Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Spring Election Results And Thoughts

Tuesday was the big day for the spring elections, there were some winners, losers and some really big losers.

Supreme Court

In the biggest race of the day, Lady Justice was the winner, by the re-election of the lady Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson.

The loser was Randy Koschnick. Not because he had his butt handed to him in the election. I believe that he was led to believe that he would be enjoying the same bought and paid for election that Annette Ziegler and Michael Gableman had. But early on WMC and the other special interest groups bailed out on him, if they ever did support him in the first place. It seemed like they were dredging the bottom of the barrel by then, having a lot of other people say no to them earlier.

State Superintendent of Public Instruction

Education won has Tony Evers managed to gain his victory more easily than I would have predicted, given that his opponent, Rose Fernandez, was getting a lot of out-of-state special interest money thrown at her.

I think she would have had a better chance of winning except for two things. The fact that she was too willing to sidle up to the special interests was one of them. The other was that some of her ideas and positions showed just how unqualified she really was for the job.

Taxpayers also win in this race as well. Fernandez' proposals, like breaking up MPS, would have jacked up the cost immensely. I suspect that it appealed to conservatives who saw several big troughs they could have fed at instead of just one huge one.

Local Courts

This was not a bad night for Lady Justice on the local level either.

J.D. Watts beat out Gabler and his hypocritical negativity, which is always a good thing.

Ellen Bostrom beat out Christopher Lipscomb. Even though I endorsed Lipscomb the other day, I also pointed out that Bostrom would make a good judge as well. I think it would have been better if one of them had gone up against someone else, but incumbents are hard to beat.

Local School Boards

This was the most disappointing part of the evening.

Peter Blewett walked away with an easy victory, defeating the dirty playing special interests-backed candidate.

Unfortunately, the special interests won on the other two contested races for the Milwaukee School Board. David Voelther beat Donna Peck.

In a real heart breaker, my friend Michael Mathias led through most of the evening. It was so sound that even JSOnline had called him the winner:
Newcomers will take three other seats on the board, with David Voeltner defeating Donna Peck in a district covering the southwest side, Michael Mathias narrowly defeating Annie Woodward for a seat representing much of the central city and Larry Miller winning an uncontested election to represent much of the east side and some of the south side.
Unfortunately, it seemed that there was a sudden spurt at the end by his opponent and Michael lost the race by a lousy 76 votes.

At least Mike can hold his head up with pride, knowing he ran a clean, positive campaign.

Similarly, my friend Zach Wisniewski lost out in his bid for the South Milwaukee School Board. But he too ran a good clean campaign. To show the class that Zach has, just look at the post he wrote about the race.

Both of these men should be congratulated just for the simple fact they were willing to take the risk and run for office, and did so with grace and dignity.

I am proud to call each of them my friend.

On a more positive side, another friend, Janet Evans was able to claim a seat on the Franklin School Board. Congratulations go out to her, with a word of advice about not letting the negative influences in her town sway her from doing what is best for the children.

The Biggest Losers

The biggest losers of the evening were not the candidates that lost their races. It was not the special interests. The biggest losers and biggest disappointments were the local media.

JSOnline did not have any results for a couple of hours after the polls had closed. But as observed by Phel and by RP, that did not slow them down from marking off the winners. On top of that, they had two separate poll results for Michael's race with the names interposed, and as mentioned above, they even named Michael the winner in the race in one of their Newswatch blurbs.

Fox 6's website was no better. They showed Michael losing in the numbers, but still checked him off as the winner.

TMJ4, boasting of their first HD news casts, couldn't be bothered with having a scroll of the results. To add insult to injury, I don't think they even covered the races in their first ten minutes of air time.

If the local news sources can't even get the information correct, where do we go from here?

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