CALIFORNIA DEMOCRATIC PARTY

Worried about its candidate's slipping standing in the 1999 special primary for California's 16th State Assembly seat (encompassing Oakland and surrounding areas), the state Democratic Party resorted to a strategy of selective incentives: To bolster turnout in Oakland's black precincts, the Democrats offered a free chicken meal. Although paying people to vote is still legal in California, the ploy prompted a voter backlash.
In The Good Fight, a book of campaign case studies, author David Beiler writes that "5,000 food vouchers worth $5 each were purchased from two local grocery stores. Flyers were then sent to several thousand voters in the Flatlands (on the heals of a ‘get-out-the-vote’ letter signed by President Clinton) offering a ‘free whole chicken and potato salad’ to those who voted. Flier recipients were directed to take the flier and voting stub to one of eight locations (seven churches and the Democrat headquarters), where they could pick up their voucher."
The Democratic Party Chairman, political consultant Bob Mulholland, initially denied so, but a story in the San Fransisco Examiner later suggested the mailing was targeted to blacks.
The free-chicken-dinner stunt initially aided Democrat Elihu Harris, the then-Oakland Mayor, who received 49 percent of the primary vote. But the subsequent news of the free-chicken ploy could only have helped Green Party candidate Audie Bock, who ultimately won the election and became the first third-party member elected to California's General Assemply since World War 1.
`'I was concerned by the low level of campaign activity (by Harris), and a lot of people were put off by the chicken-dinner issue,'' Don Perata, a Democrat who had held the 16th district seat until being elected to the state Senate, told the San Fransisco Chronicle.
In explaining his loss, Harris told the Oakland Tribute: "People could have been anti-me, pro-her, or mad about the chicken dinners."