I’d heard from a couple woeful Greg Nickels supporters this week who hadn’t bothered to vote in Tuesday’s primary election, figuring the incumbent mayor was a shoe-in for the general… but you know, one always hears stories like this, so I hadn’t given it much thought. But yesterday I heard from a Nickels volunteer who told me a story that gave me pause.
The volunteer (anonymous to you, but well known to me) had been working the phone banks over the last couple days of the campaign, encouraging likely Nickels supporters to mail in their ballots, and he talked to “at least a dozen” voters who said they planned to vote for Nickels in November but were intending to game the primary by voting for who they perceived to be the weakest opponent (usually, but not always, Mike McGinn). The assumption was that Nickels was a shoe-in to make it through to the general, and so they could afford to divert their vote to game the system.
Oops.
Of course, this anecdote is merely, um, anecdotal, so unless I hear from other phone bank volunteers who report similar conversations with voters, I’ll have to leave it at that. But it does make me wonder how complacent Nickels supporters might have been, and if the broader public had understood that the mayor might really come in third to Mallahan and McGinn, whether he really would have come in third at all?
Speculation, sure. But that’s a lot of what I do.
wow, that’s pretty brazen spinning.
the theory doesn’t hunt — everyone knew he was in deep danger….he had poll numbers in the low twenties — anyone sohpicticated enough to be phone banking or playing the odds would know that’s a sign of fatal weakness.
And think about it. If an incumbent is faced with two challengers EITHER ONE OF WHICH IS IN RANGE TO MAKE THE GENERAL ELECTION to the point that one might othink one could “choose the challenger” by shifting a few votes — then that means the incumbent is very weak to begin with. Because he’s got two, not just one, challenger in range.
You’re overthinking this one, Goldy. I agree with voter above.
Anytime an incumbent is down to only 25% support, that is pretty pathetic. The more appropriate explanation is that 3/4 of the voters in Seattle wanted a new mayor.
I hope Joe Mallahan at least bothered to vote for himself in the primary! In the last nine years (2000 to 2008), Mallahan only voted in the primary elections in 2000 and 2006. Mallahan skipped out entirely for the Seattle municipal elections in 2003 and 2007, not even voting in the general election. The only Seattle municipal election votes cast by Mallahan, out of eight possible elections (primary and general) from 2001 to 2007 were voting in the general elections in 2005 and 2009.
Mike McGinn, by contrast, has voted in every single primary and general election from 2000 to 2008, with the sole exception of missing the primary election in 2007.
So Mallahan voted in 9 of these 18 elections, while McGinn voted in 17 of these 18 elections.
Sounds like Nickels had some real chuckle-heads working for him. Any three-way primary in an off-election year can be decided thin margins.
Also being reported in a few other places:
http://blog.seattlepi.com/seat.....177088.asp
http://noisetank.com/hugeassci.....n-nickels/
On the other hand, if Nickles had any more than about 30% approval and popularity, he wouldn’t have been in this position to begin with. He did wind up with about 75% of the people voting against him.
To be clear, it wasn’t Nickels volunteers or staffers who were attempting to game the system, but the voters they were contacting.
Oh Noes! It’s the Putney Swope effect!
–ml
Democrats trying to game the system??? say it aint so!
http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-sho1.htm
[Q] From Holly Young: I love your site and have found it most helpful in many instances. I was wondering if you could possibly find out the origin of the term shoe in, meaning someone will win for sure.
[A] This one is spelled wrongly so often that it’s likely it will eventually end up that way. The correct form is shoo-in, usually with a hyphen. It has been known in that spelling and with the meaning of a certain winner from the 1930s. It came from horse racing, where a shoo-in was the winner of a rigged race.
In turn that seems to have come from the verb shoo, meaning to drive a person or an animal in a given direction by making noises or gestures, which in turn comes from the noise people often make when they do it.
The shift to the horse racing sense seems to have occurred sometime in the early 1900s. C E Smith made it clear how it came about in his Racing Maxims and Methods of Pittsburgh Phil in 1908: “There were many times presumably that ‘Tod’ would win through such manipulations, being ‘shooed in’, as it were”.
How could such a thing happen??!!
To be clear, it was Nickels volunteers or staffers who were attempting to game the system by telling Goldy about some unprovable phenomenon to “explains away” a bad outcome for Nickels, including the ludicrous notion that random voters called up by campaign phone bankers would start revealing their double reverse psychology super strategic voting patterns.
In reality, dude, the folks answering the phones barely will talk to you!
You got spun.
I was also a Nickel’s volunteer and for sure – I had at least two people tell me the same thing when I was ballot chasing. People are very talkative if you are nice.
Here is my big chance to correct the fabulous Goldy. It’s ‘shoo-in’ not ‘shoe in.’
Sweet!
Even if such strategic voting was going on it is Nickels and his campaign’s fault that things were close enough for it to cost him the election.
And an incumbent should never be in danger of going below 50% in a primary.
Am sure Big G can find something useful for himself to do (and a nice pink tent) at Nickelsville.
yes, & Obama owes his nomination to all those wingnuts who followed Limbaugh & went into the Dem primaries to vote for the weakest Dem gen’l election opponent. ;-)
SHEESH
The whole universe does not revolve around the infinitesimal low % of people (i.e., your usual drinking buddies) who are so sophisticated they can vote for something they don’t want, and actually get it.
to #4 — and so the uber-environmentalist dirty tricks begin a-non…
who really WAS behind those anti-Mallahan robo-calls, anyways — was it Nickels or the McGinn “don’t fuck this up” cult?