Richardson council election wrapup

The Nightly Build

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How the Winners Did It

Like most, I was surprised that, with three places with three or four candidates, there were no run-offs. Mark Solomon won his four-way race by 26%. John Murphy won his three-way race by 24%. Gary Slagel won his three-way race by 21%.

Like most, I was surprised that the candidates endorsed by the Richardson Coalition PAC swept the election, winning all seven places. The candidates endorsed by the other PAC who spent significantly on the election, the Richardson Fire Fighters Association (RFFA), went one for seven. Steve Mitchell, running unopposed in Place 6, was endorsed by both the Richardson Coalition and the RFFA.

Reactions were somewhat predictable. Supporters of the losing candidates credit (blame?) the influence of the Richardson Coalition, especially the "voters guide" it mailed to Richardson voters, in determining the outcome. Defeated Place 7 candidate Dennis Stewart, was quoted in The Dallas Morning News as saying, "A handful of people with a lot of money can get things done." Reader "Destiny" put it more bluntly: "The only answer I can come up with is we had a bunch of mindless sheep voting with the coalition flyer in hand."

John Murphy campaign worker William J. 'Bill' McCalpin had a different explanation.

"I can tell you that the John Murphy campaign won a three-way race outright because of sheer hard work. Yes, I am sure that the naysayers are already muttering about the election being bought by the Richardson Coalition, but the fact is the Coalition is not some monolithic monster that rules Richardson - the Murphy campaign actually didn't have much to do with the Coalition because we were running our own race."

My own view? There's a grain of truth in each of the explanations. Without professional polling of the electorate, it's impossible to say how much weight each explanation carried.

With a population of 100,000, only 7,100 people voted. Maybe 10-20% of those attended even one of the candidate forums. That says there's a lot of either contentment or apathy among the electorate and not that many fully informed voters. Unless something is done to change the dynamics, the incumbents are going to win in such an environment. And, in four of the six races with an incumbent, the incumbent did win.

Into that environment, drop a professionally done "voters guide" into everyone's mailbox and expect the Richardson Coalition PAC, who endorsed those four incumbents, to have a big impact. Big endorsements by everyone from Congressman Pete Sessions, former Police Chief Larry Zacharias, and Richardson benefactor Charles Eisemann for former mayor Gary Slagel was bound to rub off on the other candidates also endorsed by the Richardson Coalition PAC, whether incumbent or challenger. In this reading of the returns, Gary Slagel not only had strong support, he had long coattails.

In my view, the negative campaigning by both sides hurt their respective candidates about equally. The Richardson Coalition PAC's heavy-handed "voters guide" discredited the PAC in my eyes. But the anti-Coalition forces' demonization of the PAC and Charles Eisemann and Gary Slagel turned me off as much or even more. In the voters' view, I guess that both sides had more success driving up the negatives of their opponents than they themselves suffered by going negative, with the Richardson Coalition PAC coming out ahead simply because their direct mailing reached more voters.

With such a small turnout, it's plausible that an active candidate with enthusiastic volunteers can turn out enough vote to tip an election, or at least get over that 50% level needed to avoid a run-off. Testimony about some of the lesser-financed candidates that they were knocking on doors is no doubt true. But it's impossible to measure just how much "shoe leather" effort was put into each candidate's campaign and how receptive the voters were to such efforts. It's one thing to talk to a voter. It's something else again to get them to go to the polls for you. I have no doubt that, in local elections, just like in national elections, in the end, get-out-the-vote efforts are critically important. The winning candidates, even if they didn't exceed the efforts of the losing candidates, must have put enough effort into this part of the campaign to get several thousand voters out to mark their ballots for the winners.

In the end, the numbers tell the story. Four incumbents won. Two lost. There was one open seat with four candidates. What all the winners had in common was that they were endorsed by the Richardson Coalition PAC. No matter the individual candidates, no matter the uniqueness of each campaign and campaign staff, the common trait of being endorsed by the PAC is hard to overlook. Given that the PAC's most visible effort in this campaign was that one mailer that everyone was talking about, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that the Richardson Coalition PAC had the names, the money, and the skill to win themselves an election. The PAC may have united the council. Whether they've irreparably divided the city in the process remains to be seen.