Signs don’t vote, but they work

Ballot issues, one in particular, had everyone’s attention Tuesday. Mainers didn’t turn out in record-setting droves like they did in last year’s presidential vote, but it as close. The vote on the marriage equality law really drew folks.  Big votes on excise taxes and a TABOR-like tax reform drew people, too.

I spent the day at the polls, talking to voters about why they voted the way they did. Everyone had an informed opinions on the same-sex marriage issue, whether they wanted to let gay people marry or not and on tax reform.

That has had me thinking.

The TABOR/Tax reform issue went down in a big way, and the people I spoke to had a simple pragmatic reason for turning it down.

It’s called representative government, they said. We elect leaders, councilors, selectmen and legislators, to do the hard work for us. They review the issues we don’t have time for, studying budgets and ordinances and coming up with decisions. As voters, if we don’t like their decisions, we just have to vote them out.

But TABOR would have short circuited that, replacing representative government with rule by initiative. For the Mainer’s I talked to, that would have been an unnecessary, potentially expensive, extra step.

That’s all there, on the video. What didn’t make the cut is the stuff that came first.

I started out asking them how they voted in the local races,  for  the Lewiston and Auburn’s mayor and City Council seats. Their answers were mostly uniform. None of them could recall how they voted for City Council, few had any memory of the mayoral races.  It didn’t matter which  city they were in, the local races didn’t register with them.  On the college campus, many didn’t even bother to fill out the city questions. They just left them blank. One guy in Auburn said he just picked names at random on the ballot.

These were the same folks that declared their undying support for representative government, but they couldn’t name a single one of those representatives.

Which brings me to the signs. I had a candidate tell me last week that he didn’t’ spend any money on signs.  Signs don’t vote, he said, and he devoted his time to one-on-one conversations.

That candidate got his ass handed to him at the polls. True, signs don’t vote.  But they sure do seem to work.

When people pay no attention to what’s going on at a city council level, a name means a lot. Just having it on a sign and having more signs in more convenient places means winning the election.

I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.

Fragility

It was a November Tuesday, back in 1992.  All the local politicos had gathered in a downtown bar, and I imagined they were sitting around a big table, laughing and tossing back drink after drink.

I always imagined one guy at the center of that little party, a local attorney-turned-realtor, laughing louder than the rest, drinking more and generally having a better, more boisterous time.

I, on the other hand, was stuck at the Town Clerk’s office with a notebook, dutifully writing down numbers and names, figuring out who the next Town Councilors were going to be. Election night. It was a position I find myself in once a year.

Anyway, I made my way back to the newsroom, notebook, names and numbers in hand. I’d made arrangements earlier to call the candidates once I knew the winners, and luckily for me that night most were clustered in that one little bar. I called it, and the lawyer-turned-realtor snatched up the phone.

Here’s the deal. He was a successful, rich, educated, handsome guy. Glib, serious, polished, he assumed he’d do really well at the polls.

But he didn’t. He got absolutely spanked, embarrassingly so. I mean, he had  two votes or something— he and his wife, probably. I’m sure it made for uncomfortable talk at work the next day.

“Sure, I voted for you, Peter,” they said.

Uh huh.

Anyway, he was the first guy to grab the phone. I recognized his voice, but asked for someone else.

“Is this Scott? It is! Hey Scott! It’s Peter!”

I said hi, and asked for the other person.

“Oh sure. So. But, how’d I do?”

I didn’t want to be the one to tell him, but I really had no choice. It was the only way to get him off the phone so I could talk to the winners, finish my story and meet my deadline.

“You lost,” I said. “Didn’t win. Sorry.”

That should be enough, I thought. Nope.

“What? How many votes did I get?”

“Two.” And that was that, the very last time I talked to him. Ever. My sources that night say he dropped the phone, just picked up his coat and wandered out the door. Didn’t talk to another soul, didn’t pay his tab.  A few months later, I found out he’d completely moved out-of-town.

The thing is, some 17 years later, I can still recall his name but not the folks that beat him. Somehow, his humiliation lodged itself in my memory.

It’s no surprise that politicians have big egos. It’s a must.  They’d never run if they didn’t think that they were best.  And frankly, in my opinion, that’s not a bad thing.

And I guess it’s not surprising how incredibly vulnerable those same egos can be. It simply cannot be easy to put yourself in such wide-open position, to leave yourself so vulnerable to an utterly humiliating defeat.

I’m guessing the waiting isn’t the worst part, but it has to be a close second.

Some friends have told me that the local Lewiston-Auburn politicos are working themselves into a fine froth. With less than a week before the municipal election, they’re getting anxious. Not sleeping well, I gather.

I’m not foolish enough to guess who’s going to have their egos crushed, or who’s going to have that pleasure delayed for another two years.

And I’ll be there Tuesday night, writing a story about the lucky few. But I’ll be thinking about the ones that got spanked.

Enjoying Autumn’s leaves

The weather might not be the finest, but the leaves are nice. My guess is, this week or next, Maine’s forests will be in  their Autumn glory.