Post-Election Wrap, Contest Results
Nov 7, 2007 8:45 - 9 Comments
Rather than issue a series of posts, I thought I would collect all the day-after-election items into one article.>
Here are the final (still unofficial) numbers. In case you hadn’t yet heard, the winners are Hoffmann, Gajewski, Britton, Robbins, Marcuccio. You can see a video of Hoffmann’s and Gajewski’s acceptance speeches here.
According to the City, overall turnout was light, with a total of 5,887 votes cast. That’s 19.93% of the City’s 29,535 registered voters.
Perhaps the biggest surprise was newcomer and first-time candidate Piotr (Peter) Gajewski’s strong showing — he garnered the highest vote total of any candidate, with 3,019. (Sources tell me his internal goal was 3,000.) Another big surprise was seven-term incumbent Bob Dorsey’s relatively weak electoral showing with only 1,844 votes, placing him fourth down among the unsuccessful candidates.
The election was marred by a human error-induced snafu. A training voter database was supplied to the City by state election officials instead of the real one. In the training database, everyone whose address begins with “5″ was tagged as having requested to vote absentee — so, when they got to the polls to vote, they came up as having already gotten their ballot.
City election staff very quickly figured out what to do as a workaround, but the error dominated the anemic press coverage our election got from the “big” press. I mean, considering Rockville is the third-largest (or is it second now?) city in Maryland, and the county seat of Montgomery and all.
That said, our little local election made the Washington Post and the New York Times.
Rockville Central broke its own record and registered 1,011 page views (or “hits”) throughout the day, with 414 individual readers. Thank you readers!
(The photos in this piece are all from the various candidate election night celebrations. I am sorry I don’t have one for Anne Robbins.)
THE CONTEST RESULTS ARE IN
Some of our readers are keenly interested in these results because they took part in our election results prediction contest, vying for fabulous and unspecified prizes. No one predicted it exactly right. The most common prediction was Hoffmann, Robbins, Marcuccio, Britton, Mullican. Most predictors underestimated Gajewski’s results and overestimated Mullican’s final total. So, to determine who was closest, I had to do some math. On the predictions where just one pick was wrong, I subtracted final vote totals for the correct missing candidate from the wrong pick, and . . . drum roll . . . winning this year’s prediction contest is . . . Piotr (Peter) Gajewski. Truly. He sent in his prediction at 9:41 am on Monday.
Peter’s prediction: Hoffmann, Marcuccio, Robbins, Mullican, Gajewski. Since he got himself right, I subtracted Mullican’s total from Britton’s total and Peter was just 739 votes off.
Only one other person made the same prediction: Rockville Central team member CindyCG (who is Cynthia Cotte Griffiths for those in the know). But Peter got his in first, so he wins.
What does he win? Why, a T-shirt and CD from my band, The West End, of course! Peter, please send me your shirt size. You can keep it just between us. (Can someone tell me what forms I need to fill out to keep this on the up-and-up in terms of election law? I don’t want someone to call it a campaign donation.)
Various candidates and others issued statements to the voters, reflecting on the campaigns. Here they are:
Mark Pierzchala: “It was great meeting some of you today and I appreciate that you made the effort to come out to vote, so many thanks. Any voting day is a good day come what may.”
John Britton: “By voting, you validate the hard work of all the candidates. Thank you.”
Phyllis Marcuccio: Thank you to all. I am honored. The heroes in this election are the candidates’ families who held them together, their dedicated committee members, volunteers who walked the city, orchestrated the debates, froze for long hours at the polls, and of course, the citizens who came out to vote. Now it is the electeds’ jobs to fulfill their promises. [This entry UPDATED from the original post.]
Brigitta Mullican: “The City of Rockville Election for 2007 impressed me because of the number of candidates who ran for a position on the Rockville City Council. This commitment shows deep concern for the quality of life in our Rockville city. I am eager to work with a new Rockville Mayor [and] Council and am honored to serve the citizens of Rockville.”Tracy Pakulniewicz-Chidiac: “Thank you to everyone who took the time to listen to the candidates and hear our issues. You, the voters, are who make the democratic process work, and I’m grateful for your participation.”
Real Rockville: “[C]ongratulations to everyone who ran for office and everyone who worked on campaigns. Regardless of who wins, anyone who had the guts to run or took the time to help in a campaign, needs a round of applause. I think the residents of Rockville should be grateful to all of those wonderful people who took the time and effort to show us what democracy in action looks like. . . .”
If you want to engage in analysis, punditry, or other electoral dissections, I recommend you visit the comments section of this post.
Thank you, Rockville citizens and candidates, for an exhilarating day.
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Rigged
Not sure what you mean. If you mean the contest…I can show you the emails! It’s totally transparent.>
If you mean the election, why do you think that?
I’d also like to thank all the candidates for the significant investment of time and money. We are fortunate in Montgomery County to have such a wide array of outstanding candidates.>
I would be curious to hear a theory on Mr. Dorsey’s defeat. I was under the impression that he was a popular council member, although I saw comparatively few signs up for him this year.
>“What happened to Bob Dorsey?” queried jr.
Looking at each candidates votes by district, I think the answer I see better fits the question, “Who happened to Bob Dorsey?”
The answer in large part is Piotr Gajewski. Across the City, wherever Gajewski is up, Dorsey goes down (primarily in the not-so-Robbins west districts 1,2,7,9,10) and vice versa(East side district 3,4,5). The only exception is district 6 (Montrose). John Britton seems to have a similar but less extreme anti-correlation with Bob Dorsey.
Then there seem to be district specific correlations that hurt and benefitted Dorsey. For example, his weakest showing was in district 1, where all incumbant City Council candidates did poorly in a pack of also ran newcomers. Henn, Britton and Gajewski did exceedingly well. One can’t avoid thinking this result is due in large portion to the trash debacle resulting from the Marcuccio-Robbins-Dorsey caucus.
Marcuccio and Dorsey seem to covary across the city (with Dorsey 2-4% behind except district 6) unless there is some other overiding factor. Dorsey seems to get a Marcuccio bump in District 3.
Dorsey’s own home district 4 seems ambivalent, with candidate favored over the other. Perhaps, Gottfried and Pakulniewicz-Chidiac (also district 4 residents)
In district 5, Dorsey seems to have lost votes to Brigitta Mullican (this is her home district).
Dorsey may have been pulled up by Robbins in district 6 and 8 (her home district)…but it wasn’t enough, he needed at least 554 more votes to beat Marcuccio.
So to boil it down, the upper west side found a couple of guys they like better than Dorsey. Alienated district 1 voters hled a trash grudge. Other east side candidates (Mullican, Gottfried,Pakulniewicz-Chidiac, Wang) sapped away Dorsey votes.
Next question for me? What happened to Carl Henn? just 100 more votes and he would have bested Maruccio?
ER!K RE@D
Waddington Place
My own overall theory (note that I am not a quantitavtie person, and I am more than likely to be totally wrong on all this) is that on the Council side there was a strong anti-incumbent sentiment in general. There was a chorus of “dysfunction, dysfunction, dysfunction” from candidates, observers, news media, and others. In the voting data, you can see an overall thrust to start fresh.>
However, if you look at the number of individual donors per candidate in the donor spreadsheet, you can also see that Robbins and Marcuccio had remarkably high numbers of individual people supporting them, compared with Dorsey. This indicates to me that, issues aside, they are stronger candidates than their colleague Bob Dorsey who had relatively few individual donors.
(Please note that I do not equate money with strength. At the local level, it is easy to self-fund and be competitive. But I do see the number of individual donors as a barometer of having done the tough work of reaching individual people and convincing them to tangibly choose you. It’s like door-knocking: it’s the sometimes-boring work of being a candidate that there just is no shortcut around.)
My read is that Robbins and Marcuccio, by doing the old-fashioned work of politics, were able to stand their ground amidst an overall tide that tended to want to replace the City Council. In that sense, they pulled off quite a feat and should feel good about it.
(One anomaly in my argument is Mullican, who had a high number of individual donors and clearly was putting in a lot of work. I don’t have an explanation there.)
The Mayoral race is a little different, but not much, I think. That one was driven by whether you like Town Square or not. Most folks like Town Square.
Of interest here is how well Pierzchala did — see my argument above about number of donors. Pierzchala had a significant number of individual donors and so was able to come in at second ahead of the theoretically better-known Powell.
Again, I could be totally all wet on all that. Just my still-forming thoughts. I may write something longer on this later.
–Brad
Brad,>
Do you see any geographic pattern in the Marcuccio and Robbins funding?
My blind prediction is that the donors were clustered in District 3 for Marcuccio and District 8 for Robbins. I also expect Mullican’s donors to be clustered in district 5, Britton in 2, Henn in 1, Gajewski in 10.
The underlying hypothesis is that district residence conveys votes and money and that Dorsey had to compete with a field of challengers for both.
Here’s an interesting observation. Districts with resident pretty much chose the local candidate. Henn won 1. Britton won 2 (well almost). Marcuccio won 3. Mullican won 5. Robbins won 6 and Gajewski won 10. The only exception is 4, which I have been presuming is Bob Dorsey’s district.
Here are the correlation coefficients for Bob Dorsey versus other candidates…
N% candidate X
2% Anderson
-67% Britton
-61% Gajewski
38% Gottlieb
-68% Henn
65% Marcuccio
20% Mullican
-65% Pakulniewicz-Chidiac
54% Robbins
-34% Wang
45% Write-in
…which should be read as follows, “When choosing candidate X voters also chose Bob Dorsey N% of the time”.
A negative value would imply that voting for candidate X made it less likely that those voters would also choose Dorsey.
Given this analysis, it reinforces the idea that those voting for Britton, Gajewski, Henn, Pakulniewicz-Chidiac and even Wang were substantially not voting for Dorsey, whereas those voting for Marcuccio and Robbins, and Gottfried tended to vote for Dorsey.
Erik, I haven’t done an analysis of where the donors for each candidate live. I have been considering doing something like that, basically creating a map (without names attached and using blocks instead of specific addresses) that shows where candidates’ financial base came from. We could also overlay a where-the-vote-came-from layer.>
All that sounds like work, though. I may not get right to it!
–Brad
A couple other Interesting tidbits. >
-Gajewski’s district (King Farm) had the 2nd lowest voter turnout (a pathetic 13.76% of registered voters) yet he was the overall Council winner by a pretty wide (relative) margin. I think this shows district support is not the only key to winning.
-Carl Henn did very well in King Farm where he started a community garden. I bet this gave him a major push in that district. I think this shows a small, but visible impact on a particular area can really help. So close Carl!
Chris, the district 10 turn-out may have been low, but Gajewski’s percentage and actual vote total for district 10 (19.42% and 330, respectively) were seldom passed by anyone but himself (outside of the voter dense district 2). Only Henn in district 1, Robbins in 7 & 8, and Britton in 9 had more votes from a single district.>
Having glanced at the data a bit, I deduce Gajewski’s secret of success seems to have been outreach to districts which did not have a resident candidate for city council (he “won” districts 7 and 9) and a lot of covotes with Henn in district 1 and Britton in district 2.
Carl Henn’s downfall seems to have been in district 2 where Marcuccio came in ahead of him. In fact, across the City it seems Henn and Marcuccio were anti-correlated. He only needed ~100 more votes to beat Marcuccio. Thus I am somewhat chagrinned at the district 1 turnout given that trash and argyle street issues loomed large. It puzzles me why Theo Anderson, also a district 1 resident should not have gotten a higher percentage of the vote. I wonder what people could have possibly been thinking? I know it rained, it was cold, Elwood Smith is hard to find, that the polls ending at 5PM pretty much exclude working parents, but still…
ER!K RE@D
Waddington Place