The path to Victory (council edition)
The election is over…well not over, there are still ballots being counted, and Measure P is too close to call and all, but the city council race is done. And what are the lessons to be learned?
First, incumbents in local races win or lose based on how peole perceive how the city is doing. Multiple surveys, conducted over the last few years, have showed that a large majority of Alamedans are happy with how things are going here. (65% or so!). I don’t think there are many people out there who thought that Gilmore and deHaan weren’t going to win.
But the question has been asked, what accounts for the disparity between Gilmore and deHaan’s votes (approx. 800 votes separate them now but that is sure to change as the 1000s of outstanding ballots come in.) Here’s my theory: deHaan ran his campaign on Gilmore’s record.
From the dais, Doug deHaan has become known as the “lone dissenter” based on a few votes against such projects as the Alameda Theater, Alameda Point developer, Alameda Towne Centre, etc. While these votes have been few (20 or so in four years) they apparently make him the maverick of the council.
But candidate deHaan ran on a ballot statement that read:
As your Councilmember for the past four years, I have had numerous accomplishments to be proud of such as the renovation of: Park and Webster Streets, Bridgeside, Towne Centre, Alameda Theater and development of Harbor Bay Business Park, while strving for open and inclusive governent.
Literally running on the accomplishments of the very projects he worked to stop/slow/change/whatever. I can guarantee you that there were three councilmembers who were very surprised to see deHaan take credit for the Theater project after he became the one councilmember to acively work against it (heck, one of his votes was against additional historic renovation of the historic theater).
The fact is that few Alamedans (less than a few hundred people?) actually watch city council meetings and are completely unaware of what happens at them beyond the big issues that hit the papers. With the national elections bringing out a lot of voters, many/most of them vote on incumbency and on the information available to them. (Why ballot statements are important).
I’ll posit that in this year’s election, deHaan captured the NIMBY vote, these were voters who bullet voted for him (and I think it’s good that the council has someone representing this perspective so I’m not suggesting that there’s a problem with this vote), and he also captured the vote of a lot of people who are really happy with how things are going in the city, but those who are unaware that he wasn’t necessarily responsible for them.
I’m sure some will see this as an attack, but come on, you can’t be both for something and against it. Yet that was the proposition that voters were faced with last Tuesday. Given what POV they brought to the polls (the sky is falling or everything is going great), they were able to see that in candidate deHaan and it paid off at the ballot box.
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November 7th, 2008 at 10:43 am
If most voters vote based on character rather than record, then DeHaan won because they perceived him as someone who thinks independently, pays attention to his constituents, and is willing to question staff when he thinks they are pulling to wool over. He may not be the most sophisticated speaker but that seems to be less important to voters than having someone who actually cares enough to do research on his own and not just nod yes to what staff reports say.