Down Ballot: How a Local Campaign Became a National Referendum on Abortion

The fifty-fifth Illinois legislative district was a conservative Republican enclave in 1989. Comprised of the Chicago suburbs of Park Ridge and Des Plaines, its state representative since 1977 was Penny Pullen. Pullen, a hardworking legislator and among the most conservative representatives, had successfully fought very hard against Illinois's attempts to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment in 1980 and 1982. She also pushed for mandatory AIDS testing for Illinois couples applying for marriage licenses in the 1980s.Frequently introducing other bills to restrain the alleged moral decay of society, Pullen by 1989 advocated a very restrictive anti-abortion bill such as had recently passed in Missouri. A firm believer that life begins at conception, Pullen opposed any exceptions that permitted abortions, even in cases of incest, rape, or saving the mother's life.These opinions sparked a pro-choice backlash. Rosemary Mulligan, a moderate, pro-choice Catholic paralegal and the single mother of two grown sons, determined to challenge Pullen for the nomination in the March 20, 1990, Republican primary. Mulligan had only four months to get on the ballot, gather a team, raise finances, and campaign as an unknown challenging a twelve-year incumbent. She did much better than anyone expected and initially won the election by thirty-one votes. However, after Pullen moved for a recount, which raised the issue of whether to count improperly punched ballots with “dimpled chads,” Pullen eventually won by six votes. When Mulligan challenged Pullen again in the 1992 primary, Mulligan won and went on to defeat the Democratic candidate. She served in the state legislature from 1993 to 2013.In Down Ballot, author Patrick Wohl carefully details the backgrounds of both candidates and the situation in the district. All the ups and downs and nitty-gritty peculiarities of both sides of the campaigns are included. He based his study on a series of interviews with Pullen (conducted by the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library's then oral historian Mark DePue), interviews with members of Mulligan's campaign (Mulligan died in 2014), numerous contemporary newspaper articles, and miscellaneous other sources.Wohl makes the case that this “down ballot” (i.e., local) election, and by extension many other local elections, are far more important than people tend to believe. Voter participation is almost always much lower in local elections than in statewide and national races. Yet state legislatures produce most of the laws that pertain to Americans’ daily lives and deal with most of the controversial subjects that Americans fight over. The Pullen and Mulligan campaigns of 1990 and 1992 were unusual because they received a lot of national media attention, attracting widespread support from pro-life and pro-choice advocates elsewhere in the country, and functioning as a proxy vote on abortion.The issue of the “dimpled chads” led to a precedent-setting court case. The problem was that on some ballots the instrument used to mark the punch card had dented the chad (the part of the ballot that should punch out to indicate the vote) without fully pushing it out, and therefore the vote was not counted initially.The court ordered a recount of these problematic ballots by hand and the votes counted if voter intent could be determined by the dented chads. Thus Pullen scraped by with her six-vote win in 1990. Therefore, the more famous Florida “hanging chads” case of Bush v. Gore in 2000 was not the first such election mechanics dispute. And, in fact, questions about the Pullen case were part of the reason why the US Supreme Court eventually declared George W. Bush the winner in 2000, a result Wohl discusses.Down Ballot examines the Pullen–Mulligan contests and their results thoroughly and sets a good example for further studies of other local contests that had far-reaching implications. Historians and others with political interests will benefit from reading this well-written book.