The Anatomy of an Election

   With three candidates and two City Council seats open, Mr. Silbiger gained 2943 votes (38.9 percent), Mr. Malsin 2758 (36.4 percent) and Mr. O’Leary 1863 (24.6 percent).

   In mid-ponder, community pundits woke up this morning with two more potential, but so far unscheduled, personnel shifts to mull over:

   • Former City Councilman Richard Marcus, out of office since ’00, dropped hints that he may essay a comeback in ’08.

   • City Treasurer Crystal Alexander indicated that there is a degree of uncertainty over whether she will compete to succeed herself in ’08, when the office becomes apppointive instead of elective.

 

 

 How Will the Winners React?

 

 

   Meanwhile, the political clouds over Culver City were blowing away. The vividity and avidity of Election Day faded thirty-six hours later, and the reality of new City Hall dynamics sank in.

   How will Mr. Malsin, the compromiser, and the feisty Mr.  Silbiger fare on the dais?

   How will City Council dynamics change when Mr. Silbiger takes his turn at the top and is elected to the not entirely symbolic Mayor’s chair on Monday, April 25?

   Mr. Silbiger and his wife/campaign manager, the smart Barbara Honig, talked glowingly about how aggressively they pursued new supporters. This was a full-service recruitment. They wanted residents who would not just vote for the candidate but commit to his broadly based Progressive agenda.

   The most meaningful indications are that they succeeded.

   Capitalizing on the widespread community recognition that fuels the campaign of every incumbent as a bonus, Mr. Silbiger and his team, smelling a tight race, ran hard, as if the candidate had started in third place instead of first place. 

 

  

 

   As with the Vice Mayor, Mr. Malsin’s first campaign concentrated entirely on the candidate, ignoring all outside  factors.

   The laser-focused staffs of both winning candidates tweaked their messages and tailored their presentations to exactly suit their contrary styles and causes.

   After the counting was finished on Tuesday night, School Board member Jessica Beagles-Roos, who just emerged from her own campaign last autumn, remarked that the race had been run very cleanly.

   Another description, arguably, would be conservatively, as in cautiously.

   By ignoring what their rivals  were doing and saying, Mr. Silbiger and Mr. Malsin, illustratively, ignored the only episode of the campaign that came within a mile of being controversial.

 

   Late last month at Culver City High School, their mutual rival Mr. O’Leary went out of his way at a Candidates Forum for students to point out he once had been an illegal alien, for about three years in the early 1990s.

      Illegal immigration was the sizzling topic du jour.

The day before the forum,  about a hundred and fifty Culver High students had participated in an immigration reform protest at City Hall.

   Dropping a white-hot coal of  a subject into the laps of his rivals, Mr. O’Leary further acknowledged the use of a Social Security card during that period that was not legally his.

   Mr. Silbiger and Mr. Malsin sat through the entire story of Mr. O’Leary’s two-step migration from Ireland. They chose not comment. 

   Then or later.

 

   Since rhetoric typically rises to overheated temperatures during small and large political campaigns, this was a fairly amazing development.

   On Election Night, while Mr. O’Leary freely admitted that he should have developed a busier resume and a stronger community profile before running for office, he refused to back down from his statements at Culver High.

   No need to apologize for displaying good character, he said.

   “People expect a candidate to be honest,” he said. “I am not going to hide what I did.”

 

      As political surgeons reported to the Operating Room for post-election analysis, Culver City residents were asked to consider the following proportions:

   Voters marked the name of Mr. Silbiger, leading all the way, on two-thirds of ballots, elevating his victory to the level of very impressive.

   He established his primacy in the absentee ballots, where liberals seldom do well, and from there he gained only unimpeded speed.

`  Mr. Silbiger won or did well in a whopping ten of thirteen precincts, which advances him to the overwhelming category. In the past, slices of that size have been identified with the now retired Mayor Albert Vera.

   There were similarities and contrasts between the first- and second-place finishers.

   Mr. Malsin, a longtime activist deemed to have much narrower name recognition than the Vice Mayor, relied on an appealingly transparent platform, and his patrented arms-over-the-back fence personality. It worked. He attracted support from all over town, not just his Westside neighborhood.

   He, too, was named on more than sixty percent of ballots, a powerful debut in electoral politics.

   At a closer glance, Mr. Malsin won or did well in five of thirteen precincts, half the number of Mr. Silbiger.

   Embedded within  those numbers was Mr. Malsin’s sweetest triumph:

He won Sunkist Park, the home territory of Mr. Vera.

That is a decision the Malsin camp will savor for awhile. At least until he is formally installed at the Council meeting of Monday, April 24.

 

 

  

   The candidate attributed the victory to his message.

   Mr. Malsin not only was prudently succinct but exactly right when he asserted that his coherent, unclouded message of enthusiastic, listener-friendly, non-partisan representation would be flavored with a strong sense of compromise.

On the other hand, in a juxtaposed world, preaching harmony could be considered fighting words for a pugnacious City Council.

   The analytical picture changes dramatically when it comes to Mr. O’Leary’s turn.

   To put the raw count into context, his 1863 votes left him nearly 1100 behind the leading votegetter and nine hundred behind Mr. Malsin.

   He did not finish first or  second in any of the thirteen precincts.

   Mr. O’Leary’s strongest showings were in Sunkist Park, the home of Mr. Vera who awarded the Irishman his only endorsement, and East Culver City, home of the candidate.

 

 

   Apathy reared its prune-shaped, pale, blue-veined face as it frequently does at election time. Of Culver City’s 22,594 registered voters,78.9 percent stayed home to plan a summer vacation in sunny Iraq, watch Oprah or polish their hammers and nails. Only 21.1 percent learned the secret routes to polling places.

   It was apparent that voters were more pleased with their choices than last autumn when they were asked to fill three seats on the School Board, George Laase concluded in his extensive statistical analysis.

On Tuesday, only fifteen percent of voters declined to vote for two Council candidates. Twenty percent is considered an acceptable threshold.

   In the School Board race last November, a hefty 42.3 percent refused to choose three candidates on their ballots. 

 

 

 
The Complete Results