Monthly Archives: November 2006

Every election season, once the ballots are counted, we the readers of the news, are treated to “election analysis.” Read any major paper, alt-weekly, or “the Internets” and you have all sorts of Big Experts talking about What It All Means.
What strikes me, having worked on campaigns for years, is just how little one finds out about what actually happened during the election season that gave us the results – instead these “analyses” function more like a political Rorschach Test, telling us more about the prognosticator than about what really happened or more importantly, how.
Let’s take a look at local election post-mortems. Most people locally tend to use pollster David Binder’s premiere post-election analysis as a starting point, which is primarily concerned with statistical information about turnout, who voted, polling info and the like – in other words, facts that are agreed upon to be verifiable with some interpretation by the knowledgeable Mr. Binder to translate these raw numbers into conversational English.
Fog City Journal ran a short analysis (which I was asked to write literally minutes before I walked in the door at SPUR, hence its lack of polish) , BeyondChron, and even the “blog” at the Bay Guardian used some form of Mr. Binder’s work to base conclusions and the like.
This is also where things get interesting. In the print edition of the Guardian, the results are trumpeted loudly as a rebirth of the local “progressive” movement, and at times one gets the impression that the authors are almost breathless in restating over and over “Things are OK. Don’t worry. We’re doing fine, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.”
Which is fine, I suppose for people who want to hear that. But what I missed in the article most was the “why” and “how” – how did Chris Daly managed to win after a bruising campaign? Why did candidates like Supervisors Dufty and Alioto-Pier crush their opposition, if they had any at all?

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