Submitted by Londonderry Resident Gregory Carson
Do the recent Londonderry town election results reflect active partisanship in a nonpartisan election? Do they reflect the adage, “politics makes strange bedfellows”? Or do the results reflect the old election adage: reformers get elected, not re-elected?
Nonpartisan elections, where voters can choose more than one candidate, often reveal interesting patterns, and the Londonderry numbers offer a graduate seminar in voter behavior.
Ron Dunn, a well-known Republican, received 2,369 votes, and Ted Combes, a well-known Democrat, received 2,337 votes. That 32-vote difference strongly illustrates that many voters treated them as a pair. Kristine Perez received 1,691 votes, and Alan Roy 1,187. The 504 vote gap between Perez and Roy is notable. In a two-vote race, that type of gap often means Roy was the second choice for voters who had already selected Dunn or Combes. If Roy voters had commonly paired him with Perez, as many voters appear to have paired Dunn and Combes, their totals would likely be much closer.
Another quiet statistic sits in the background. The election recorded 1,689 undervotes. In plain English, many voters declined to use their second vote. That pattern often appears when voters are comfortable supporting one candidate but are unwilling to give the second vote to someone else on the ballot. When those patterns are viewed alongside Londonderry’s underlying electorate structure, the numbers become even more interesting. A simple model of the town’s registration and typical voting behavior would normally yield about 62 percent Republican support and 38 percent Democratic support in a straight partisan contest. Yet Combes, a well-known Democrat, finished 646 votes ahead of Perez, a well-known Republican.
None of this proves intent, and ballots do not come with footnotes explaining voter psychology. But taken together, the tight Dunn-Combes pairing, the Perez-Roy gap, the large number of unused second votes, and the town’s usual partisan baseline all point in the same direction. A meaningful share of voters appear to have organized their ballots around a simple rule: vote Dunn, vote Combes, and do not vote Perez.
Whether the numbers reflect strategy, candidate perception, national trends, or the familiar political cycle in which reformers win their first elections but face an increasingly skeptical electorate in following elections is open to interpretation. The arithmetic, however, is not subtle and very hard to ignore.
As the former long-time Chairman of the Londonderry Republican Committee, I never worried about winning elections from the top to the bottom of the ballot—I’d be worried now!
The information posted above was submitted by a Londonderry resident. The views and opinions expressed are not necessarily the views and opinions of the TownUnderground Staff and should not be considered an endorsement by the TownUndeground.
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