End of an Era

As this week ends so does that of the marathon tenure of FW city councilman Don Schmidt. Last night he gave an interview of retrospect covering his terms of service, and his last campaign. It shed light as to why he lost his race.

He said that this would have been his last election and that he had contemplated not even running this year. He thought that the Kelty debacle might have caused him to lose the twelve votes he needed to beat Karen Goldner. When you talk about a margin such as this there usually isn't just one thing to point to as to that can point to and say "this is why I lost".

The Kelty problems didn't affect candidates as much as one would think. It appears that the overall undervote was smaller than normal (more on this in a later post). The smoking ban might have hurt Schmidt a little but was offset by his Harrison Square stance. I think the deciding factor was passion. From what I observed Karen worked harder in her campaign than Don did.