Analysis
Ten days after our ballot initiative won in Evansville, it's worth looking back to try to understand the results. The competing statements were on the upper right-hand side of the ballot, with ours first, perhaps because it was submitted to Council first. Or perhaps the position was decided by a coin flip; I don't know.
First, let's look at those who voted FOR each of the competing referenda. 444 Evansville voters wanted to "immediately begin an orderly and rapid withdrawal of troops". 386 voters wanted "not to quit this fight until unquestioned victory is clearly won.". So 444-386; out of 830 affirmative votes on the two initiatives, 53.5% favored an immediate withdrawal.
On the negative side, 425 voted against withdrawal; 397 voted against not quitting. Our initiative won and theirs lost, but both margins were close.
There were a total of 985 ballots cast overall for the 4/4/2006 election. 869 tackled the question of withdrawal, leaving 116 who chose not to vote in the issue. 783 tackled the question of not quitting, so 202 chose not to vote on not quitting. Did more people ignore the second question than the first, just because of the positioning? Or did some voters not realize they could/should vote on both?
So it seems to me that quite a few people favor a middle-ground, somewhere between the positions taken by the two initiatives. I heard some commentary that the word "immediate" in our initiative gave pause to people who would have otherwise voted in favor of withdrawal. Likewise, Ron Gay has said that he lost votes because of his language praising our "honorable" president. At least one person told me that the logical thing to do was vote against BOTH initiatives, since both were too extreme.
It's clear that our initiative, the mostly emotional reaction against it (as evidenced by the forum presentations), plus the generally positive votes in municipalities around the state, indicates that CUUE (and other like-minded people around the state) were able to mobilize more people in favor of immediate withdrawal than the administration-supporters were.
Let's keep that in mind as we come up to the fall 2006 election. If we work hard at the local level in our communities, the causes CUUE supports can win at the ballot box, and we'll be on the way to changing the direction America is heading. The moderates and liberals are the majority in this country; all we have to do is make the issues clear, and the votes will come.
