After successfully, and breezingly defending their seats last evening, Mayor Jeff Cooper and City Councilman Jim Clarke characteristically were gracious winners.
Mr. Cooper retained his Council chair with a 95-vote margin over Mr. Clarke, who will begin serving his first full four-year term. If the vote had been reversed and Mr. Clarke were in the majority, it would not have been surprising.
Although third-place Christopher Patrick King scored a sizable dent on Election Day, he was almost 1,000 votes behind the winner, sizable in a small turnout.
The controversy-free campaigns nearly lulled voters to sleep.
Like his City Council colleague, the mayor, Mr. Clarke, a veteran who knows the parameters of a winning campaign, was not going to err by presuming he had the breadth of support even strangers told him was his.
“People kept saying ‘You are a shoo-in,’” the always aimiable Mr. Clarke said. “Okay, but people have to come out and vote. It will be interesting to see what the turnout is. Two years ago, turnout was 19.6 percent. That is really a sad indictment of what goes on here in Culver City because all politics is local.
“I would hope that people would take more of an interest in voting even if the result is supposed to be a ‘foregone conclusion.’”
Even though Mr. Clarke and Mr. Cooper did not need to create a sweat, Mr. Clarke said that “there is always drama.
“Okay, I could breathe a sigh of relief when I see the absentee vote totals. But it could have been something different.”
Why does Mr. Clarke believe he won?
“In part because I am an incumbent, and Jeff is an incumbent. People are pretty content with the way things are going in Culver City. They like the direction. They like living here. People have individual problems, and I heard a lot about them. That is great because now I have a laundry list of things I can work on.”
No Chance of Overconfidence
“I didn’t take anything for granted,” Mr. Cooper said at the victory party at his Studio Estates home.
He learned a valued lesson in watching School Board races. “We have gone through two elections that were very, very close. Two people who had assumed they would be re-elected (Scott Zeidman and Karlo Silbiger) were not elected.
“I took nothing for granted. I did not ease off in any way.”
Mr. Cooper dwarfed his rivals by raising a hefty $40,000 for his campaign. “A lot of gelt,” he said with a smile, adding this revelatory observation: “It was a lot easier to get that than the $25,000 I raised last time.
“It was just that people were coming at me, helping me out, really believing me. It was amazing,” the mayor said, seeming to be as startled as others were by his campaign treasury.
