2019 Local Elections Offer Partisan Mix of Results

Well, another election is behind us and, as usual, I have some thoughts before it disappears completely.

There was no clear trend, other than Democrats sweeping to offices in Chester and Delaware counties at a level that has never happened before.

Locally, perhaps the only effect that had was on the Owen J. Roberts School Board race where Democrats won all but one seat in that traditionally red school district.

In Montgomery County, Democrats dominated in the Perkiomen Valley area winning all school board seats and a new majority on the Lower Frederick Township Board of Supervisors.

In the Collegeville Borough Council race, Democrats took all three seats, but next door in Trappe, the only Democrat running could not win either of the two seats she sought on borough council.

And in neighboring Limerick, despite a long-simmering public feud over development and a seemingly strong challenge, Republicans easily kept the two open seats on the board of supervisors.

They also won in Upper Pottsgrove where a 20-year incumbent, Elwood Taylor, was ousted after switching from Republican to Democrat.

Republicans had their usual strong performance in Berks County and in the Boyertown School Board race, not one candidate who appeared only on the Democratic ballot line won a seat.

On the other hand, in Pottstown, no matter how hard incumbent Kurt Heidel worked, being only on the Republican line doomed his chances of being reelected to the school board.

And yet, incumbent Pottstown Democrat Rita Paez seems to have been ousted from the Sixth Ward council seat, ironically by six votes, by a Republican who got on the ballot in the primary as write-in.

So while others may see patterns driven by national politics in these local elections, I can't say I see it. Perhaps in another day or so, a look at the numbers will reveal some sort of theme.

Questioning The Mercury Candidate Questionnaire

Regular readers may recall a post I wrote in the spring, apologizing for not getting a candidate questionnaire online in time for the spring primaries.

The reason was a shortage of staff, just me, and time, no overtime allowed.

Nevertheless, we managed to get one up and running for the general election which allowed me to write 13 election preview stories to try to give voters some idea who was running.

As we have in the past, we also populated The Mercury's free election website (yes, it's outside the paywall) with spreadsheets of candidate by county, by municipality, important dates and all 61 candidate profile created by those who filled out the questionnaire.

As I anticipated, I also heard from one who didn't.

His name is Stewart Strauss and he is a (victorious) incumbent Republican councilman in Trappe Borough.

Strauss has had contact with the paper in the past and I have even been to his house when he tried to convince me to investigate something I didn't think bore investigation.

He and his three Republican running mates, another of whom is also an incumbent, did not fill out their questionnaire.

But the Democrat running for two different seats in the race, Sarah Calvin, did. As a result, hers was the only profile featured in our Trappe election preview.

I should note, this happened in other races -- notably Lower Frederick Township, Perkiomen Valley School Board and Boyertown School Board -- in which some candidates responded and some did not. I waited as long as we could, but we ran them with what we had after the deadline.

As in the past, our method for inviting candidates to participate was to use stories in the newspaper, as well as posted on our website, Facebook and Twitter feeds. We set an Oct. 25 deadline.

Mr. Strauss did not feel that was adequate and said if we could not reach out to every single candidate personally, we should not do any preview coverage at all because it was not fair to the politicians who don't read the local paper.

First of all, any local politician who does not read the local paper should not complain about its coverage. Presumably, our elected leaders want informed citizens and one of the better ways to get informed is to read the local paper.

Second, I explained to Mr. Strauss, that in Montgomery County alone, his method would have meant tracking down 104 individual candidates in 27 contested races; with another 32 in candidates in our Chester County coverage area and 17 in Berks County.

Given that I am, with a few notable exceptions, the only Mercury reporter covering municipal elections, that seemed like a poor use of my time, given that I am engaged in coverage other than just elections in the months of September and October, I replied.

Acknowledging that the staffing issue is a problem, Strauss remained unbowed in his opinion.

He wrote "if you cannot do the forum for candidates right, do not do the forum at all. Period."

It seems to me its better to have some information than none at all. And isn't having no forum for candidates discriminating against those who are willing to participate? But what do I know? I've only been doing this for more than 30 years.

What do you think? Is there a way (other than hiring more staff) that you think we could get better than this year's 40 percent candidate participation? If you have an idea, let me know.

By the way, the lack of coverage of the Republican team in Trappe didn't seem to hurt Strauss and his running mates. They won easily.

On the other hand, every candidate who won in the Lower Perkiomen Township Supervisors race, Democrats and Republicans, filled out a Mercury candidate questionnaire.

Anyway, here are the Tweets from the night:


At the Polls