2012 Hawaii Election

[11/27/12] Abercrombie wants future elections to be done entirely by mail

[11/7/12] The results
Caldwell defeats Cayetano 53.9% to 46.1%
Hirono thrashes Lingle 62% to 37%.
Hanabusa defeats Djou 55% to 45%
In other results:
For State Representative, Dist 27, newcomer Takashi Ohno defeated Corinne Ching 58% to 42%.  I thought Corinne did a good job, but Takashi really hit the streets.  I probably saw him about 4 or 5 times doing the rounds.  We'll see what he can do when he faces the system.

[11/17/12] Campaign 2012 hits new lows [by Dan Boylan].

Let’s start at the top. President Barack Obama’s presence on the Democratic ticket this year insured long coattails for Hawaii Democrats running for Congress. All they needed to do was promise strong support for the president during his second term, a promise that would resonate with an electorate that is 70 percent brown and had watched the first non-white President of the United States thwarted at every turn by overwhelming white congressional Republicans, a disproportionate number of whom spoke in the accents of the Old Confederacy.

So that’s what Senate candidate Mazie Hirono and District 1 Congressional Colleen Hanabusa did. Too often, that’s about all they did, particularly Hirono. Neither said much about the fiscal cliff that awaits in Washington, both vowed to protect Medicare and Social Security no matter how close such a defense brings the country to bankruptcy.

Closer to home, Hirono and Lingle have piled television advertisement upon television advertisement (an estimated $4 million worth for Hirono, $5 mil for Lingle), at least half of which are negative, characterizing Hirono as an absentee member of Congress and Lingle as the architect of Furlough Fridays. Both charges are a good part nonsense, but when campaign coffers overflow and Super-Pacs ante up additional cash, nonsense – and worse – become the intellectual capital of the campaign.

That’s especially true in the Honolulu mayoral race. There was always going to be an enormous amount of money spent in support of the pro-rail candidate for mayor. Construction jobs, development projects, planning goals, and traffic solutions, however slight, depended on it.

But when Ben Cayetano, a candidate with total name recognition and a large ethnic base of support, announced that he was joining the contest with the single objective of stopping rail, the stakes grew higher. Pacific Resource Partnership gathered the cash and went after Cayetano with an unremitting series of ads that criticized him for running “pay-for-play” fund-raising efforts and pardoning a record number of convicted criminals, thus putting them on the streets to terrorize us all. The take-down-Cayetano effort cost PRP $2.8 million, and a “Workers for a Better Hawaii” $700,000 more.

Cayetano fought back with a defamation of character suit that will not be heard until long after thisweek’s election.

[10/24/12] Q&A with Kirk Caldwell

[10/22/12] Cayetano files libel lawsuit against Pacific Resource Partnership

[10/21/12] Hawaii: the state that doesn't vote

[10/21/12] 2012 General Election guide

[10/4/12] Mayoral candidates Ben Cayetano and Kirk Caldwell re-staked their positions on the city's $5.26 billion rail project in their first head-to-head mayoral election debate Wednesday night on KITV.

Cayetano, who has vowed to kill the rail project if elected mayor, criticized Caldwell for going "with the hype" when he was former Mayor Mufi Hannemann's managing director and misleading Oahu residents about how much traffic would actually be taken off the road with rail.

"Both the city and the federal government agreed that rail would not relieve traffic congestion and, in fact, congestion would be worse in the future with rail than it is today without rail," the former governor said. "And yet you kept quiet and went along with the hype. And when you became mayor, you didn't tell the public the truth."

Caldwell said the final environmental impact statement for the project makes it clear that "within the urban core, traffic congestion is going to be reduced by about 30 percent. There's going to be 40,000 less cars than there otherwise would be (without rail)."

[9/22/12] Former Gov. Linda Lingle's campaign for U.S. Senate released a video advertisement Friday that claims Lingle would partner with U.S. Sen. Daniel Ino­uye and that Ino­uye would retain his influence regardless of which political party controls the Senate — an ad the Hawaii Demo­crat called "grossly misleading."

In the video, retired Maj. Gen. Robert G.F. Lee, Lingle's campaign manager, thanks Ino­uye for supporting the military and praises Inouye and the late U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, for delivering for Hawaii no matter which party held the majority.

"I am not supporting Linda Lingle's Senate candidacy and I would ask Gen. Lee to stop using this misleading ad," Ino­uye, who has endorsed U.S. Rep. Mazie Hirono, Lingle's Demo­cratic opponent, said in a statement. "Neither General Lee nor former Gov. Lingle discussed this advertisement with me. If they had, I would have objected because it is grossly misleading and suggests a relationship that has never existed.

"To claim that Gov. Lingle could replace my brother Ted Stevens is outrageous and as I have said previously, Linda Lingle is no Ted Stevens. After watching the ad, I would like to state that I am Daniel K. Ino­uye and I do not approve that message."

[8/16/12]  Tulsi Gabbard resigns from City County saving city $150,000.

[8/12/12] Honolulu will have a new mayor in 2013. But whether it will be an anti-rail former governor or a former city managing director committed to seeing the $5.26 billion project through will be determined in November.

Former Gov. Ben Cayetano was the runaway winner in the primary election Saturday, but he fell short of the majority needed to win outright.

Second place went to former Managing Director Kirk Caldwell, who beat Mayor Peter Carlisle, ending his incumbency after just 20 months.

With all precincts reporting on Oahu, Cayetano received 44.8 percent of the vote. Caldwell was next with 29.5 percent and Carlisle third with 25.1 percent.

Caldwell's strong showing and the likely joining of his and Carlisle's pro-rail backers has Cayetano running as an underdog, a position with which he is more familiar.

***

U.S. Rep. Mazie Hirono scored a decisive victory over former U.S. Rep. Ed Case in the Demo­cratic primary for U.S. Senate on Saturday night and pivoted toward a November showdown with former Gov. Linda Lingle.

Hirono held a 57 percent to 41 percent gap over Case after most votes were counted in the primary to replace retiring U.S. Sen. Daniel Akaka. Lingle glided to victory in her Republican primary against former state lawmaker and attorney John Carroll.

The November general election will be a rematch of the 2002 governor's race, when Lingle defeated Hirono after Hirono had ousted Case in the primary.

Hirono said Hawaii needs a senator "who shares our values."

Hirono, 64, said a Republican Senate could lead to the repeal of the federal health care reform law and the permanent extension of President George W. Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy. She also said that Social Security and Medicare would be at greater risk.

"Regardless of what we think about Linda Lingle and her ‘extreme makeover' efforts, she's going to be one vote closer for Republican control of the U.S. Senate," she said. "That would be bad for seniors, for women, for working people of this country.

"And I'm going to fight that agenda every chance I get."

Lingle, 59, has campaigned on a bipartisan message intended for the moderate Demo­crats and independents she will need on her side to offset the state's Demo­cratic history.

"I think now that the primary is over, the people of Hawaii are going to have a clear choice between an experienced leader who has made tough decisions and worked in a bipartisan fashion and, in her case, a hyperpartisan Washington, D.C., insider with no record of accomplishment, with one of the most one-sided voting records in the United States Congress," Lingle said.

"I think the choice is very clear."

*** [8/12/12]

Honolulu City Councilwoman Tulsi Gabbard won a resounding and surprising victory Saturday over former Mayor Mufi Hannemann for the 2nd Congressional District Democratic nomination.

Gabbard, 31, a war veteran, capped an improbable jump from distant underdog to beat Hannemann, 58, and put herself in perfect position to win a seat on Capitol Hill, something that has eluded Hannemann since he first ran for public office in 1986.

Gabbard gave a short victory speech at 10:15 p.m. after being congratulated by Gov. Neil Abercrombie.

"You are going to hear me say this many times tonight, and you are going to hear me say this many times in the future — that (this) is about serving the people, serving the people of Hawaii, serving the people of our country and the world," she said.

Hannemann conceded the race at about 9:45 p.m., about 90 minutes after arriving from Maui, where he spent much of the day campaigning. "There are worse things in life than to go through another campaign and come out on the short end," Hannemann told supporters gathered at his Kalihi headquarters.

[7/4/12] You’ve probably seen the ad by now. An off-camera interviewer stops a muumuu-clad local woman on the street, hands her a sheet of paper, and says, “Excuse me. Have you seen the facts about Ben Cayetano’s illegal contributions?”

“A half-a-million in illegal contributions?” she asks.

Cut to a bald-headed man in an aloha shirt reading the half-million figure. “It’s all here in black and white.”

It’s tough stuff, and I suppose we should have seen it coming – or something like it. When a politician threatens a $5.3 billion infrastructure project backed by years of planning, an apparent approval by the electorate, and powerful labor, political and business interests, there was bound to be pushback. Pacific Resource Partnership, a strong supporter of the rail project, sponsored the ads (which come with a few different riffs, but the same basic structure).

Cayetano has fired back that he knew nothing of the “false name contributions” to his gubernatorial re-election campaign:

“During my 1998 campaign for re-election, our supporters raised more than $5 million in campaign contributions. I did not handle fundraising. There was a committee of several supporters that did the work.”

When he became aware of the violations, Cayetano “called Bob Watada, who was Chairman of the (Campaign Spending) Commission back then and informed him that there was no way the funds could be returned because it had already been spent for the campaign.” Watada instructed him to return what was left in the campaign account, and the case would be considered closed.

Since PRP began to run its ads, both Watada and former campaign spending commission member Della Au Bellati have come forward in support of Cayetano. Watada and state Rep. Bellati are upright public servants. So is Cayetano.

*** [10/5/12 from MidWeek 5/16/12] Dan Boylan on Kirk Caldwell's Listening Tour