Election Night

QUIZ ANSWERS

Regarding our post from last Wednesday, the answers are:

• Candidate A =
  Elizabeth Bingham
• Candidate B =
  Barbara Miller
• Candidate C =
  Hilary LaConte

OBSERVATIONS

Now that the polls are closed and the counting has begun for the 2007 Claremont Unified School District Board of Education election, we wanted to make a few notes.

As you may recall, the election was originally supposed to be a coronation. The current and outgoing CUSD board members had picked two people, Hilary LaConte and Elizabeth Bingham, to replace the two retiring members, Joan Presecan and Jack Mills.

Until the third candidate, Barbara Miller, filed her papers with the L.A. County Registrar of Voters office just before the August deadline, no election was in the offing. Once it became clear that the two anointed ones would have to actually run for office, one had the impression that the Claremont 400 really resented having to earn their spots.

In any event, there seemed to be good deal of overlap between the LaConte and Bingham campaigns, which we pointed out last week. That overlap consisted of people who had been very active in the Preserve Claremont smear campaign from the 2005 Claremont City Council election - a fact that none of the LaConte or Bingham supporters want to acknowledge.

During the various campaign forums, you could see the members of the LaConte and Bingham campaigns huddling together afterwards, plotting strategy. This collusion between the two seemed to confirm suspicions that they really had only one common campaign, one designed to have LaConte, who was the stronger candidate (among the 400), pull the lesser-known candidate, Bingham along.

PREDICTIONS

Barring some unforeseen, sudden jump in voter participation, we fully expect today's turnout to be less than 25%, which we believe favors the Claremont 400 candidates.

We expect the strongest turnout to be the Village precincts, and we expect that those will carry Hilary LaConte and Elizabeth Bingham to victory. This has nothing to do with the candidates' merits so much as it confirms the idea that the 400 control the Village and in particular the retirement communities where turnout is always the city's highest.

Because very few people really pay attention to or even care about the CUSD election, the 400 will be able to use word of mouth among their various cliques and social circles to generate more than enough votes for their candidates to win.

Assuming the election goes the way past CUSD elections have gone, we predict the order of finish to be LaConte first, Bingham second, and Miller 3rd by a good distance. You can follow the results here.

We also predict that once in office, Bingham will prove to be the more substantive of the two 400 candidates, though she will soon discover that she doesn't have quite independence or room to maneuver that she may now think she has.

Let's not forget Robert Redford's closing line from "The Candidate":

"Marvin...what do we do now?"