What if they gave an election and nobody came?
I'm leaving to vote after I finish this entry.
Based on what colleagues tell me, I'll feel like the Maytag repairman when I show up.
The Maytag repairman?
Some readers might be too young to remember the television commercial for the appliance manufacturer. The idea was that the Maytag repairman was the loneliest guy in town because the company's washers and dryers were extremely reliable.
Anyway, voter turner appears to be living up to woeful expectations of 25% to 30% -- or may end up even lower.
It's a bit puzzling in that Fresno area media -- old and new -- are providing unprecedented access to information about the candidates and the issues through the Internet.
But, in other ways, the turnout isn't surprising.
California, beginning with the gubernatorial recall of Gray Davis, simply has had too many elections the past few years. And it appears that our local races are overshadowed by the intense interest in the presidential campaign.
The mayoral campaign has lacked controversy, with front-runners Henry T. Perea and Ashley Swearengin running strong, competent, politically safe campaigns.
Throw in the end of the school year, the start of summer, the price of gas, and people can easily rationalize their decisions not to vote.
I hope folks pay more attention in November.
Comments:
Bill:
Listening to your podcast with Jim Boren. Good stuff. One clarification: You said "that's where all the money's coming from," referring to campaign finance and how the mayoral candidates are getting funded mainly by public employee unions and developers/builders.
The excellent Bee graphics in Saturday's paper for the race showed that Ashley Swearengin received exactly 0% of her money from public employee unions and only 19% from the building industry/developers. These numbers shy in comparison to Dages and Perea, for example, who received considerably more.
The reason I bring this up is to show that while you are absolutely correct to say builders/developers and unions are usually the biggest players in town, Ashley has proven that broadbased support can be found elsewhere....
Posted by: David Schecter at June 3, 2008 6:08 PM
Even in the local paper, the national races are mentioned far more often [near daily or daily, inside A] while there's less coverage of the city council and mayoral candidacies-- not even the horse-race analysis I bemoan.
Part of it is the race's value as discussion fodder; mastering a local issue means you can talk with the five or ten local people interested in the same issue. If you invest your time in national politics, the same time invested will give you a much larger audience or group of political junkies to discuss the issues with.
Posted by: ScottM at June 3, 2008 6:24 PM
The candidates in local races don't seem interested in using the "new" media either by using their own sites decently or respecting bloggers so why would voters be interested either?
I was interested in the Dictos/Pinedale issue and posted on it. Then I went to Dictos' website to email him questions on the issue and the email form on his site didn't even work. So I finally got his email and sent him my questions (and made it clear that I was going to post on my blog in regards to his answers). I got a fairly blase answer and then asked him a couple more follow ups that could give him an opportunity to re-align my thoughts on him and never heard from him again. No response of any sort.
Posted by: NerdMom at June 3, 2008 7:24 PM
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