Jimm Dispensa thinks baseball fans have it made. “If you go into a bar to grab a beer and watch a game,” he says, “and somebody sets in on some historical baseball fact, and you enter the conversation and correct them, you’re not only expressing camaraderie, you’re expressing a sick attraction to the minutiae of that sport.” But it’s different for people like him. When your favorite pastime is local politics, it’s not so easy to slip into a neighborhood bar and geek out with a stranger about the 12-candidate pileup in the 15th Ward.
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Part information hub and part social forum, AlderTrack is a kind of ESPN.com for election junkies. “It’s the central nexus for campaigns,” says Peter Zelchenko, an aldermanic candidate in the 43rd Ward. “Anytime someone wants to know something, they go there. It’s one of those things that hit so fast you don’t even remember how you heard of it, but you immediately knew it was mission critical.” Each ward has its own page, with a comprehensive list of candidates and related links, which are updated daily. Reporting in the Sun-Times and the Tribune may have been scant so far, but AlderTrack offers a glimpse of how much election coverage can be found elsewhere. Weeklies (including the Reader), neighborhood papers, smaller-circulation dailies, blogs, YouTube, and Google Video: they’re all included.
Visitors are invited to leave comments, and while most wards are averaging only a handful, a few have generated full-blown conversations. The 12th, on the near southwest side, has over 50 comments so far, including a few from candidates and campaign managers. Not that Dispensa has much time to join in. “I have two kids and a full-time job,” he says. “I cook dinner and run errands.” Add to that the two or three hours he spends dealing with the site every day and there’s not a lot of time left to hang out. “It’s really a pain to moderate,” he says. “It can be like listening to the guy behind you at a Sox game all day say what a bum the pitcher is.”
Although he knows there are people double-dipping with multiple e-mail addresses, Dispensa says his markets have around 1,000 trading accounts. And many of the aldermanic races are getting heavier action than the other 150-odd markets Inkling hosts. Last week the Second Ward race, in which challenger Bob Fioretti’s stock was trading at $65 compared to $7.71 for incumbent Madeline Haithcock’s, had 186 traders; a market on the likely 2008 Democratic presidential nominee had 156. (Hillary Clinton held the edge at $31.23, although Barack Obama’s stock rose three bucks to $23.62 after he officially declared his candidacy.)
