Salt Lake City Mayor
The Mayor’s race was stale by the time November rolled around given that all the fireworks happened in September.  That isn’t to say that Ralph Becker’s victory was anything less than a great change for Salt Lake City!  However, in an overwhelmingly Democratic city, Mr. Buhler didn’t stand much of a chance.  (I am a bit surprised that Dave gave up his seat on the City Council to run an obviously uphill race.) 

No, the real race was between Ralph and Jenny Wilson.  Conventional money, and mine!, was on Jenny to win it.

But something happened along the way that took the front runner down to a third place finish after the primary votes were counted, propelling Ralph and Dave into the general election.  Most folks would tell you that Ralph came from behind to win the race sometime late in the primary, but I think that the polls tell a different story.  Jenny started the race with around 23% of the vote, with the rest of the vote largely undecided amongst the other 3 major candidates, Ralph, Dave, and Keith Christensen.  Jenny was the natural front runner from the beginning because she had major name recognition and a compelling story to tell.  But the truth is that she never really moved from the 23% she had at the beginning of the race and was not able to parlay her early support into anything more than a base.

Now, I work with Jenny at the County, and she is an excellent public servant—considered, thoughtful, intelligent, and unafraid to ask hard questions.  She would, no doubt, have been an excellent mayor.  Ralph and Dave ran good campaigns that seemed to each carry a theme that had something for voters to sink their teeth into when they went into the booth to vote.  They set themselves apart as “the Blueprint Man” and “It’s Dave! (goofy as he may be)” and communicated something of a personal message to the electorate.

Perhaps even more importantly, Ralph and Dave both had substantial bases of voters that were densely clustered in tight geographic regions that were easy to walk and work for votes.  Ralph’s natural base in the Avenues not only got worked, but got worked over, and over, and his campaign probably mined every last Democratic vote out of that area!  (someone should get a copy of that voter file!)  He also worked the west side and focused a solid GOTV campaign in that area.  On the other hand, Dave worked the voters in his moderate eastside, Salt Lake Country-club neighborhood, which he once represented as Senator before losing his seat to Karen Hale in 1998.  The Primary vote statistics indicated that Dave had won handily, but maxed out his turnout in the Country Club area, while Becker still had room to gain if he could turn up the relatively low turnout in the avenues and Westside.

What the data suggests, then, is that the moderate Republican base of Salt Lake City, even with a high voter turnout, isn’t enough to beat a Democrat with a modest GOTV plan when head-to-head.  Republicans in Salt Lake City now understand what it is like for Democrats to campaign almost anywhere else in Utah—you can’t wage an “air war” with flyers, billboards, and ads to pick up independents and moderate voters.  They have to see you, look you in the eye and get the sense that you are worth overriding the default button to vote for a Democrat (or Republican in Salt Lake City).

The bread and butter of Utah Democratic campaigns is the door-to-door “ground war,” which is precisely the kind of campaign Ralph ran—classic and well executed, with a bit of sass added with the Blueprint Man.  Jenny’s campaign for her County Council seat was run in this tradition with Jeff Mathis at the helm, putting up lawnsigns at the wee hours of the morning in a 13 point come-from-behind victory over then Council Chair Steve Harmsen in her first election.  I think Jenny’s team tried the Jim Matheson, the Later Years, campaign approach that is focused more on maintain than gain.  In the end, Jenny maintained the 23-24% she started the race wit.  Jenny’s team had the difficult task of collecting votes spread over the entire city district, and no natural geographic base she could concentrate her resources on.  While she raised a whole ton of money, she wasn’t able to get the same bang for her buck Ralph and Dave were in focusing on specific areas and precincts to mine for votes.  As an aside, Keith faced much of the same problem, but with obvious other larger problems. 

So to those who would say that the 2007 Salt Lake City Mayoral race seemed like a hum-drum election this year, I would respond, “there is gold in them thar hills,” go mine the data for 2008 and see if we learned anything beyond Bob Bernick’s incredibly insightful newspaper selling statement, “Salt Lake City is a tough place for a Republican to win an election.”  Duh.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 20th, 2007 at 9:57 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.