Desperation in politics is usually ugly.
It’s most often what’s truly behind the attack ads you see during campaigns. Both candidates start out all warm and fuzzy, talking about what they’re going to do and their own attributes. And then the polls come back showing a tight race or a deficit, and desperation sets in.
And a desperate politician is an ugly politician.
That seems to be what’s happening in the Huntsville City Council runoff, where newcomer Liliana Peinder is giving longtime incumbent Jennie Robinson an absolute fit. So much so that Robinson has turned desperate.
And the ugly has started to flow.
The worst came a few days ago, when mailers from Robinson’s campaign warned voters in her south Huntsville district of “outsiders” coming in to “hijack” a City Council position.
Many took that “outsiders” label as a racist dog whistle referencing Peinder’s Hispanic heritage. They took it that way because it doesn’t make sense any other way.
Peinder is not, by any definition, an “outsider” to Huntsville. She’s lived in the city since buying a home there in 2014. She graduated from UAH. She’s been a teacher in multiple Huntsville schools. She’s a business owner in town.
She’s not exactly swooping in for a carpetbagger campaign, you know?
But it’s easy to understand Robinson’s desperation. After a dozen years on the council, and several as president, more people voted for someone else on the ballot in last month’s general election than voted for her.
Many of those people appeared to be motivated by the fact that they didn’t believe their council representative was listening to them and that she was far more interested in rubber-stamping the plans and developments of big-money donors than in listening to their concerns. Particularly their concerns about rapid growth that is outpacing infrastructure and planning.
Both Peinder and third-place candidate John Stuart ran on those issues. Peinder is still running on them, along with banning Flock cameras.
Peinder’s campaign is the sort of wholesome, innocent endeavor that politics should be. She’s just a person who wanted to do something about these problems she kept seeing.
“I’ve always been a person who cares a lot about those around me, and working in our school system and seeing the deficits that exist, I just wanted to change that,” Peinder said during an interview on the Alabama Politics This Week podcast. “During the last election, I looked up my options and realized that there were 23 uncontested races on my ballot. That’s 23 races where no one had a choice and the incumbent didn’t even have to try. So, instead of sitting there with my anger, I talked with my husband and decided to do something.”
You want to talk about grassroots politics, that’s all Peinder’s got. She’s raised a total of just over $12,000—every dime from individuals. Aside from one mailer, in which she talked exclusively about her ideas for the district, Peinder’s campaign outreach has been just her on video roaming around talking with people or pointing out issues in her district that she’d like to solve. The videos are posted to social media, and several have thousands of views.
In the meantime, Robinson has been sending out mailers, has a TV ad in which she talks awkwardly with people sitting in a circle, in very low lighting, on folding chairs (you know, how all normal people converse casually) and has taken in almost $50,000, most of it from various PACs.
She is, undoubtedly, still the favorite to win, but despite all of the advantages of being a longtime incumbent with big-money backing, she’s managed to make enough missteps and odd decisions to leave the outcome in doubt.
She had another city councilman recently call for an investigation into her actions as president when she changed the status of a called meeting without allegedly going through the proper process. A mailer from Robinson took a pointless shot at local union workers for backing Peinder, and the vice president of the North Alabama Area Labor Council responded with an op-ed in al.com. And she has been hopelessly out of touch on Flock cameras.
It’s that last one that’s the real problem for Robinson.
In a low-turnout City Council runoff, with nothing else on the ballot, alienating a large group of voters over a single issue could be the catalyst that ends a career. And Flock cameras could be Robinson’s.
She has made no public comment on the cameras, but that has not stopped her from being dragged into the issue. Most notably, a local activist seeking to obtain the Flock camera audit records from the City of Huntsville—showing how the cameras were used and by whom—was denied access to the records. Huntsville’s attorneys told him that the records fell under the “investigative records” exemption of Alabama’s open records law.
When the activist spoke with Robinson about the issue and asked why Huntsville was denying the request when Blount County, under the same open records law, fulfilled his request, he said Robinson told him: “We’re bigger and have more attorneys.”
Which, of course, feeds into the very concerns over those mass surveillance cameras.
Peinder, at the same time, has made it clear that she would make the redacted records public and ensure greater public oversight of the cameras.
Is it enough to turn the race and help a political newcomer pull off an improbable upset? I don’t know, but the desperation is certainly there.
