Election Redux: A Tale of Three Races
Challengers and incumbents have a mixed Election Night
Yesterday, voters throughout Ohio participated in the Primary Election, where county-wide turnout was just over 13%. In Troy, the Primary Election featured several Republican races. One incumbent lost, another was seriously challenged, and three at-large members were re-elected to City Hall.
While most people tend to focus on the overall results, the real story of how elections are won or lost can be found in the precinct-level data. If every election is like a puzzle, it’s the precinct returns that show how the pieces fit together and what kind of picture the candidates create with their campaigns.
It’s important for voters to understand that campaigns, especially for local office, are often more mechanical than stylistic. In other words, the way precincts have voted and behaved in the past can have a huge impact on how they will vote in the future.
Ward 3: Neighbors vote for neighbors
This was exactly what happened in Troy’s Third Ward, where challenger Madison Hickman defeated incumbent Samuel Pierce. The Third Ward has some of the most varied voting patterns in the city. Precinct 3D, located in the Southwest Historic District, usually has very high voter turnout, while the other precincts, mainly on the city’s south and east sides, tend to have much lower turnout. With this information in one’s hip pocket, it becomes clearer on how to create a campaign strategy.
Hickman had a natural advantage because her home precinct is 3D, while Pierce’s is 3A. Since neighbors often vote for neighbors, Hickman needed high turnout in her home precinct and had to perform well in the rest of the ward to win.
That’s exactly what happened. According to the Board of Elections, Precinct 3D had a turnout of over 20% — the second highest in the entire city. The other Third Ward precincts had turnout between 8% and 12%. Hickman won her home precinct with a vote count of 90 to 49, or 64.7% to 35.5%, giving her a large margin of 41 votes. Pierce’s best precinct was 3B, where he won by a margin of 63.8% to 36.2%, but the raw vote total was just 37 to 21, a net gain of 16 votes. The other two precincts were close. Precinct 3C was a tie, with both candidates getting 21 votes. Hickman even won Pierce’s home precinct, 3A, by a single vote, 21 to 20. In the end, Hickman won the Third Ward with 153 votes to 127, or 54.6% to 45.4%.
Ward 6: Razor thin margins all around
The Sixth Ward race was much more difficult to predict. Both candidates, Jeff Schilling and Sherrie Foster, live in Precinct 6C, so neither had a home advantage. The Sixth Ward also has many new housing developments, so the voting patterns are not well established. The race was extremely close, with incumbent Jeff Schilling defeating challenger Sherrie Foster by just eight votes. Schilling won three of the ward’s four precincts, with his biggest victory in Precinct 6D, where he won 30 votes to 21, or 58.8% of the vote. He also won Precinct 6C by five votes and 6A by just one. Foster won 6B by five votes. It was an incredibly close contest for a ward race and that closeness was seen through all of the ward’s four precincts.
Incumbents can be hard to beat in wards and neighborhoods that are terribly homogenous. The Sixth Ward is amazingly similar. Even though there are some older neighborhoods, such as Kings Chapel, the ward is filled with newer residents and unset voting patterns. It’s hard for challengers to gain a foothold in such neighborhoods and Foster’s effort stands out. The challenger garnered at least 40% of the vote in every precinct her name was on the ballot. It was truly a job well done.
At-Large: Turnout Matters
In the at-large race, Todd Severt and Susan Westfall won comfortably. Severt earned 30.5% of the vote, and Westfall came in second with 29.1%. Severt won 13 of the city’s 21 precincts and finished second in the other eight. Westfall won eight precincts, finished second in twelve, and came in third in Precinct 3A.
Lynne Snee won another term on City Council, but her victory was far from comfortable. She received 21.4% of the vote, beating challenger Kay Friedly by 4.4%. However, the precinct numbers reveal some cause for concern. Snee never finished first or second in any precinct; in eleven precincts, she was the third-highest vote-getter, and in ten precincts, she was last. Snee’s saving grace was that she finished third in the precincts with the highest turnout, such as Precinct 2A (21% turnout), Precinct 3D (20%), and Precinct 6C (18%).
Snee’s challenger, Kay Friedly, finished second in one precinct and third in eleven of the city’s 21 precincts. She finished fourth in nine precincts, beating Snee in this metric. The problem for Friedly was that the precincts where she performed well had low turnout. Her second-place finish in her home precinct of Troy 3A was positive, but turnout there was only 12%. Her third-place finish in Precinct 4C, where she outperformed Snee, was offset by the fact that turnout was just 7%. The same story played out in Precinct 3C, where she had a solid margin over Snee, but turnout was only 8%.
The lesson from Tuesday night is clear: voters often support their neighbors, and voter turnout matters. In areas where challengers were able to increase turnout, such as the Third Ward, they were able to win. In areas with low turnout, candidates who did well, like Friedly, struggled to turn those gains into overall victory. If turnout had been more even across all precincts, it’s possible that more than one challenger would have won.
This publication will cover other county races later this week and examine those patterns for further insights. In the meantime, if you have questions about the Primary Election, you can send them to pinnaclestrategiesltd@gmail.com, and we will answer them in a future publication.
Share Your Thoughts!
Please take a moment and participate in our daily poll question and of course, our paid subscribers are more than welcome to leave their ideas and insights in the comment thread! If you have comments, this publication will be more than happy to publish your editorial, simply send us your thoughts in an email to pinnaclestrategiesltd@gmail.com and your ideas will be shared with our community!
Tell Us How You Feel About Your Community!
Our reader survey for this month is looking for responses! Feel free to share your thoughts and ideas on your hometown! You can access the survey here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/PF6SPPN
Check out our New YouTube Channel!
Our goal with the Civic Capacity YouTube Channel is to be a centralized location where residents can watch videos of local government meetings in action and also provide comments and insights.
The Troy Chamber of Commerce recently released videos of candidates for office in the May Primary Election. With the chamber’s permission, we have placed those videos on our YouTube channel!
You can check out the channel here!
Thank you to our New Media Partners!
Recently, many of our stories has been showing up on the local news website, www.mymiamicounty.com. We are grateful for the good folks for sharing our work with their audience and we would encourage our readers to check them out at their website!
Our publication would also like to recognize the good work being done at www.piquanewsnow.com. Piqua News Now is a new web-based news and information site for the Miami County area, with a specific focus on Piqua!
You Can Help Support This Work!
Our readers and subscribers have been asking for a new way to support the work being done here at Civic Capacity! Some of our readers do not like the idea of having to sign up for another subscription service. Some of our subscribers occasionally want to give more support through a one-time transaction.
Civic Capacity is partnering with “Buy Me A Coffee” to give our readers, subscribers and friends an opportunity to give one-time support to Civic Capacity. Personally, I don’t like coffee, but I will never turn down a nice iced tea. If you feel compelled to support this effort, just click the button below. In other words, this is an online tip jar.
Also, thanks for reading today’s Civic Capacity Newsletter! Please feel free to share this information with your friends and neighbors.
Also, please consider subscribing to our work. If you are a free subscriber, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. For less than $1 a week, you can get timely and conversational updates about the decisions that are impacting you and your community!