The school board races in Olympia and North Thurston were a lot more interesting than these races usually are. Oftentimes, it seems, competitive school board races are debates are played under the table. Door-belling and interpersonal connections see to matter more than clearly stated policy position and interest-group endorsements.
But, that was before Moms for Liberty, trans-exclusionary policy debates and the issue of police in schools raised the nature of these races.
I have not spent a lot of time dissecting these races after-the-fact. So this is my first real go at it, in my memory. I’ll be especially unsure about how to read the maps for the North Thurston seats, since I don’t really look at Lacey on its own very much.
Olympia School District
The first two maps are for Hillary Seidel and Jess Tourtellotte-Palumbo.
Both of these maps are generally the same. Tourtellotte-Palumbo had a thinner margin of victory, so her territory is smaller. But her best precincts are the same as Seidel’s. They both did best closer to downtown Olympia, with their leads fading as they go further out of town.
The interesting map here is the race between sitting board members Maria Flores and Talauna Reed. Reed had been appointed by the board to serve in a westside district, but had moved before filing week to the eastside, so filed to run for the district seat currently filled by Flores. The problem for geography though is that both occupied nearly the same lane politically, with Flores being more towards the center of Reed’s leftward tilt.
Here is Maria Flores’ map:
This is a fairly dominant map, with Reed pulling only four precincts overall.
What is really interesting about the Flores/Reed race was that the voters noticed the crowded left-hand nature and started writing in other names. There were fewer than 130 write-ins in the first two races, but over 800 in the Flores/Reed race.
And those write-ins definitely trended towards where Flores was the strongest. Where voters were more likely to vote for Flores, more of them were also more likely looking for someone else.
This chart is Flores’ raw return against the percent of write-ins:
This chart shows the percentage of write-ins vs. the percentage difference for Flores against Seidel and Tourtellotte-Palumbo.
North Thurston School District
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about Lacey and non-Olympia districts, but generally in how they relate to county-wide races. So, my observations here are pretty much based on a surface reading of the maps and numbers, with no additional insights or experience.
Michelle Gipson beat a sitting school board member with a map that was centered on older and denser precincts, with rural districts generally going to her opponent:
This is largely the same map Gretchen Maliska had in her race:
Esperanza A. Badillo-Diiorio’s map is strikingly different:
While on first blush, this map seems like the opposite map of Gipson or Maliska. This would mean that Badillo-Diiorio took an opposing path to victory, but was able to win enough cross over voters to beat Gipson or Maliska’s coalition. But from what we know about Badillo-Diiorio’s race, this isn’t likely to be true. Her opponent had pulled out of the race and endorsed her, leaving no real organized campaign to pull votes in another direction.
So, looking at all three races from a different perspective, you see an obvious correlation between Gipson and Maliska’s precinct returns.
For Badillo-Diiorio, though, her returns cut straight across the charts. Her good and bad precincts have no connection to the good and bad precincts in the other races. Which is confusing to me, especially since there weren’t more write-ins or undervotes in this race than the other ones. This leads me to believe that voters made their choice for Badillo-Diiorio using other information or motivation than they did in the other two races.
