Feb 24, 2015 toledo politics thoughts

"Now, more than ever, people are interested in a mayor who has the best interest of the city at heart."

Maybe a tiny percentage of people are interested. The relevance of the Toledo mayoral race is grossly overrated. At least for normal people.

Most people don't give a damn. You might have 10 to 20 percent of Toledoans who are interested in a mayor's race.

The Toledo voter turnout for the September 2013 primary was only around 15 percent. Nothing important with that primary. It just whittled down the field of mayoral and city council at-large candidates.

With the amount of political money raised ahead of that September 2013 primary, the mayor's race felt important, but clearly it wasn't.

Sep 10, 2013 Blade story.

• Lopez raised $103,393
• Bell raised $91,010
• McNamara raised $90,296
• Collins raised only $10,267, but he finished second.

And the unofficial September 2013 mayoral primary vote counts:

(I) Michael P. Bell	6340	27%
(I) D. Michael Collins	5806	24%
(D) Anita Lopez	5443	23%
(D) Joe McNamara	5328	22%
(I) Alan Cox	378	1%
(L) Michael R. Konwinski	283	1%
(R) Opal Covey	142	1%
Write-in	28	1%

That was a lot of money raised by Lopez and McNamara for a little over 5000 votes each. What a waste.

The November 2013 Toledo voter turnout was only 25.4 percent. That election just chose the mayor and the six at-large council seats, so again, nothing important. Apparently.

The voter turnout for the September primaries and the November general elections for Toledo's mayoral races has declined with each election. The rate of decline in voter turnout seems greater than the rate of decline for Toledo's population.

Both losers in the 2005 and 2009 November mayoral elections had more votes than the winner in 2013.

2005:
Carty Finkbeiner	47,351	61%
Jack Ford	29,169	38%
	76,520
-
2009:
Mike Bell	35,118	52%
Keith Wilkowski	31,987	48%
	67,105
-
2013: unofficial
Mike Collins	28,002	56.5%
Mike Bell	21,536	43.5%
-	49,537

I'm guessing that at max, 45,000 votes will be cast in Toledo's mayoral election this November. The city's population is around 280,000 with around 190,000 registered voters, I think.

In my opinion, the September 2013 primary was the real indicator, regarding interest political interest in Toledo. Since not all eligible voters are registered, the "real" voter turnout was probably around 12 to 13 percent. And I'm guessing that a certain percentage of voters vote the same way all the time or vote according to someone's recommendations.

So maybe, at most 10 percent of Toledoans actually pay attention to the mayor's race and put actual though into their decision.

But that's okay.

#toledo #politics