Election Day: The Morning After

As the smoke clears from last night's election results, no really huge upsets in the state races in New Jersey and Virginia, nor in the big mayoral races.

Chris Christie easily won re-election in New Jersey, where exit polls showed him winning 20% of black voters and 45% of Latinos, unheard of in most elections.  In Virginia, Terry McAuliffe fought back AG Ken Cuccinelli's last minute push to win by about 3 points.  And in New York City, Bill de Blasio rolled to a huge victory in the mayoral race there.

But locally, things aren't looking good at all.  John Cranley looks to have won by a big margin in the Cincinnati mayor's race, beating Roxanne Qualls by double digits.  Cranley, in his victory speech, vowed to end the streetcar project as his first act as Mayor.  With the city council also being realigned and Laure Quinlivan and Pam Thomas out and streetcar opponents Amy Murray, Kevin Flynn and former Mayor David Mann in (along with Qualls' departure), Cranley should now easily have the votes there to scrap the project entirely.

In other words, the streetcar project is almost certainly dead after being approved by voters twice.  The question is how soon the burial will be, and how much damage the city's reputation will take when outside investors decide that putting money into any project in Cincinnati is impossible when the council and mayor can just kill any infrastructure improvement plan voters approve.

What'll happen is the council will vote on a plan to shelve any futher work on the project until yet another study can be done on the project, and then the project will never be restarted.  Council members PG Sittenfeld and now David Mann have suggested the study route, even though there have been several studies on the project both before and after the project was approved by voters.

We'll see if they pull the plug or not.  Considering that was Cranley's top promise and he won by 16 points?  Count on him doing everything possible to try.

Really the only good news is that Issue 4, the Tea Party backed ballot initiative to basically scrap all city pensions and replace them with 401k plans (eagerly backed by Ohio investment banks) lost by more than 50 points.

The measure also would have crippled the city financially the same way that Republicans crippled the Postal Service:  by requiring the city to pay off pension liabilities for workers decades from now in just 10 years. That would all but eliminate the city's budget for social welfare, public safety, and infrastructure improvements or requiring huge tax increases, or most likely both, just to balance the budget.  And of course, the Cincinnati charter would require voters to approve the tax increases, which would fail, ultimately leaving all the budget balancing to mean massive and draconian cuts in city schools, police, firefighting, safety, and social programs.

Needless to say, the measure died screaming.

We'll see if the streetcar survives the next year.  I'm betting like the Cincinnati subway, it will lie unfinished for eternity.