Divining the message of an election is as easy as, say, discerning the meaning of a Jackson Pollock painting.
Just as he unleashed a bit of artistic chaos with each of his drip paintings, voters inject a dash of political chaos into the workings of government with each of their mail ballots.
Take Snohomish County, where a majority of voters backed Tim Eyman’s Initiative 960, which will make it a heck of a lot harder for state legislators to raise taxes and hike fees.
Yet a few boxes down the ballot, a majority formed behind House Joint Resolution 4202 to make it a lot easier for school districts to pass levies that pay for operating and maintaining the public education system.
What’s the interpretation?
Maybe county voters felt more confident they can keep leaders of their neighborhood school districts in line than they can those running state government.
Statewide, the simple majority measure is headed for defeat. Combine that result with passage of Eyman’s initiative and the creation of a rainy day fund and the prevailing punditry is that the folks who make up this year’s electorate gripped their pocketbooks tightly.
No doubt uncertainty about the economy pervaded their thinking and guided their pens in marking their ballots.
There also was an important ingredient missing that might have changed the overall message: True Blue Democrats.
These are the Jim McDermott-Ted Kennedy Democrats, the ones wanting to impeach the president and get troops out of Iraq today, the Democrats who were the force of the Blue Wave of 2006 that put the party in control of Congress and solidified its lock on power in Olympia.
Had these rock-ribbed Democrats shown up in larger numbers Tuesday, the simple majority measure would be law. Democratic Party leaders would be patting themselves on the back and the teachers union flexing its muscles.
But a $3.2 million campaign and 353,024 phone calls couldn’t turn out enough of those True Blue believers to pull off what should have been one of the party’s big victories.
In Snohomish County, the absence of these Democrats kept John Lovick from celebrating Tuesday night rather than this weekend.
Lovick is a Democrat, one of the party’s most liberal now serving in the state Legislature. He got loads of help from the Democratic Party in his bid for the nonpartisan seat.
And one of the strongest and most progressive statewide labor groups, the Service Employees International Union, also aided him. It produced and sent out mailers attacking the credentials of his opponent, Tom Greene.
All that political juice didn’t prevent the tight race that followed.
In fact, Greene’s performance against the machinery of the Democratic Party is a message in itself — maybe Republicans can regain a bit of political potency in Snohomish County next year.
And wouldn’t that be chaotic.
Reporter Jerry Cornfield’s column on politics runs every Sunday; 360-352-8623 or jcornfield@heraldnet.com.
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