Lessons for Conservatives
It’s been a little over a week since the Gainesville City Elections, and I am finally ready to weigh in on the results. I would have done this sooner, but I have been sick for a good part of the time, and I haven’t even felt like writing. In fact, between today’s abysmal weather and the return of my symptoms, this is the first time that opportunity and the right mood have coincided.
A 27% turnout is not a mandate, but it doesn’t have to be. Our elections do not require that we have a quorum to be official. If, on elections day, only 10 people bothered to vote, 6 of them would basically do all the deciding for us.
It is mark of profound apathy that it took so much outside money and outside manpower to rally 15% of the registered voters to come out and defeat Charter Amendment One and the 12% of voters who came out to support it. The conservative Citizens for Good Public Policy must be wondering what they could have done to draw out a few thousand more sympathizers, but there is actually a more important question than this. The questons is, how did we become a community that has no conservative representatives in our city government?
For years my fellow conservatives have told me, “Gainesville is such a liberal town! There is no hope for a conservative candidate here!” Yet, those rascally liberals keep winning so many elections with so many voters being left on the table. We routinely have turnouts in the 10-13% range. Are we really doing the best we can do? Should we just give up permanently? Does this enlightened University town only have room for one point of view?
Critiquing our performance
In retrospect, it was probably a mistake to get Charter One on the ballot. It was also a mistake for the city commission to blow off the concerns of the citizens who opposed the gender identity provisions in regard to restrooms, but it was a sustainable mistake. What was underestimated was the amount of resources that would be released to oppose a ballot initiative that would roll back the city’s ambitous civil rights laws to the state’s more modest ones. If Citizens for Good Public Policy had instead gathered a similar effort to support a candidate to defeat Jeanna Mastordicasa, they would have faced much smaller resistance and may have pulled it off.
This also would have required that conservatives do something they never do: think ahead. Their successful effort would have to be followed up by getting a new Mayor and District 4 commissioner after Pegeen Hanrahan and Craig Lowe are removed by term limits. Three new commissioners, with the amenable Sherwin Henry, would have made the majority needed to cherry-pick the changes they wanted to begin with while leaving the rest of the civil rights laws in place.
Of course, all of this falls apart if each opportunity brings a new crop of last minute conservative candidates tumbling out and getting each others’ way. If you are thinking about running for one of these seats, you should adopt the motto of, “If you don’t get in early, get out of the way.” City elections are non-partisan, so there is no party primary to give people a chance to choose which conservative they will have to vote for in the big one. And when you have a lot of candidates, it usually means a runoff. And runoffs go to the liberals who faithfully participate in elections, and everything that leads up to them.
In summary, conservatives need to change their ways, not their values. They need to show up on election days, but they also need to stay engaged year round. And that means that Citizens for Good Public Policy should NOT disband, but expand its mission.
