He blames Charlestown Residents United and town Democrats
By Will Collette
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| Vanover is a self-proclaimed tick magnet, drawing 30-60 bites a year |
We lost in the total vote count by a tiny margin, but more relevantly, we
failed to get all three Chariho towns to say Yes which was necessary under
election rules. Charlestown voted overwhelmingly Yes, Richmond voted No by a tiny
margin and Hopkinton was overwhelmingly No.
In my own post-election wrap-up,
I blamed the strong MAGA elements that control town politics in both Hopkinton
and Richmond, especially Hopkinton, for killing a needed and logical proposal
to replace three aging, obsolete and dangerous elementary schools. The state
would have provided $112 million of the $150 million.
The MAGA anti-education fog obscured the facts and created a false
narrative sufficient to sucker the good people of Hopkinton and Richmond into
voting against their own self-interests.
Cliff and I are in complete agreement that voting down the bond was
a big mistake. However, Cliff chooses to rail against the electorate in general,
claiming that a special election where only a small percentage of registered
voters cast ballots is “not a reliable way to test public opinion.”
Yes Cliff, election results and your impression of how people feel don’t often match up. But guess
what, Cliff? As Aaron Sorkin wrote in The West Wing, “Decisions are
made by those who show up.”
You can speculate all you want about what you think is the public's opinion, but ultimately, you count the number of votes.
Special elections nearly always have lower
turnouts than general elections and you have to plan with that in mind. In most
constitutional democracies, you can’t force people to vote.
The school bond lost the popular vote, albeit narrowly but more
significantly, in Chariho’s version of the Electoral College, we lost two towns
to one. The popular vote really didn't matter much at all.
You could have gotten every CCA follower, at least those who actually live in Charlestown, to vote twice and we still would
have lost by two towns to one. Hell, Charlestown could have cast 10,000 Yes
votes and still would have failed to get the required unanimous three-town
approval.
Nonetheless, Cliff wants a scapegoat for this loss and has decided to
blame Charlestown Residents United (CRU) and Charlestown Democrats for not
trying hard enough. Never mind the large forum organized on April 17 to support
the bond or cooperation between Charlestown and Richmond Democrats to push a
Yes vote.
There were also lots of social media posts by those Cliff-scorned non-CCA elements, as well as a lot of internal work. But I do credit the CCA for their talent for grabbing credit for a consensus built by far more than the CCA alone.
Following the CCA playbook, Brother Cliff doesn’t let the facts get in
the way of CCA puffery.
