The Power of No

When did Ward 6 City Councilwoman Nina Trasoff realize she was
going to lose her re-election bid to Republican Steve Kozachik?

It was right around 11 p.m. on Election Day. Trasoff—who
started out behind her GOP challenger when early-ballot results were
released, but then took a lead as the first Election Day votes were
counted—was studying results that showed her lead had dropped to
about 600 votes.

She realized that a quarter of the precincts had yet to
report—and most of them were from the eastside, where Republicans
had pushed turnout.

“I’m toast,” said Trasoff, who ended up losing by 1,728 votes.

Trasoff became the first incumbent Democrat to lose a Tucson City
Council race since Republican Roy Laos beat Democrat Rudy Castro in
1977.

So how did Kozachik knock her out of office?

Kozachik busted ass and, in many ways, used the same playbook that
Trasoff used against Republican Fred Ronstadt when she beat him by 30
percentage points in 2005. He tore into her over Rio Nuevo, just as she
had complained about the slow pace of downtown redevelopment under
Ronstadt’s tenure. He blasted her for raising taxes, just as she had
blasted Ronstadt for raising the garbage fee. He griped that the city
was cooking the books and playing a “shell game” with the budget, a
complaint that Trasoff leveled while on the campaign trail four years
ago.

It hardly helped that Trasoff had alienated some of her own base. In
downtown, she was the chief champion of a complex development agreement
with Rialto block owners Scott Stiteler and Don Martin, which brought
her into a fight with the Rialto Theatre Foundation before the deal
collapsed earlier this year.

She was embarrassed again one week before the election, when she
attended a press conference with Stiteler to announce that Kwang C. An,
of Sakura fame, was opening a new downtown restaurant and sports bar.
The conference was interrupted by a salon owner who complained that
after 14 years of sticking it out on Congress Street, he was being
kicked to the curb—transforming what was supposed to be good
downtown news into a public-relations disaster.

On top of that, Kozachik had help from the state and county branches
of the Republican Party, who used money from auto dealer Jim Click to
bring in Maricopa-based consultant Nathan Sproul to target voters and
boost turnout. Meanwhile, Democrats were dumping resources into the
campaign against Prop 200 that could have otherwise gone to help their
candidates.

Combine that with the anti-incumbency mood, and you have the perfect
storm to take down Trasoff.

Why wasn’t Democratic incumbent Karin Uhlich swept away,
too?

She nearly was. Uhlich, who beat Republican incumbent Kathleen
Dunbar by 23 percentage points four years ago, hung on to the Ward 3
seat by just 195 votes—about as narrow of a margin as you can
get.

Perhaps some Democrats were willing to cross over for Kozachik, but
decided that voting for one Republican was enough. (She also had the
smarts to side with our friends at the Rialto earlier this year.)

Why did the Public Safety First initiative go down so hard, with
seven out of 10 voters rejecting it?

Democrats were pretty excited about beating Proposition 200,
especially since their polling showed that it was supported by nearly
60 percent of the voters back in September.

Prop 200 was a lousy idea that suffered the death of a thousand
cuts. The opposition from the left was predictable, but once the
business community—including the Tucson Metropolitan Chamber of
Commerce, the Metropolitan Pima Alliance and the Arizona Multihousing
Association—came out against Prop 200, it was doomed. That
overcame support from the police and fire unions, the Southern Arizona
Home Builders Association and the Tucson Association of Realtors.

The initiative was always planned as a way to get GOP voters to the
polls; it’s too bad that the cops and firefighters allowed themselves
to be used.

We would hope that the dues-paying members of the Tucson Association
of Realtors would have some hard questions for association bigshot Bill
Arnold about why he poured so much of their money into a political
campaign that created the idea that Tucson is a crime-ridden nightmare
of a city where no one in their right mind would buy a house. That
can’t help home sales.

What was the deal with turnout?

One out of three voters—33.5 percent—cast a ballot.
While that doesn’t seem high, it’s pretty spectacular for an off-year
election—particularly one following a presidential election year
that saw a considerable swelling of the voter rolls.

In the old days, when the city of Tucson ran its own elections, we’d
have a ward-by-ward breakdown of voting, and we could tell you, for
example, whether Kozachik won his own ward. Those numbers are not
available to us yet, but we’ll do some crunching for next week’s
issue.

For the first time, early ballots went out automatically to all
the city voters on the county’s Permanent Early Voter List. How many of
them sent back ballots?

A total of 68,571 early ballots were requested, and 45,127 came back
in, for a return rate of 66 percent. That’s the lowest return rate on
record, primarily because many of those voters who got on the list to
cast ballots in 2008 didn’t care about the city election.

What about the Tucson Unified School District override?

Props 401 and 402 got crushed! After coming within 2,000 votes of
passing one year ago, TUSD saw 60 percent of the voters reject this
year’s propositions.

We credit that to general economic uneasiness, amplified by all the
talk of “no” on Prop 200 that was in the air. So when real-estate
agents have trouble selling houses because of TUSD’s troubled schools,
they can thank themselves and Bill Arnold.

What does this mean for the future of the city of Tucson?

Well, Trasoff’s mayoral campaign is finished. Uhlich, who harbors
mayoral ambitions, has some obvious weaknesses. Ward 4 Councilwoman
Shirley Scott, who wasn’t on the ballot, may be emerging as the
strongest potential mayoral candidate of them all at this point.

But all the rules go out the window if the state law pushed by Sen.
Jonathan Paton remains in place, and the city goes to nonpartisan
elections. Stay tuned!

This article appears in Nov 12-18, 2009.