NYC Election Night Recap

<p>AS some of you may know I have been doing a fair amount of work (volunteer) for Rosie Mendez, after having provided some data services and a civicspace website at the beginning of the year.</p> <p>Well, Rosie, the grass roots, progressive candidate in a crowded 7 candidate field won a decisive victory with 36% of the vote, double her closest challenger. The NYT endorsed candidate came in 3rd!</p> <p>Rosie ran an all volunteer GOTV operation, we hit a small supporter list of 400 6 times in the last 3 weeks, we had an open rate on those emails ranging from 20 to 25%, the volunteer coordinator acknowledged the email campaign as an effective means of turning out vols.</p> <p>The unofficial tallies can be seen here <a href="http://ny1.com/ny/Election/2005primary/index.html?page_name=manhattan" title="http://ny1.com/ny/Election/2005primary/index.html?page_name=manhattan">http://ny1.com/ny/Election/2005primary/index.html?page_name=manhattan</a></p> <p>the scariest part of it is that the election basically cost $25 a vote for Mendez, her nearest opponent spent something like $50 a vote. This is with 4:1 public matching funds. Most of the expenses of a campaign are related to mailings.</p> <p>Andrew Rasiej techno-wonderkind got thoroughly trounced garnering a mere 5.9% of the vote coming in 4th behind a guy i never heard of. the Incumbent managed to pull 48% of the vote, beating my favorite, Norman Siegel, by 18%. Oddly, the candidate's own prohibition against street postering probably did him in more than any other single campaign decision. <a href="http://ny1.com/ny/Election/2005primary/index.html?page_name=citywide" title="http://ny1.com/ny/Election/2005primary/index.html?page_name=citywide">http://ny1.com/ny/Election/2005primary/index.html?page_name=citywide</a></p> <p>Freddy Ferrer, 3 time candidate for Mayor and 3 time Bronx Borough president does not appear to have managed to win the necessary 40% +1 vote to avoid a runoff with Anthony Weiner (my favorite). I actually called the primary day scenario for mayor, with Ferrer not pulling out the 40%+1 and weeiner surging inthe final weeks while Giff Miller and Virginia fields tanked in the last 2 weeks. Miller (the council speaker) almost didn't make it into double digits.</p> <p>And interesting aside: In the last 2 weeks i was trwice solicited by representatives from the Ferrer campaign to do some work on their voterfile and voter contact systems. Tonight I can say that if I had helped them they very well might have made it to the 40% +1 vote necessary to avoid a run off. as it stands, Ferrer closes the night with 39.95% of the vote to Anthony Weiner;s 28.82%. The will likely face off in a runoff. 1% is somethign like 4562 votes, so .05% is 228 votes, plus 1, heck lets round it to 230 votes could make the difference between a runoff and not. Now there is a chance that after affidavit and absentee ballots are counted Ferrer will have dodged the bullet, but all thing ebing equal, these ballots usually break evenly between the candidates.</p> <p>The total turnout was 456k, a mere 17% of registered democrats. and somethign like 200k fewer voters than in the 2001 primary. I predicted a drop off, but not by that much, i figured somewhere around 550k voters. </p> <p>17% turnout is absolutely pathetic. Bloomberg, the incumbent plutocrat mayor ran ads, mailings and a series of rallies and volunteer parties even though he had no primary. Including an election night primary that looked from all appearances on the local cable new channel NY1 (Which ran an uninterrupted 15 minutes of bloomberg speeches while the dem primary results were coming in) to be like a victory party. He seriously distracted from the election, but Katrina is probably as much to blame.</p> <p>I will be able to pull expenditure numbers soon and we will likely be able to come up wit some cost benefits and ROI numbers on this primary campaign that could help make the case for investing money in grassroots technologies rather than old school mail/phone/media advertising.</p>