It would be foolish to get melodramatic about a single election result.
But at some time in the future, we may pinpoint yesterday as the moment when our schools finally passed over, irrevocably, into State control.
Just as predictions, and election predictions in particular, are just about, or worse than, useless, so too are post-election analyses, mostly.
We can’t tell you exactly why consolidation repeal lost. Someone suggested that there were a set of geographic determinants: rural versus urban, southern and coastal versus interior and northern. Certainly a lot of statewide races and questions seem to break along those lines. I leave it to others to judge whether these divisions truly determined the outcome on 3.
Here’s another possibility. Urban communities were unaffected by consolidation; for them it was a tiny speck on the horizon. Voters in Portland might have wondered, when they got to Question 3, “Why are we voting on this?”. Other voters live in districts where, for better or worse, they’ve hashed it out (think Orono), or dodged the bullet with an AOS (think Dexter). What was their take on 3? What would repeal mean to them?
Put it another way. The wolf’s at my neighbor’s door. That’s too bad; lucky for me I paid him off already!
Taken all together, looking at the results on all the questions, there’s something there to disappoint just about everybody. Maybe that’s the way it should be.
But concerning Question 3: it’s going to be harder and harder to get communities to care about their schools if they have less and less to say about how they’re run.
Forgive me for stating the obvious.