What Went Wrong

The General Council meeting following our Tribal elections is traditionally unpredictable. I’ve seen meetings, like 2002 and 2006, where the tone for the oncoming election was laid out unmistakably, if even only by a few individuals. Other times, like 2005 and 2007, it seemed people either didn’t care or weren’t sure how to act. Today, 2009, was more like the latter than the former, but just barely.

I won’t pretend to be surprised, because the 2009 Tribal Council elections were, for all the tension and ugliness that occasionally manifested itself, deflating. I can’t say that the partisan politics we’ve dealt with for the last few years have died out. That will never happen, and I use the word “never” sparingly. But something seems to have happened over the last three years to change the nature of Grand Ronde politics. When the three Council members who scored record votes in 2006 are three years later registering record losses in votes (690, 630, 608 in 2006 to 337, 324, 338 in 2009), one can’t help but wonder what, for them, went wrong.

We’ve seen this before. One Council member in 1999 would drop close to 150 votes in 2002. Likewise two of the ABC’s went from 604 and 462 respectively, to 400 and 291. Our Vice Chair, who many see as the most influential Council member of the last ten years, went from 591 in 2005 to 468 in 2008, the first time in any of his re-elections where he lost votes. Personally, I myself can’t help but wonder how the numbers will turn out for me next year. Will I see similar drops?

When you think about it, the concept is hard to digest because you don’t see that kind of extreme fickleness expressed that often in other elections. Can anybody imagine a President, Senator, or Congressman getting less than half their original votes during a re-election bid? Even Ted Stevens, the Alaskan politician who was on his way to prison as an incumbent, was barely beaten. So even an extremely negative and embarrassing incident doesn’t equate to loss of votes, not always anyway. But there has to be some explanation.

Which brings me to the the original question of what went wrong. Why was it that 18 people decided to throw their hats into the election this year, with many of them campaigning on “change”? How did incumbents who looked absolutely unstoppable three years ago come to be such lame ducks yesterday, each of them garnering less votes than a first-time runner?

I don’t really know the answer, but have some theories, because really 2009 wasn’t all that different from 2007, the year I survived. For one, political loyalties, meaning votes, can easily shift elsewhere based on feuds and disagreements among voting group leaders, often family heads. I think that made a huge difference this year. Two, people expect revolutionary changes following electoral sweeps. Democrats are dealing with that right now. Anything less than major changes will turn supporters sour, which is a double-edged sword because too much change will galvanize and unify opposition. So it has to be done carefully. Lastly, eventually, supporters look elsewhere for candidates who embody or uphold what they would like to see, which might explain why this year was the most number of candidates we’ve had since 2000, when 23 Tribal members decided to vie for three positions. This year 15 people aside from the incumbents sense, correctly I might add, that voters would be wanting some sort of change. The election results don't argue.

That year, like 2003 when 17 people ran, 350 votes was the magic number, which is interesting because anytime over the last five elections such figures would have made you a runner-up. Not so in 2009, not that I’m complaining about the results. I think Grand Ronde needs somebody like Toby McClary right now.