Kurt Wright has a serious blind spot and a gross inability to reflect upon the obvious. IRV is the ONLY reason someone like Kurt Wright was taken seriously enough to run for mayor in 2009.
Prior to IRV, a side-show-fringe-appeal player such as Kurt Wright, would be the obvious “spoiler” candidate. Kurt Wright received an inordinately high 32.86% of the first round votes in the 2009 election. The virtually certain historical fact is, however, that in a non-IRV environment we would have seen at least 85%(or more) of the vote going exclusively to the “serious” candidates – Andy Montroll or a 2006/9 Bob Kiss – and a few scraps would fall off the table to Smith, Write-Ins, Wright & Simpson.
Guess what, the days of just table scraps going to “Smith, Write-Ins, Wright & Simpson” are back. The pre-IRV days will return and political Special Olympians like Kurt Wright can no longer count on the social promotion of IRV to lift their message for one election; or more importantly, to carry their message forward to the next election or into future elections. The status quo is safe once more. Instead of campaigning on ideas, prepare for hyper-scrutiny of candidates until there are only two establishment anointed “mainstream” acceptable candidates. The yappy spoilers barking on the fringes can make their “we stood on principle” speech to their 9 family members and 4 supporters at a “neighborhood celebration.”
You bet there’s more . . .
Normally, a “Wright type candidate” would be the fringe spoiler that so-called establishment types – who are out of power – would be calling on to get.out.of.the.way so that someone electable could challenge the Progressive incumbent.
Questionable, handicapped and otherwise non-credible candidacies, such as the Wright 2009 Mayoral bid, do not win broad based support in a city-wide election. While he held a neighborhood niche following together, he was unelectable in a straight-up election with a credible city-wide candidate. That’s not news, that’s history. Talk to Bernie Sanders who ran, and lost, as the non-IRV candidate in state-wide elections in 1972, 1974, 1976, 1986 and 1988 and finally won in 1990 in a “throw’um all out year” when he was finally seen as a non-spoiler. Kurt Wright is no Bernie Sanders.
However, because of IRV, voters bothered to listen to Wright when he campaigned 2009 and because of IRV Wright has garnered a 15-minutes’ of credibility that a scrutinized candidate in a plurality election could never enjoy. Rather than constantly debating whether Wright was hurting Andy Montroll’s chances to defeat Kiss, in the last Mayoral election, political Special Olympian Wright had an IRV ticket to play Varsity. Wright, again, only because of IRV in 2009, was permitted into a line-up of candidates where he was allowed to keep swinging until the pitcher finally hit his bat. IRV was a refreshing change of pace, the dynamics of which were about twenty feet over Wright’s head.
This is what makes Wright’s latter-day complaints about IRV such a huge joke. He is perhaps the biggest beneficiary of IRV Vermont has seen so far. In 2009, IRV was the lipstick that hid Wright’s pig-lipped joke of a non-IRV campaign. In fact, IRV remains the reason why someone such as Wright, (extreme views albeit with a modicum of credibility) still has a shot in Burlington. I’d like to give Wright the benefit of the doubt and credit him with being duplicitously cynical and merely disingenuous by criticizing IRV. Unfortunately, as we approached Town Meeting day, it seems he really is dumb enough not to realize that IRV is the only thing that allowed him look serious for a few months in 2009.
Please, don’t take this the wrong way. IRV is not bad because it elevates someone like Kurt Wright who is functionally dumber than a bucket of hammers. IRV is great BECAUSE it can elevate and give an opportunity to someone, not because they are dumber than a box of hammers, but in spite of the fact that they are dumber than a box of hammers. IRV also opens up the process to many other creative and useful ideas that move our democratic process forward. The status quo craves the homogenized but stagnant uninspired middle, and plurality voting awards both homogenization and the status quo.
Congratulations Burlington on your, um, victory.
Yikes. I never thought my first post here would be a defense of Kurt Wright.
I’m a 20+ year resident of the New North End, and I respectfully agree to disagree with your, um, characterization. I’ve seen him up close working the Cul-de-Sacs, and your rant is off–way off–the mark . . . he is not the “side-show-fringe-appeal player” you make him out to be. While I disagree with lots of his positions, I have come to respect his work ethic. Let’s set aside IRV for a moment . .
Sit down, this may hurt: I think he is arguably the best street level political operator in the city.
Never mind his political leanings, he’s got what Napoleon Dynamite would call: SKILLS. If half of the Progressives I have voted for since 1981 had gone through the same amount of shoe leather he has, there would be a lot more than 2 of them on the City Council.
In 15 years the guy has evolved from a convenience store manager to a councilor, to a State Rep and now he’s got fully a third of the city electorate as a political BASE, perhaps the largest such in town. You can hate him all you want but he is hardly a fringe player; he is the biggest winner of the night, he is a heavy and the Progressives and Democrats know it.
Last night on Channel 17 he came off as practically an Elder Statesman, after Ed Adrian’s huffy call for the Mayor’s resignation. In his public statements, he consistently tempers the right-wing expectations of some supporters while still getting these boneheads to vote for him. On marriage equality, I admire how deftly he diffused the idiots to his right (yes, those to the right of Kurt) who challenged him on the issue. He is an easy speaker, surprisingly, almost-polished, in a town of starchy pols who feel much more comfortable at their keyboards. He Tweets face-to-face.
Which brings me to his big asset: he’s a likable guy. Most voters aren’t policy wonks, even here. I have a friends on South Union, Brookes Ave, and the Five Sisters who not only like him but aren’t ashamed to have him as a Facebook friend. There is no comparable candidate on the left with this kind of cross-appeal. Being a “good guy” is worth more now than it was last March.
IRV? Whatever success he has he owes to himself. He is a one-man act who built his political house from scratch, from the ground up and well before IRV 2009, to which you have wrongly ascribed his showing. Only “subsequent” rounds, not Round 1, are an exercise in IRV, and for the life of me I cannot parse your call on his “inordinately high 32.86%” top score there. I will call it how many perceived it: a near-win. More than any candidate last night, he leveraged the discontent with an administration perceived as arrogant and out of touch–not unlike 1981. You wrote like you just noticed him last March. You can’t dismiss this guy. I know it stings, but it was his night, and I’m gonna give it to him.