By Antonio D. French
Filed Thursday, April 6 at 7:15 PM
See the ward-by-ward breakdown of Tuesday's school board election at pubdefweekly.com/breakdown
Some highlights include:
Donna Jones was a much stronger candidate than most political observers recognized (us included);
Jones got the most votes in 7 of 10 northside wards;
The 4th and 5th Wards were the only northside wards won by Darnetta Clinkscale and James Buford;
Buford and Peter Downs got the same number of votes in the 9th Ward;
Downs and Jones won every southside ward but one;
Downs got the most votes in all but two southside wards (tied in the 9th, Jones won in the 20th);
Buford and Clinkscale won the 4 central wards;
The candidate who had the most votes in the 20th Ward (Donna Jones) won with only 126 votes;
And of course what everyone is talking about: Downs and Jones easily won the 23rd Ward, the political base of Mayor Francis Slay.
UPDATE: Some other outlets are incorrectly reporting that Clinkscale and Buford won the 3rd Ward. They are also reporting that the incumbents won the 9th Ward, which is hard to say since Buford and Down tied with 252 votes each.
UPDATE 2: KWMU has corrected its page.
2 Comments:
The 20th Ward had the smallest turnout, but not that small. I count 542 school board votes in that ward, with Jones getting 126 all by herself.
Downs and Jones got 49.4%, while Clinkscale and Buford got 41.6%, an overall margin of just under 8 percentage points. (I think these percentages are more meaningful, because voters got 2 votes. The individual percentages are artificially low.)
To me, the ward analysis shows that sources of the incumbent’s strength were not centered on Mayor Slay, but on former Mayor and former board member Vince Schoemehl. The incumbents’ strongest ward was Schoemehl’s 28th, where they won by 23 points. Next best were Brian Wahby’s 7th Ward, where they won by 16 points, and Mike McMillan’s 19th (home to Vince’s Grand Center), where they won by 15 points. The only other ward where the incumbents won by a double-digit margin was Joe Roddy’s 17th, a 10-point win.
The Downs-Jones strength (or the Slay-Schoemehl weakness) was more widespread, as the challengers won 15 wards by double-digit margins. The biggest margin was in the 1st ward, home to former Slay challenger Irene Smith and late-to-the-party Yaphett El-Amin, where Downs and Jones won by 25 points. Their other top wards formed no particular pattern: Terry Kennedy’s 18th (just under 25 point spread), the 15th south of Tower Grove Park (24 points) and Jim Murphy and Republican Fred Heitert’s 12th (21 points). The 1st and 18th may be related to anti-Slay feeling and resentment over the Civilian Review Board veto, but the 15th and 12th have been strong for the mayor.
The city's traditional racial voting was reduced but not eliminated: Both slates drew fairly representative proportions of black and white votes. However, white Downs outdrew African American running mate Jones in every white or integrated ward (the 17th was a tie), while Jones outdrew Downs in every black majority ward except the 22nd.
10:15 PM, April 07, 2006
Right you are about the 20th Ward, Oracle. What I meant to say (and have corrected the post to reflect) was that the candidate that won that ward did so with only 126 votes.
As for all of your other observations, I agree with most of those as well. I would like to point out one political truth that held up in Tuesday's election:
In a St. Louis election with a bunch of black candidates and one white candidate, the white guy will probably get the most votes.
6:18 PM, April 09, 2006
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