election results: friendship trumps money

Despite all the money the Koch brothers and their “Americans for Prosperity” poured into our city council election, their four candidates were trounced. Their candidate for mayor got only 27% of the vote; none of their three council candidates got any more than 25%.

In my previous posting, I expressed surprise that the AFP had not resorted to personal attacks: as it transpired, they saved that for Monday, the day before the election. Their mailing-of-the-day featured photos of the incumbent council members and proclamation of the tax breaks they had given themselves as council members. True, in a way: their taxes were reduced. But so were everyone else's, by exactly the same rate; it was an across-the-board reduction in property taxes, normally the sort of measure beloved of “fiscally conservative” groups such as AFP.

But the direct mailings, the painting of our town as a little Detroit, the half-truths, the robocalls, the blizzard of advertising – all of it was to no avail.

I spent the day as election chair for the smallest of the six city precincts, sworn to “prevent fraud, deceit and abuse in the conduct of this election” along with my two co-workers at the polling place. It quickly became clear that the turnout would be heavy, and that we would run out of ballots. I called this in to the county auditor's office, with increasing desperation as we dwindled to less than a score of ballots by midday. Just in time, a delivery of forty-eight more ballots arrived, followed by a second delivery in the late afternoon, after the auditor's office had printed another 1800 ballots to be divided among the six precincts. They were needed: it was a record turnout, higher than either of the last two presidential elections.

One other thing became clear: one of the non-AFP candidates lived in our precinct, and it seemed like every voter on her street and the neighboring streets were coming out to vote, a steady stream of them all day long. In the end, she gained the last of the three open council seats by a margin of about 150 votes. This lady was a traditional candidate: a thirty-year resident of the town, a “soccer mom” who put all her children through the local schools and was active in parent-teacher organizations and civic activities. Every time in the last twenty years or more that there has been a community drive or festival or event or need for volunteers, she has been there, working alongside others to do the grinding (and often unappreciated) hard work that undergirds such activities.

And in this election, that trumped the outside money. Her neighbors and friends came out and voted for her. It was as simple as that.