Alachua Voter Guide

Consider this a bit of Election Postmortem, if you will. This past Tuesday night yielded a number of predictable results, which I had largely predicted correctly. Incumbents rolled to victory, except in one case. The turnout was pathetic. All of it, in hindsight, is easily explained. And a new challenger should be able to learn something from this.

It helps to understand how people think when they go to the voting booth. If it’s November, they are there because the top of the ticket has energized them. For the vast majority of the voters, the local candidates are an afterthought. That explains why a locals-only election gets only a 24.6% turnout. In those moments, the voter goes through a couple of defaults to make a decision.

1. Are they informed enough to have a compelling reason to vote for a candidate? The compelling reason trumps party affiliation. But very few voters have a compelling reason to vote for a local candidate, because they are usually fairly uninformed. Therefore, the majority of voters go to default number…
2. Party Affiliation. When that candidate has a D or and R after his or her name, it matches a list of reasons the voter already has in mind.
3. Name Recognition. Known beats unknown all the time. In the School Board race for the 4th district seat, a non-partisan race, Janie Williams, the incumbent, lost to Barbara Sharpe because voters have been seeing her campaign signs for years. Ms. Williams was a first term member of the board. Ms. Sharpe appeared to be the incumbent to people who didn’t know any better.

This year’s November election is going to pose a particularly thorny problem to those who oppose Democrats. Because of the extremely high level of interest in Barack Obama in Alachua County, there is going to be a huge Democrat turnout here. There is also, due to the fact that Senator Obama is the first black major party candidate on the ballot ever, going to be an unprecedented black turnout. And this large Obama-sized turnout is going to vote for other Democrats on the ballot. Their major default will be party identification, and candidates with a D after their names will be the beneficieries.

The conventional wisdom is usually to make sure you get “your people” out in higher numbers than those of your opponent. But you are not going to do that this time around if you aren’t a Democrat. You are going to have to give people a compelling reason to vote for you, and you are going to have to make sure people get it.

Lonnie Scott gave the voters a compelling reason for not re-electing the Sheriff. What made it most compelling was that Sheriff did not try to dispel those reasons. She showed her resentment, but did not  really make a case for herself. However, the Gainesville Sun, the local newspaper of record, completely ignored it and never reported it. TV20 did, but the newspaper withheld the aura of legitimacy that Scott needed. They did print opposing editorials by the former head of the jail, and by the Sheriff herself, but those are just opinion pieces. And it wasn’t until after the election that they printed a letter from former two term sheriff Steve Oelrich that lambasted Sheriff Darnell making a pretense fo cleaning up corruption. To be fair to the Sun, it may be that Oelrich didn’t write until that last minute. And if Oelrich had really been so outraged by the campaign Darnell was running, he has had months to make a lot of very public endorsements and to star in a few TV commercials. But he didn’t.

Lonnie Scott’s compelling reason was the proverbial tree that fell in the woods when no one was there. For most, it just didn’t happen. People did not get the message, and they yawned through the election by largely not showing up; the powers of incumbency and name recognition doing the rest.

As a challenger, you will have to use everything at your disposal to get your message out. You will not be able to count on the Sun to do that for you. And the forums are small attendance events that are sparsely reported at best. And those forums, when they are rebroadcast, are not ratings-winners either. You will have to go to these events, but you will also have to go around them to the thousands who will mindlessly vote for no real reason in November.

And it starts by daring to go directly to the public over the Internet.  Use this site. Blog about your compelling reasons. Interact intelligently with the commenters. You will not reach most voters this way, but you will have a deeper impact on a core number of people. Those people will help you reach the others. They will be more inclined to give to your campaign. They will be more inclined to talk to their friends. They will be more inclined to volunteer. They will be more on board your campaign than some members of your family who are just being indulgent.

Remember, if you are not a Democrat in November, your odds are already extremely bad. You have nothing to lose. DO NOT listen to that consultant who tells you to play it safe, look harmless, and buy all the yard signs you can get.

As far as the public is concerned, they are looking for a reason to vote for you. If they don’t find one, they will go to the defaults, or not vote in your race at all. In 2004, 10,000 voters opted NOT to vote in the county commission races AFTER they had voted for a presidential candidate. They simply had no reason to vote at all.