Victor De Grazia Memoir - University of Illinois Springfield

I want to get back to the organizing thing because of one important, I
think, phenomenon. In the beginning of the campaign I asked a friend of
mine who was a sociologist to dig up for me everything he could find on
voting habits of the suburbanites. And he was at Columbia at the time
and I remember we met in New York and he gave me some articles and he
said, "There's one thing I can tell you. People who move from the city
to the suburbs do not change their parties." I said, "What!" He said,
"They do not change their party unless they change their class. If they
change their social class, they may change their party." Well, when I
started realizing the implications of that, the organizing strategy
started developing for the campaign. We organized those suburbs
fantastically. I mean we just had volunteers everywhere.
One of the funny things is, a Democrat from Chicago moves out to Lake
County or moves out to southern Cook County; now he's always had a
precinct captain who's come around, knocked on the door, and he'd vote.
He moves out there, he stops voting or he votes only when he's really
excited. So people say, "Oh well, as soon as they leave Chicago, they're
no more Democrats." They're still Democrats, they just don't vote.
In DuPage County just before the election, Bill Redmond, whom I love, and
I were talking about that and he was for Paul Simon and I said to him,
'I Bill, how many votes are we going to have in the Democratic primary?"
And he said, "Oh, I would guess the usual. Around ten thousand." I
said, "Bill, you're wrong .I1 He said, "No, I think around ten thousand."
Well, he was right. He got out his ten thousand and we got out thirty
thousand other ones. And he was astonished. "Where did you find all
those people?" So, he said, "Oh, they're all Republicans." Baloney.
They weren't Republicans, they're Democrats. They're still out there.
And you look and you see what happens when Alan Dixon ran or Stevenson
ran in DuPage County. They pour out like crazy to vote for them. But
they're not going to vote for . . . well, Redmond is a good Irish
Catholic and he and I would fight about the Catholic control, Irish
Catholic control, of the Democratic party. I believe it should be
Italian. (laughter) But the candidates they run . . . they run Irish
Catholic candidates in DuPage County. Well, that's not going to, you
know, those candidates aren't going to win. So that's what I was doing.
Working on organizing, fundraising wherever I could. Cajoling, pleading,
doing whatever I could.
Q: The last months of the campaign--February, March--how were you
feeling about it? Did you believe you were going to win?
A: We did a poll in January that showed Simon winning. But his
weaknesses were so apparent in that poll that we knew we could win. And
the last month of the campaign nobody knows nothin'. You just are going
on adrenalin and instinct and, you know, you say what you have to say to
people. People say, "HOW does it look?" You want to throttle people
because everybody says that, Well, they're so nervous and they think
you're on the inside and you know everything that's going on, you know,
and so you say, "Oh, it looks great,'' and "He's going to win,'' just
'cause that's the best thing to say to keep people's morale up. But you
really don't know. You can do sophisticated polling at the end and get a
pretty good idea, but if it's close there's no idea.