Friday, November 21, 2014

Measure "S" puts Marks Consulting in the win column again! Bergel? I was told last week of this result.

Eureka School Bond Measure "S" wins! I was part of a large committee that had over 100 volunteers in one capacity or another. Orchestrating this mass of people was Gregg Gardiner and my hats off to him for his tenacity and hard work. I did data base management and it was huge. Around a 1/3 of all voters in Humboldt County live in the Eureka City Schools jurisdiction. Lots of walking sheets and phone banking sheets and then the entry of the supporters and banking them for the Get Out The Vote (GOTV). It wasn't flawless, but this was probably the most aggressive GOTV I have been involved in. The first election report showed us well short of the 55% threshold needed for the bond to pass and panic set in at the victory celebration for volunteers. People were asking me what would it take for victory to be stolen from defeat. I told the room to hope for a 60% poll voting showing to put us back in the game. Thankfully that happened but the volunteers were left at the edge of their seats for 17 days. The GOTV won this election. Went from around 80 votes up to over 300 up after absentee votes at the precincts were counted. Campaigns are controlled chaos. This campaign was successful keeping the chaos controlled.

I had lunch a few days back with a Humboldt political insider. (No, not MIM.) They had voter information of past elections and asked me to evaluate the trends. It concerned the Mike Newman vs Kim Bergel race.  I am a certified para-statistician (Thank you Louisiana Pacific for sending me to this certification process for operators.) and am obsessed with operational and political trends. All of information gathering was sitting in front of me and I offered that Newman was in trouble. The insider said if the Absentee Votes reached around 1,600 that it might be game over. That person was absolutely correct. And they did not want to be. I have told enough people this last week about what was going to probably happen. Not many believed.  I know, Lies, damn lies and statistics.

1 comment:

skips said...

Very interesting inside read. Thank you, Marks Consulting!