Robert Toyofuku, said a lack of time and a contested primary also hurt the Democrats.
He noted that Lingle had been running for governor since she lost in 1998. The contested primary also meant that Hirono had to spend a lot of her money before the general election.
Toyofuku thinks Democrats did close ranks, and he is happy with how the Hirono campaign was able to attract supporters of primary opponents Ed Case and D.G. "Andy" Anderson.
However, Case's decision to run for Congress meant that Case and his organization were focused on that race rather than on helping Democrats win the governor's race.
Toyofuku said Democrats will need to discuss the future of the party.
"Do we have to change the way we do things?" he wondered.
"From a practical standpoint it would make sense for the (Democratic) Party to try and sit down and discuss who goes for Congress (in January), but that is not the philosophy of the party," Toyofuku said.
Hirono's campaign said money helped the Republicans build a grass-roots get-out-the-vote effort that even Democrats credit with helping Lingle win.
"The GOP tore a page out of the old-time Democratic playbook of years past," said Randy Perreira, deputy executive director of the Hawaii Government Employees Association.
The HGEA organized phone banks and tried to get its members and retired members out to vote for Hirono, but Perreira said the union will have to look at the precinct numbers to see how successful they were.
Party officials, meanwhile, were still fuming over the Republicans' use of poll watchers in the voting areas who checked voter lists and phoned in the names of supporters of Lingle and James "Duke" Aiona who had not voted.
"It's unethical and illegal, and we want to make sure it doesn't happen again," Akiba said.
Andy Winer, the Democratic Party's coordinated campaign chairman, said party officials will be talking with the Office of Elections about what happened and may try and change the law regarding poll watchers during the next session of the Legislature.
Chief elections officer Dwayne Yoshina said poll watchers have historically monitored whether their party's voters cast ballots.
But, he said, "in the old days we never had cell phones."
Yoshina is more concerned with allegations that Republican poll watchers intimidated voters with challenges to their right to vote.
Yoshina explained that if voters do not have photo identification, there is a system to verify their identity. He said his office is looking into allegations that the poll watchers were too aggressive in challenging the rights of some voters to cast ballots.
In one instance, he said a voter showed up without proper identification, and before the precinct captain could verify who the voter was, the poll watcher went directly to the voter and challenged his right to vote. The voter left and did not cast a ballot, Yoshina said.
"Maybe we need to teach poll watchers manners," he said.
