• The Publisher’s Notebook •

Malibu’s Counter Voters

BY ANNE SOBLE

Because it looks as if the current city council race is going to present an interesting case study in how an electorate looks at candidates who have relatively similar stances on key issues—so similar that each of them has openly aligned with the sole incumbent seeking reelection—it was hoped that a group of political science graduate students were going to prepare a telephone survey and analysis for the two weeks before the election. Funding issues and conflicting schedules scuttled this project, leaving mostly anecdotal options for assessing how the race is going until the actual votes are cast and counted. In the newspaper office, I’m tallying what I call the counter voters. These are the people who come in to place ads, file fictitious business name statements or want a copy of an issue with their child’s photo in it. This is totally unscientific and is not to be regarded as anything other than arbitrary opinion sampling, but it is interesting none the less.
What is most surprising is the apparent lack of interest in the campaign. Journalists tend to think that everyone else is engrossed with what they think is important, but the response to the question of how much attention they are paying to the election tends to elicit scoffs. With comments along the lines of “the most boring race so far,” or “the candidates are all the same,” or “I’d vote for none of the above,” there is disinterest, if not disdain, for Malibu’s local government. When people are asked whether they are going to attend a forum, unless it’s also a meeting with items of personal interest on the agenda, such as mobile home or neighborhood issues, they say no. That only a dozen or so people gave up part of a Saturday morning for the Malibu Township Council forum may say something about voter priorities.
One explanation for this could be that people have already made up their minds about who they are going to vote for, but many of the voters we ask don’t know the candidates’ names. The exception is the lone incumbent candidate whose name recognition scores high on any scale, which may explain why the other four candidates appear to want to ride her coattails. This is an interesting campaign strategy, and we can’t wait to see how it plays out in the final vote count.