Bennett: Election showed city’s division

The dust from the November electoral action has settled, the new city council has been sworn in with only one new face, and now, perhaps, it is time to try to assess what happened, and why.

For those of you who were doing the Rip Van Winkle thing, David Glass won the mayor’s race after a multi-week counting of absentee votes, and political newcomer Dave King was a runaway top vote getter in the council race.

In the process, the voting revealed what many poll-watchers have known, or at least suspected, for some time – politically, this is a sharply divided city. Residents to the west of the freeway see issues one way, while to the east, the view is sometimes diametrically opposite.

First, a note about interpreting the poll results. Whereas in days gone past it was a slow slog to view and analyze poll results, now it is even slower and trickier. Mail-in ballots have changed everything. Where there was formerly about 30 or so precincts with clear geographic boundaries, now there are precincts with A, B and C sections, or even hiding under different numbers, so it is not really clear whether or not some votes are from east or west of the freeway.

On top of that, separate results are given for those who voted at the polls, and those who voted by mail. Having said that, the trends are still clear enough to back the information that follows.

In the mayor’s race, Glass took almost all the west side precincts, while Mike Harris took almost all on the east side. Since about 60 percent of the vote is on the east side, that would normally spell victory for Harris. However, the turnout west of the freeway was a few percentage points higher than on the east, and for the most part, Glass’ margins of victory in the west were higher than Harris’ margins across town.

For example, in precinct 2504 on the west side, which runs from West Street south to I Street, and from the river west to Howard and Seventh, Glass got almost twice as many votes as Harris, beating him by a margin of 353 votes, while winning the election by 84 votes.

A couple of months back, I wrote about the “progressives” west side strength, citing what was pretty much the same geographical area noted above. The factor that has changed is that the Cherry Valley area, which was once a source of moderate and conservative votes, this year voted with the progressives.

The pattern was not as clear in the city council race. While “progressive” Teresa Barrett ran at the head of the pack from the north all the way to I Street, King was top vote getter in three west-side precincts at the south end of town, including Westridge and the Mountainview area.

The other “progressive” on the ballot, Janice Cader-Thompson, had a good showing in three or four of the west side precincts, but fell far behind in the rest of the city, and placed a distant last.

Meanwhile, east of the freeway, it was all Dave King, running far ahead of the field in precinct after precinct. The surprise here was the solid showing by Ken Quinto, an east-side resident and heretofore political unknown who campaigned on support for a cross-town connector at Rainier Avenue. Although he did not show well on west side voting, in one east side precinct or another he made a strong showing, and election day at the polls, he edged incumbent Chris Albertson by 30 votes, but Albertson beat Quinto in the mail-in voting by 517 votes to win reelection.

Ultimately, the “progressives” retained their two seats on the council, so it might have been a shallow victory. They remain on the short end of a 5-2 split, and it will be interesting to see if they continue, as they have in the past, to show a dogged unwillingness to modify any key aspects of their agenda, content instead to sit back and exploit the excesses of zeal shown by the other five council members, such as their decision for a go-for-broke tax increase on the ballot.

(Don Bennett, business writer and consultant, has been involved with city planning issues since the 1970s. His email address is dcbenn@aol.com.)