Postmortem Part 1: Issue 78

This has been an odd day. On the national liberal blogs and on Air America, commentators are positively giddy about election results across the country. In the Ohio blogs, depression, recriminations and excuses for the pancaking of the RON effort.

For myself, I have awakened from the fevered dream of fair redistricting and acknowledged that RON doesn't look nearly as good by the harsh light of day. I have reserved all my depression, anger and bargaining for the defeat of Issue 78.

This caught me by surprise. Obviously, a school levy effort doesn't have the resources to put a poll in the field. But the signs were all good. No organized opposition emerged. The BJ contained relatively few LOEs against. What I heard from the phonebankers was positive.

I also thought that other campaigns' GOTV would be complimentary. The four judicial candidates, the school levy committee and RON supporters were all doing GOTV targeting essentially the same folks.

I don't think the problem was a failure of Democratic turnout. Two Democrats won Muni Judge spots over appointed incumbents. This was the first race in which judges were allowed to declare party affiliation in their campaign materials. That along with their strategy of casting the election as a referendum on Taft made this the most partisan race I've seen in Akron. What's more, Akron voters chose Eve Belfance and Kathy Michael by sufficient margins to overcome the inevitable Republican majorities in Bath and Richfield. This could only have happened with considerable Democratic turnout.

So what went wrong? Here are my best guesses. First, that economic realities make it hard to support any new tax. People are looking at a long, cold winter with spiking gas prices. Akron's economy remains dormant. Uncertainty permeates the air.

Second, while APS made the case that they deserve a raise, they didn't make the case that they need one. I heard that the belief within the campaign was that discussing the need for more money is too much of a downer. "People don't want to hear that" was the quote. The problem is, without laying out why the schools need a raise, people don't think you need one. They might not want to hear all that depressing, whiny stuff, but without it they won't understand that the need is dire.

Third, the campaign was too short, too concentrated and too dependent on teachers. They kicked off in mid-September. That's not enough time for the kind of voter education they obviously need to do.

I hope that with a concentrated effort to reach voters and walk them through the basics of why Akron needs a new levy it can pass the next time around. The alternative to me is believing that Akron is overrun with dickheads and I don't want to indulge in that kind of defeatism.