The fightin' 14th (or not)

Timothy McNulty | November 4, 2009

Chris Potter at City Paper digs into Ravenstahl taking all 32 of the city's wards last night, including those East End wards we talked about yesterday, and notices that turnout was way down there (despite it being the home of Harris and Acklin):

Flash forward to 2009. This time around, only 18.6 percent of Shadyside-area voters bothered to show up at the polls. In Squirrel Hill, only 27 percent of voters came out. That's more than a 10-percentage-point drop from Ward 14's turnout two years ago. Countywide, turnout between 2007 and 2009 only dropped by about 6 percentage points.

. . . I guess I'm just sort of stunned by this. I mean, the East End prides itself on its high level of political engagement. And it's the part of town where resistance to Ravenstahl has been the strongest. Plus which, Acklin lives in Squirrel Hill, and Harris has a place just down the road in Oakland. If these folks couldn't take an interest, you sure can't fault voters anywhere else for ignoring the election. One explanation is that back in 2007, DeSantis was running as a Republican, and there are a lot of Republicans out in the East End. This time around, by contrast, the "Republican" on the ballot was Ravenstahl, thanks to a write-in campaign during the May primary. Acklin is a former Republican, but as for fears that he was some GOP "Trojan horse"? He should have been so lucky -- Acklin finished third in both the 7th and 14th wards. 

Yes, the enthusiasm for Ravenstahl may well be waning: He got only 55 percent of the vote this time around, as compared to 63 percent against DeSantis. But this campaign didn't just diminish enthusiasm among his supporters -- it wearied the people most opposed to him as well.