Election Strategies

It’s been up there for several days, but I just noted a post in City Hall Scoop [link here] suggesting that Pakou Hang’s candidacy might have cost Kevin Riach election to the school board.

I’m not sure that I agree, but the case is made interestingly. The article suggests that the increased turnout in Ward Six caused by the unsuccessful Hang candidacy brought out more Conlon voters.

People always need to be reminded that people and referendum items on ballots do affect other things on the same ballot. This is why we had a constitutional amendment on the right to fish and hunt a few years back and it is why Michele Bachmann and Governor Plenty wanted us to vote on one to outlaw gay marriage for last year’s elections, a move echoed [with varying degrees of success[ in several states.

GLBT issues have been used this way by the right for some time. Old timers can remember that Rosalie Butler won her last election in the 1978 city election when the city’s gay rights ordinance then in effect was defeated in referendum. One commentator noted that, if you believed all the hype the various parties were giving out before the election that 50,000 bigots had outvoted 30,000 perverts. [That is why it is not out of line to suggest that Dave Thune had courage when he introduced a new gay rights ordinance several years later.]

Other subjects have also skewed elections. It seems hard to believe now, but the GOP came close to taking control of our city council as recently as 1982 [the first year for ward elections]. The DFL elected Bill Wilson, Leonard Levine, and Victor Tedesco solidly enough and the Republicans picked up three seats with Bob Fletcher, Hugo Masanz, and Chris Nicosia. [Purists will note that the GOP had not endorsed Masanz and that indeed the DFL endorsed him in the next election, but the GOP did publicly note its “support” of him in his run against the DFL-endorsed Liz Anderson.]

In the seventh race, the Ward Two seat, the DFL candidate Jim Scheibel narrowly beat his GOP opponent by 25 votes. If thirteen of those people had thought differently the GOP would have won the Council. [Historians may note that his opponent was a man named Dave Thune, but I suspect that it must have been a different guy.]

What made that election so tight? A referendum on whether the City should be allowed to investigate municipal ownership of cable television. It wasn’t to have municipal ownership, it was just to be able to consider it as one possibility.

Sometimes other things on a ballot have an effect and once in a while the effect is not what the candidate or cause expected.

There is no great lesson here. But before you sign that referendum petition or suggest to somebody that he/she should run for something, you might want to think twice, reflecting on the bigger context of things.