Rum, Romanism and Rebellion

Nina Trasoff won the Ward Six Democratic Primary by an impressive 65%-35% margin. Early numbers show that she won the mail-in ballots by a ridiculous fifty points. This made for a rather big hole for Steve Farley to get out of. Despite what a couple of people told me tonight, my quick and dirty math on the numbers show that Farley lost the election day vote as well.

The margin both suprised me and gave me hope for the general election. I saw some numbers from Trasoff’s field operation that predicted this sort of outcome, my thought was Howard Dean’s campaign in Iowa. You know, overly exuberant volunteers over estimating the support that their candidate had. But the fact that Trasoff’s field effort could even generate such numbers gave an indication at how sophisticated it was.

Farley had been involved in grassroots politics for years, in fact, his campaign towards the end touted him as “the grassroots candidate.” For some reason, this didn’t translate into sneakers on the ground. Farley’s people included an organizer who put together the local anti-proposition 200 effort. She had put together that campaign with bailing wire and chewing gum and did a better job than the Phoenix people with all of their big names and money. For some reason, the same magic didn’t work this time.

Early on, it seemed like so many leading activists who would traditionally be associated with liberal candidates like Farley lined up with Trasoff. This probably took a lot of wind out of his sails early on. The biggest problem was that Trasoff is just as progressive as Farley, and it became difficult to tag her as too conservative for the liberal activists.

Farley’s biggest problem may have been his own overassessment of his support. I’ve talked about this before, he has a tendency (actually, all of us on this side of the political fence suffer from some form of this malady) to read support for one of his issues, or even lack of opposition, as support for him as a candidate. This, plus his other logical leaps, probably led to some strategic errors. The main leap was his argument that he beat Fred Ronstadt once before. (He was opposed to a plan that Ronstadt supported, and Ronstadt’s side lost. Using his logic, I beat Howard Dean and John Edwards in the 2004 presidential primary) The argument was supposed to convince voters that he was the best guy to run against Ronstadt, but the argument was so complicated that only voters who were too sophisticated to buy the argument would understand it.

He made many of these sorts of arguments, even up to the end. This morning, for example, they played a soundbite from him where he said that people that just paid $60.00 to fill their gas tanks will remember that he was the one who tried to get them light rail. He forgot that someone who needs $60.00 worth of gas, even with these prices, is an east sider with an SUV and probably voted against his transportation plan.

The size of her margin is an indication that the party is pretty strongly behind her. The bad old days of the losing candidate’s supporters forming “Democrats for some Republican” the week after the primary are, hopefully, over.

It’s on to the general election and…

…Victory.

UPDATE: The Star reported that the tunout was 12%. An article just posted in the Tucson Citizen put the turnout at 24.2%. I trust the Citizen’s number more, since it has a decimal point, and so many of the numbers in C. J. Karamargin’s article seem to be estimates (ie – they end in five!).