Democrats’ win is all about the numbers
It’s all George Soros’ fault, or so one of my most faithful conservative correspondents tells me.
Or “Socialism has won” as some others said.
Or voter fraud is to blame because we don’t have a photo ID law, as a couple of voters emphatically told me Tuesday when I was working as a minority inspector at a polling place in Brookhaven.
It was none of those things, it was sheer numbers and, for once, it was some decent Democratic voter participation in a local election.
Democrats tend to vote in presidential elections and stay home for state and municipal ones, while Republicans are much more disciplined to vote every time.
This time you can thank the president of the United States for firing up Democrats to come out, sweeping the Delaware County Council, D.A. and judge offices for the first time in history.
But it wasn’t just that. The numbers are key and the county has been trending Democratic over the last few years. The current voter registration breakdown in Delaware County is 189,879 Democrats to 156,871 Republicans and 52,026 unaffiliated or “other.”
Tuesday, roughly 160,000 of those 389,776 registered voters cast ballots, a figure I arrive at by adding together the votes of the top vote getters on the Democratic and Republican tickets for County Council (88,164 and 71,375, respectively), on the assumption that every voter voted for council and none (or relatively few) voted for both candidates.
Congratulations Monica Taylor, 88,000 Delaware Countians voted for you! You won by more than 15,000 votes. That’s pretty spectacular.
Two years ago, Democratic candidates Kevin Madden and Brian Zidek barely broke the Republican stranglehold on county council, winning by a mere 2,000 to
3,000 votes each.
This year, 41 percent of the registered voters participated, an unheard-of number for a municipal election in Delaware County – and because they did, a county that has been Republican-dominated or all Republican for decades is very suddenly not. A couple of things:
Not only is county council going to be all Democrat come Jan.
2, it is going to be majority female as Taylor, Elaine Schaeffer and Christine Reuther will join Madden and Zidek on the five-member council.
Taylor, the high vote-getter, is black, another cause for celebration in a county that is roughly
75-80 percent white. And two out of three row offices – comptroller and recorder of wills - are already occupied by Democratic women. (The third, the county sheriff, is held by a black man, Democrat Jerry Sanders.)
As outgoing Republican Councilwoman Colleen P. Morrone showed us during her tenure, women tend to have a different style of leadership, more conciliatory, less cut-throat and more willing to listen to and even vote with the other side. (Not that there will be another side for at least a couple of years.)
In other big news – we have elected four Democratic judges in Delaware County, for the first time since Pennsylvania adopted the elected judge system in the
1830s.
We’ve had a couple of appointed Democratic judges before, but none of them survived election, so it is truly historic that Nusrat Rashid, Stephanie Klein, Kelly Eckel and Rick Lowe won election to judgeships.
While Rashid is the first black female judge and Muslim judge ever elected, we have had at least two black judges before, Robert Wright Sr. and Jr., who also made history by being the first father-son duo ever elected to the Delaware County Court of Common Pleas.
In another historic first, Jack Stollsteimer became the first Democrat ever to be elected district attorney.
What does that matter in positions that are supposed to be nonpartisan? It matters because up until now, the Republican machine has parceled out judgeships, the D.A.’s office and the row offices (and the boards of any number of quasi-public agencies) as sure thing rewards for those at the top of the party hierarchy.
As a result, we have had some great judges and some terrible judges, but they’ve all been Republicans – parochial, insular and as loyal to party doctrine as to the law, for all their “nonpartisanship.”
I was personally sorry to see Kat Copeland lose the D.A.’s office because she was not a party hack but a very experienced and able district attorney. She can be proud that she was the highest vote getter among the Republican candidates for all offices.
As for George Soros, maybe his money paid for the canned, generic, scurrilous and thoroughly unconvincing TV ad the Democrats ran against Copeland. The Republicans had enough money from somewhere to run a pretty sorry and unconvincing ad against Stollsteimer, too.
What I remember most about Copeland is that she was the only Republican official to sit on the panel assembled by Democratic state Sen. Tim Kearney for a town hall to talk about gun safety earlier this year.
Maybe if the Republicans had done more of that sort of thing and less worrying about their NRA ratings, they would have fared better.
Despite their total control of county government since God was a kid, the Republicans seemed to have little to run on other than fearmongering and their perennial promise not to raise county taxes (which they have done from time to time) and their unspoken promise to keep the party patronage flowing.
Today there are many department heads and political appointees looking for new jobs ahead of the expected Democratic housecleaning.
I expect a lot out of the new Democratic county leadership – an end to lucrative no-bid insurance, engineering and legal contracts; better oversight of the privately run prison we are stuck with for the next five years; a county animal shelter, and a county health department.
We also need a prompt rebuilding of the demolished jurors’ parking garage and the Toal Building, and a real county economic development program.
Anyway, it’s a new day in Delaware County and I hope a better day. A lot of us never thought we’d see it in our lifetime.