On Election Night, Dan Wolk did what everyone expected him to do, as the Mayor Pro Tem-elect won by an overwhelming margin, winning every single precinct in the city of Davis. The other candidates were tightly-bunched, but in the end, two longtime incumbents ended up being defeated.
We begin with an interview with Will Arnold, campaign manager for Dan Wolk.
“I was very pleased with the result as far as Dan was concerned,” Will Arnold told the Vanguard on Wednesday afternoon. “I can’t say anyone was overly surprised, that seemed to be the general prediction although I’m not sure anyone anticipated the margin of victory he would enjoy.”
“I was definitely surprised when I saw how close the rest of the candidates were on that initial return,” he added. While eventually Lucas Frerichs kind of pulled away to finish second, it would remain tight until the last ballot was counted at 1 am on Wednesday morning.
“We had a very close and well-contested election and it came down to the wire and it was a long night for everybody,” he said.
Will Arnold saw multiple slates that kind of developed over the course of the campaign.
“Based on the results, it looks as though the new generation or new blood slate won the day, as opposed to say the Chamber Slate or the Enterprise Slate or something like that,” Mr. Arnold said.
From Dan Wolk’s perspective, there were multiple camps, but one constant was that Dan Wolk was part of each of those camps, except perhaps those who chose to bullet vote.
Mr. Arnold noted that if you project that theory onto an election result, the results would look remarkably like the ultimate outcome, with Dan Wolk way ahead and the other candidates fairly close.
While many perhaps expected Dan Wolk to win and perhaps win handily, Will Arnold is among those surprised that Sue Greenwald would go down to defeat.
“I can say very confidently that I was very surprised that Sue didn’t win a seat,” Mr. Arnold said. “My prediction was that she was safe. I was very surprised at that. I had a feeling it would be close. I think the spread about what I thought it might be, but if I had been taking any bets, or anything, I would have bet with Sue as my number two with the rest falling as they did with Lucas, Brett, and Stephen.”
So the big surprise for Will Arnold and many others was really that Brett Lee leapfrogged Sue Greenwald.
The question is why, and for Will Arnold the short answer is that he really does not know.
“Obviously the thing that people are pointing toward as the watershed moment in the election would be the attack mailer that went against Sue,” he said. “So it’s natural to draw the conclusion that [the attack mailer] had an effect, and if you infer that the intended effect was to hurt Sue obviously and then also potentially to hurt Stephen by putting his name on it, and then if you look at the results, those two ended up on the wrong end of the election – then I think it would pretty much the only conclusion that naturally jumps out at you that the mailer potentially had its intended effect.”
However, Mr. Arnold argued that this was a bit of specious reasoning. He argued it was like the proverbial rock that keeps the tigers away. Just because you see the rock and there are no tigers, does not prove any sort of causal relationship.
Instead, he sees a more simple explanation – that given the years of service both Sue Greenwald and Stephen Souza have given, along the way people have come aboard and fallen off from their support.
“I would venture to guess that has more to do with the election result then just one mailer,” he said, “but the mailer is what jumps out at folks and that’s going to be the big question mark – how much of an effect did that have on the ultimate result.”
Other explanations focus on the low voter turnout and the possibility that some people simply wanted something new in the city.
“There is an anti-incumbency sentiment nationally that I’ve heard ventured that potentially could take effect in Davis and looking through that prism, it would make sense that this election would be part of that general trend,” Will Arnold speculated.
He thinks that it would be very easy to write the conclusion that there is an incumbency wave that threw the proverbial “bums” out of their elective office.
“We’ll never really know what was on folks’ minds when they were in the voting booth but that’s a fair conclusion to draw,” he said noting that in these tough economic times, there is in general a lot of anxiety and the incumbents can get painted with a broad brush.
The other critical question facing the city, now that we have essentially an entire council that has been in office for two years or less, is how that impacts the city.
“The number one feature of the council that is striking in my mind is that Joe [Krovoza] and Rochelle [Swanson] will be the senior members,” he said. “So you’ll have a council that has been, in its entirety there will be no person there who has been there for more than two years. That has consequences.”
Positive and negative consequences, in fact.
On the positive side is the ability to look at issues and policies through fresh eyes.
“You’re not beholden to decisions that were made in the past, defending them, you don’t have the baggage, so to speak, that the long time incumbents have,” he pointed out.
On the other hand, there is a loss of “institutional memory” that comes with individuals having been around to remember the decisions of the past and the context as to why they were made.
“This council will not have that type of institutional memory,” Mr. Arnold noted. “Now I think that can be mitigated if they do their due diligence to speak with folks who do have that institutional memory.”
“Whether that is a positive or negative, or how that plays out on any given issue is yet to be seen,” he added.
“I would imagine because of the newness of the council and frankly because of the personalities of all five individuals that are on the council or will be on the council now, I anticipate this will be a very collaborative group,” Will Arnold told the Vanguard.
Each of these people during the campaign, he said, “All spoke of collaboration as a forefront to their political philosophy. That’s going to be put to the test once the new council is sworn in. That’s going to be one of the things to look at, how do these folks work together because they’ve more or less put it out there as one of their selling points that they can work together.”
“We’ll see what the results of that is,” he said. “Whether it’s friendlier or even shorter meetings to choose the more tangible example. Whether it’s votes that are not as easily defined by voting lines.”
Already Will Arnold noted that with the present council, the notion of a permanent council majority where there were predictable voting blocs whereby most contested decisions were made, has fallen by the wayside.
He said, that has “completely been erased. Predicting how a vote’s going to go down on a given issue is almost impossible now or at least impossible without knowing how a given councilmember thinks on a given issue. Whereas before you could, when there was the gang of three and there were two solid members that were not part of that group, you could kind of draw conclusions as to how a vote was going to break.”
Those conclusions, he argued, are much more difficult to draw right now, though he said those could change.
Will Arnold suggested that since Dan Wolk has been on the council, votes have broken down in almost every single possible combination. We can probably expect more of that in the council to come.
“I think that’s generally a good thing for a healthy governance that you don’t know beforehand how folks, or at least you can’t presume how folks, are going to go on a given issue,” Will Arnold added.
That forces the council and the stakeholders to have to work to get to three votes – whereas previously it was almost a given.
In the end, if that means more collaboration and less predictability, we are looking at something new emerging in Davis.
—David M. Greenwald reporting
DG “In the end if that means more collaboration and less predictability, we are looking at something new emerging in Davis.”
Especially if it comes from each council person looking deeply at each issue and with and open mind rather than an agenda. I really hope to see that! That approach makes each decision potentially more difficult, but also more honest.
Many people asked me what was going to happen on election day. I had the same answer that Dan would win and that without poll data it was anyone’s guess, but then I would add I think the Ruth vote is going to make a difference. Ruth was quite popular with an older group of voters that knew her for many years. I don’t think the pipe fitters needed to remind them of the acrimony that occurred between Sue and Ruth. Where I was sickened by what happened and outspoken most were low key but no less upset. In the past some of these people might have given a second or third vote to Sue but not this time. Sue’s base was still mostly in tact and she almost was returned for a fourth term, but, in the end it was all she had left and it wasn’t enough to beat out the Dick Livingston, Ken Wagstaff backed Brett Lee who, it turned out, was a better candidate than conventional wisdom predicted.
One other thing, Sue did not have a history of going door to door. All the other candidates left campaign material at my door. Sue depended on her base and a letter to the editor campaign. It was no longer enough.
Oh and don’t underestimate the transit of Venus and its impact on the need for renewal. As my good friend and astrologer Kepler the Frog would say “it was a once in a 100 year event and it was riveting. Maybe that is why turn out was so low.
Will Arnold is building an excellent record as a political campaign manager. Anyone thinking about running here–or promoting a measure–in the future should be checking out his credentials.
Hope you also can talk with Stephen and Sue or their reps for their views. Sue made a case that this campaign’s main attribute was nastiness and PAC intrusions–before results were in–on the delightful black & white community tv coverage election night.
Questions for Souza’s campaign start with why he seemed to completely withdraw when Sue announced she no longer considered him a “victim” of the union mailer ad. Lots of questions for Greenwald’s campaign.
I wonder if a supposed city council “institutional memory” isn’t vastly over-rated. Given the openness with which the council operates, what of significance is tucked away so that it requires anything more than a little reading or discussion to uncover? And, who would one want to believe anyone or care about what supposedly might had happened in closed sessions in past years?
JustSaying
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I wonder if a supposed city council “institutional memory” isn’t vastly over-rated. Given the openness with which the council operates, what of significance is tucked away so that it requires anything more than a little reading or discussion to uncover? And, who would one want to believe anyone or care about what supposedly might had happened in closed sessions in past years?”
As a senior member of our administrative team, I have a different perspective on “institutional memory” than you have depicted. For me it is not so much about what is “hidden” as it is about what approaches have worked, and which have not. It is not unusual for a junior member of our team to come up with what seems to be a really good idea, but which it turns out was tried and failed 10-20 years ago. One could of course wade through 20 years of admin. team minutes to discover that this idea had failed. But how much more efficient for one of us to be able to say, politely, so as not to discourage initiative, “Yes, we thought so too, but it didn’t work because….” we have saved much time, frustration, and money needlessly spinning our wheels on good, but impractical ideas just by having someone present with “institutional memory”.