OK, it's been 10 days since my bitter defeat at the hands of the throughly scrutable Ralph Hudgens and so I thought I'd take a closer look at the election results and see what turned up. Every one of our statewide candidates got a different vote total in the election, I wanted to know what the vote spread was in the top four counties that supported our valiant crew and what that might reveal about our grand experiment in Liberty.
Cobb County
John Monds 10,312
Dan Barber 8,977
Chuck Donovan 6,655
David Chastain 11,657
Kira Willis 13,393
Shane Bruce 10,519
Will Costa 10,773
Kevin Cherry 10,533
Don Smart 8,208
Dr. Jim Sendelbach 10,419
Cobb's pretty sweet, 7 out of 10 Libertarians polling above 10K.
Fulton County
John Monds 10,192
Dan Barber 8,242
Chuck Donovan 5,993
David Chastain 9,480
Kira Willis 12,897
Shane Bruce 9,367
Will Costa 9,578
Kevin Cherry 9,817
Don Smart 8,348
Dr. Jim Sendelbach 9,524
Fulton is little stingy, only 2 Libertarians break the 10K barrier.
DeKalb County
John Monds 8,209
Dan Barber 6,225
Chuck Donovan 4,570
David Chastain 7,494
Kira Willis 9,622
Shane Bruce 6,954
Will Costa 7,142
Kevin Cherry 7,609
Don Smart 6,622
Dr. Jim Sendelbach 7,467
DeKalb saw no 10K barrier crossers for Liberty.
Gwinnett County
John Monds 9,478
Dan Barber 8,450
Chuck Donovan 5,811
David Chastain 9,340
Kira Willis 12,005
Shane Bruce 9,457
Will Costa 9,633
Kevin Cherry 9,176
Don Smart 8,458
Dr. Jim Sendelbach 9,314
Looks like Gwinnett is all Kira all the time.
It's pretty obvious that there was no such thing as a crowd of straight Libertarian ticket punchers voting on Nov 2nd. Having a 6000 vote spread between your top vote getter and the anchor man in these county by county breakdowns indicates that a hell of lot of picking and choosing was going on. So what was the method to the madness of these split ticket voters?
Kira Willis emerged as the elections leading Libertarian vote getter followed by David Chastain, John Monds and me pulling up fourth. Four completely different campaigns by four completely different people yielding almost incomprehensible results. I haven't asked my fellow candidates any details about fundraising numbers but I'm pretty sure nobody raised more that 30K for this years run. I know I damn sure didn't, so I don't think the fundraising thing was the make or break factor in the voters choices.
Of all of our candidates, no one even came close to the level of earned media that John Monds received in his top of the ticket campaign courtesy of the multiple televised debates and a couple of TV news interviews here and there and yet the way down ballot School Super out polled him by a good chunk. Go figure.
I'm supposed to meet with a stats dude on Sunday who thinks we'll see all sorts of strange stuff as a result of the county by county/candidate by candidate analysis he wants to run. I sure hope so.
In any event, I'm going to run some Google searches on candidate names with a 30 day filter and see who draws the most hits as another possible explanation of this years results although I know in my heart that our 4% finish is just a reflection of the importance of moola in the political game. If John Monds had 18 Million dollars to run a campaign with, the outcome might have been different, even revolutionary!
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