Malibu Surfside News
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• The Publisher’s Notebook
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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.
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