Voters Save Cincinnati from New Orleans' Fate

Celebrate! The best candidate and the second-best candidate in the Cincinnati mayoral primary finished in second and first place respectively, separated by only a hundred or so votes (provisionals still to be counted) and way ahead of the other "major" candidates, who would have been major disasters. Mallory and Pepper will go through to the general election in November. Our city is assured to be in at least reasonably safe hands (Pepper) if not highly qualified and capable hands (Mallory). No Ray Nagins here!

Some SWNID observations about the election:

• Mallory managed a virtual first-place tie even though he had not a single TV ad. Pepper--with what I hear is about three times Mallory's money, not surprising for the P&G scion--blanketed TV with more ads than Progressive Insurance. This bodes well for Mallory in November.
• Winburn moved up about 10 points from his early poll numbers. Doubtless his intensive direct-mail and phone solicitation campaign, with its shameless use of every local (Steve Chabot) and national (Rudy Guiliani) Republican figure, got out the vote among diehard Rs (SWNID is a die-not-quite-so-hard R). The endorsement of the FOP, always ready to add 200 police to the union even if the city has no money to pay them, didn't hurt either. But in the end, there aren't enough yellow-dog Rs who vote in the city to get Charlie though. Given the lack of traction he will have at the county or state level, where there are enough Rs to elect a conservative, Winburn is finished politically.
• Reece polled nearly even with Pepper in August but came in fourth in September. Let's assume that lack of qualifications and platform trumped name recognition in the end. Gone from City Council, Reece's political future is bleak too.
• Turnout was around 20%. And that's just fine. In light of the media's miserable noncoverage of the candidates' positions, we should be happy that turnout roughly corresponded to the likely percentage of reasonably informed and motivated voters.

For more election fun, see the Enquirer's election blog.