A candidate’s $4,700 cookie giveaway — smart politics?
Erick Russell, locked in a three-way race for state treasurer, was just about finished with his speech at the Democratic convention on a Saturday in May when his volunteers hit the aisles with a surprise.
For each of the nearly 2,000 delegates present — a cookie. Chocolate chip, the classic. Wrapped in plastic with a campaign sticker. And these were no jive supermarket cookies. “Baked by Katalina’s, a woman owned bakery in New Haven,” the sticker said, prominently.
With this week’s campaign finance reports, we saw the price Russell’s campaign paid for those treats: $4,679. No sugarcoating it, that’s a lot of dough.
A half-baked idea, spending thousands for cookies as campaign swag? Or maybe it was a brilliant ploy to crumble the competition — Dita Bhargava of Greenwich and Karen DuBois-Walton, a fellow New Havenite.
Conventional wisdom says a candidate should go with a durable rather than a consumable. Buttons, tshirts, hats, that kind of thing.
I still use my red, plastic “Audrey Blondin for Secretary of the State” fly swatter, which the candidate from Torrington signed for me in 2005. It works great, I’d vote for her even today.
But people also remember cookies, which is maybe why computers use cookies to remember websites. Russell’s gift might have been just the thing to rise to the occasion and satisfy the delegates’ hunger for an impression. Each candidate has a different background and set of skills but on policy, they’re more or less all the same.
And all Russell needed to make that $4,700 investment pay off was a few swing votes, right then.
Bhargava’s team handed out small coin purses with little mints or candies inside. Get it? The treasurer manages the state’s $40plus billion in pension funds among other money duties. She also had shirts and, her campaign finance report shows, $1,688 for food from Panera Bread, though it’s not clear whether she handed out labeled sandwiches.
DuBois-Walton has tshirts at her table, and other stuff. Her report shows she spent $8,441 for “convention materials” from a Guilford company, DNA Campaigns.
Sharon Thomas, a delegate from Simsbury, favored DuBois-Walton. “I made a comment,” Thomas recalled this week, “‘Are those cookies going to be considered bribes?’”
She added, “I don’t usually eat cookies. They were good.”
Food was scarce that day at the Xfinity Theatre in Hartford, with long lines at the concession stands.
“For a lot of folks it was definitely nice to have something that they didn’t have to wait 45 minutes for,” said Akash Kaza, a Democratic Party activist and staffer for the mayor in Hartford. “They were on the crunchy side.”
He prefers soft. I’m a crunchy cookie guy myself.
Russell did win the endorsement, with 47 percent of the vote in the first round, which led Bhargava and DuBois-Walton to give up their right to a second round, as each won enough votes for a primary.
That election on Aug. 9 matters, whether you’re guided by your brain, your heart or your stomach. The Connecticut treasurer has huge discretion over investments. For the record, the pensions could buy enough cookies to go to the moon and back eight times, at a buck for every 6 inches of cookie.
For his part, Russell would rather talk about the issues and his qualifications in the three-way Democratic treasurer primary. He’s a young partner in a law firm, doing finance work — and would be the first openly gay, Black statewide elected official in the United States if he were to win.
Bhargava is a moneymanagement professional and executive, running an agressive campaign with a new ad about abortion rights and how she would invest state money.
DuBois-Walton is the only one of the three who has run a public or quasipublic agency, the housing authority in New Haven, where she is executive director. She’s also the only one who has not yet raised enough money to qualify for public financing — $484,125 for the primary.
As for the cookies, Russell said in a written comment, “It was a purposeful choice — as someone who spent time working the cash register at my mom and dad’s convenience store, I know the incredible value and importance of local small businesses, and I’ll have those values front of mind as Connecticut’s Treasurer.”
The order definitely did matter to Kathy Riegelmann, who founded Katalina’s in 2011 and knows Russell from power-lifting at a gym together at 5 a.m. — long after the start of her workday. Making and packaging 2,200 cookies, each one of good size, took her and her staff two days, she told me. “We just kept going.”
Thomas, the delegate from Simsbury, appreciated the snack but told me, “I don’t think they were effective, it didn’t change my mind.”
I spoke with a political consultant who I often call about these matters. “Erick
Russell will now be known as the Cookie Monster candidate,” said Jennifer Schneider, at the Democratic media firm Metro Square.
“The question is, how does he convince voters he should be trusted with $40 billion in taxpayer money? On the other hand he’s sure to make inroads with the Girl Scout vote.”
Schneider said she’s skeptical of a large outlay for something that’s gone the next day. But in this case, if, say, 75 delegates had voted for one of the other two instead of Russell, we might have seen a second ballot. Anything could have happened.
You never know in marketing and politics. That’s the way the cookie crumbles.