The Day After

A few thoughts the day after the May primary…if you feel so inclined, weigh in with your own thoughts by making a comment at the bottom…

Voter turnout in Lee County was 44.4 percent, with 13,450 ballots cast. The lack of contested primaries on the Republican side for Lee County Commissioner and the lack of a real race on the Republican presidential ballot likely kept the number of GOP voters much lower, comparitively, than Democrats, although final breakdowns won’t be available for a few days. The Lee County Board of Elections says Tuesday’s vote was the highest turnout since the 2004 General Election, which means that with decent weather this coming November, and with what promises to be a tight Lee County Commissioner race and, of course, a presidential ballot, turnout will likely top 50 percent.

Unofficial exit polls were done by some observers and poll workers, as always. I got a call late Tuesday afternoon from an ardent sales-tax opponent who predicted that the sales tax measure would be approved and that the Board of Education winners would be Dr. Lynn Smith, Shawn Williams, Cameron Sharpe and Mark Akinosho. I was taken aback by the concession and I held out hope this anti-tax person’s prediction would stand. But as you know by now, the sales tax was defeated by a 55-45 margin and current BOE Chairman Bill Tatum, not Akinosho, won back his seat on the board.

Sales tax vote: Most people with whom I spoke in the last couple of weeks understood the .25-cent sales tax question, and the vast majority of them said they’d support it. Its defeat was a little surprising; the margin of the defeat was very surprising. Another informal exit poller (he worked the polls for a BOE candidate) said today that the people he spoke with who voted against the tax said they did so because “our taxes are too high already,” and that he got the sense these voters didn’t understand the possible fallout from a defeat – that indeed property taxes might go up to help pay for repairs and renovations at Lee County High School and CCCC. Maybe my “sample” was a bad one, statistically, but it was clear from people I spoke with and people who talked up the tax that the more you knew about it, the more likely you’d vote for it. The big question now is: what next? What will the county and the school board do in response, and how will organizations like the Sanford Area Chamber of Commerce, which helped lead the fight for the tax (along with nearly a dozen endorsing organizations, including The Herald), respond? And might we see the issue back on the ballot in November? The gloating by the Americans for Prosperity and John Locke Foundation has been surprisingly tame today; parties in both groups are already making the call for a consensus-reaching group to form and then work within the county to address government spending.

BOE vote: Cameron Sharpe joined incumbents Bill Tatum, Dr. Lynn Smith and Shawn Williams in victory lane last night. I thought Mark Akinosho had broader support from both the “inside the bloc” crowd (supporters leaning toward the incumbents, including late write-in candidate John Bonardi) and the “outside the bloc” crowd (supporters leaning toward Sharpe, Kim Lilley and write-in candidate and former board chairman Ruth Gurtis), but not so. Akinosho finished 6th in an eight-horse race, ahead of only the two write-in candidates. One local political observer told me last week that Sharpe would win one of the four seats because he either knows or is related to almost all of Lee County…I don’t know about that, but now that he’s won the seat, it’ll be interesting to see what happens. Will Sharpe reach out to Tatum & Co. and begin to dialogue about how he can become an asset on the board? Will Tatum and the others reach out to Sharpe and find a way to integrate him into the board? Or will we have a silent stand-off that results in 6-1 votes from here until at least the next election? (And will the provisional ballots put Lilley in the seat instead of Tatum? And provided Tatum does stay in, will he remain as chairman? And how much input will Gurtis, Sharpe’s mentor, now have?) Interesting to note as well that with with a little more than 39,000 votes cast for BOE candidates, the average voter voted for only 2.91 candidates – just less than three per person, when you could vote for four. Perhaps some bloc-only (sans write-ins) voting?

Commissioners: Board Chairman Bob Brown was ousted; former BOE member Richard Hayes will join fellow Democrats Ed Paschal and Jerry Lemmond, both of whom are seeking re-election, and Republicans Larry “Doc” Oldham, Dr. Andre Knecht and former commission board Chairman Herb Hincks on the November ballot. Voters will select three of the six. Lots to speculate on about these races. Brown didn’t provide great leadership as chairman and, like some of his fellow Democrats, he often looked toward de facto chairman Robert Reives before casting his vote to make sure he voted the way Reives wanted him to. Lemmond has widespread support because he’s very engaging and goes to everything – every event, every gathering – and he’s established great rapport with his constituency. Looking ahead, it’ll be interesting to see what kind of support Hincks gets. He helped establish Lee County as a two-party county a decade ago, and he’s enjoyed broad support from both parties in the past. But Hincks has wondered how much Republican support he’ll get come November; he’s become a little unpopular with some of the Republican elite. Paschal got in despite campaigning very little. The swing vote for a new chairman could be Hayes, if both he and Hincks win in November…but that’s getting way ahead of the game. Way ahead.

For now, I think most of us look forward to a brief break from politics…

Newspaper Endorsements…Do They Work?

 

 

 

CAN AN ENDORSEMENT TURN AN ELECTION? | A caller’s theory

How much do endorsements – specifically newspaper editorial board endorsements – mean to candidates for elected office?

It’s fun to speculate about that, and I have a theory about how impactful The Herald’s endorsements have been over the years.

More about that in a minute.

I started thinking about this today when I got a call from a nice lady who read my “Just Mad About Mark” blog posting, and said she knew the answer to my question.

What question would that be?

“Why Mrs. Gurtis won when you did not endorse her and lost when you did,” she said.

I took the bait.

“A lot of people,” she said, “wait until your endorsements come out and then they vote for whoever it is you don’t endorse.”

Really? A lot of people? Like…how many?

“A lot,” she said.

I told the nice lady that the numbers didn’t support her premise. Over the years it’s been fairly consistent that at least 80 percent of the candidates we endorse in local races win, I said. I told her that I remembered a letter to the editor of the Raleigh News & Observer a few years ago thanking them for summarizing their political endorsements in a single editorial just before each Election Day because it made voting easy – the writer said he simply clipped out the editorial and voted against whomever the N&O endorsed. (The N&O at that time endorsed about one Republican a year, and always in a judge race.) As far as The Herald goes, I remembered one candidate telling us specifically he didn’t want our endorsement, but I never had anyone tell me before that they always voted against whomever we endorsed.

If that what she said were true, I told her, our “picks” would only win about 20 percent of the time instead of 80. In fact, if you factored Ruth Gurtis out of the equation, our percentage would probably jump to 85 or so. (The former school board member won all but one of her races when we endorsed other candidates over her, then lost the one time we did endorse her. This year’s endorsements, which included a “for” vote on the sales tax issue, were slightly off our trend: we hit on three out of five “picks,” a 60 percent mark…of course, I didn’t know that at the time she called.)

I asked her if she wanted to “see the statistics” on our endorsements.

“No,” she said. “I’ll take your word for it.”

I asked, “And what’s your name, ma’am?”

She hung up without telling me.

Full disclosure here: it’s a good thing she didn’t take me up on the “see the statistics” offer. I don’t have any. Nothing formal, anyway. We don’t keep a running count of how our endorsements fair, but I do know that in almost every election since we starting doing endorsements in 1999 our usual “batting average” is about .800. Some years slightly better, some years, like 2008’s primary, slightly worse. If she wanted proof, I would have provided it for her, and it would have supported my 80 percent claim…

But I also would have told her my theory about political endorsements: that they probably don’t influence many political races at all.

Here’s my thinking: most people who take time to read our endorsements each political season are probably fairly politically savvy…meaning they’ve probably also taken the time to find out about the candidates and the issues (hopefully from reading our stories and profiles on our news pages). I think there’s a strong likelihood, therefore, that most editorial readers already know by the time our editorials are published (usually in the 10 days leading up to the election) how they’ll vote.

The reason most people are curious about the editorials is because they want to see if we “got it right” this year or if we blew it. (See Billy Liggett’s blog posting here to read his take on a similar subject.)

The actual number of “undecided” voters who read a newspaper’s endorsement and decide based on the newspaper’s pick is probably, in most cases, pretty small. Think about it: how often have you gone to the polls undecided about a local race? At any time, did you base your decision singularly on someone’s endorsement, newspaper or otherwise?

OK. So if that’s true, then why is there such a strong correlation between The Herald’s “picks” over the years and winners in the polls? Does our 80+ percent “success” rate make us geniuses?

Hardly.

Lucky?

No.

Smart?

Uh, not necessarily.

Could it be that most of us - editorial boards and voters alike - have something in common? Perhaps that we make the right choices most of the time?

I think that’s it.

Our editorial board is usually unanimous in its decisions during election season. Four of us vote, and we had our very first 2-2 “tie” vote was last November – and it happened to be in the Linwood Mann/Earl Barker city council race that turned out to be decided by just a few votes among hundreds of voters. When it comes to making our endorsement, we’re almost always all on the same page – and it happens, about 80 percent of the time, to coincide with voters’ picks.

So why make endorsements? They’re a lot of work for us (we devote dozens of collective hours to the process each election year) and sometimes it’s not a lot of fun. But there’s a good reason to do it: to make readers think.

Our goal is simply to help readers become firm in their convictions for a candidate (or an issue) and to make sure votes are based on a candidate’s credentials and ability to be effective, not just on personality or something superficial.

Occasionally, I think, an endorsement can play a factor in a close race. I think of the 2006 Lee County Sheriff’s race, for instance, which was extremely close. I get a lot of feedback on our political endorsements, but that year I got more ”that helped me make up my mind” comments than in all other years combined.

But that’s why we vote. Hopefully that’s why you vote: because you believe.

Sometimes we’ll agree. Sometimes we won’t.

And just about every year - as with Ruth Gurtis and this year’s sales tax vote – we get to be baffled.

In those cases, we sweep up the confetti afterward and move on to the next thing.

Coming Wednesday: Election Recap