BreakDown: Danville School Board Election

We already did a BreakDown on the City Council election results, so let’s do an overview on how the School Board election came out.

Two incumbents and three challengers for three seats. We’ll go in order of the results…

Steven Gould: 1st place with 3270 votes.

• The Good: Everything. Highly professional attitude, well-spoken and brutally honest about the school system’s problems. I was impressed the first time I met him and rightfully so. He ran a perfect campaign.
• The Bad: Nothing.
• The Ugly: Absolutely nothing.

Philip Campbell: 2nd place with 2761 votes

• The Good: Campbell came out saying that the school system has problems and that blocked him from the “Throw The Bums Out” anti-incumbent mentality. He also came out with his own ideas on why the problems have happened and how to fix them.
• The Bad: Not much. As said above, this could have easily been an election with all incumbents voted out. Campbell preempted that from the start.
• The Ugly: The Register & Bee failed to endorse Philip Campbell in their effort to clear the incumbents out. Their advisory was clearly ignored by the voters who correctly determined Campbell was an asset to the board.

Sharon Dones: 3rd place with 2216 votes (last elected spot).

• The Good: What a pleasant surprise to see a candidate with little experience work hard to make the voters believe that she could do a good job. Dones pulled off support from all of the voting blocs in the city and I look forward to her term on the school board.
• The Bad: Nothing.
• The Ugly: Me. I blew it. In hindsight, both Dones and Henry Walker should have tied for SouthsideCentral’s final endorsement but I cut her out at the last minute. I am the ugly part of this BreakDown.

Henry Walker: 4th place with 2061 votes.

• The Good: Henry Walker had the knowledge and experience to make a good school board member.
• The Bad: He rarely connected to the voters directly in the ways that other candidates did. He seemed angry at times and that’s a problem for a first-time candidate.
• The Ugly: Walker had no support from the black voting bloc at all and that’s a big reason why he lost. He had no social media presence and very little outreach.

George Wilson: 5th place with 2003 votes.

• The Good: There’s not much Good when a 16 year incumbent finishes last.
• The Bad: Wilson’s support plummeted from last election because of his failure to directly confront the school system’s problems.
• The Ugly: For everything that Philip Campbell did to be re-elected as an incumbent, George Wilson did the opposite. He failed to recognize the anti-incumbent threat that was there by trying to say that the school board was already working on the problems. That wasn’t enough and the voters. It’s sad to see a long-term incumbent be voted out so badly but in this case, Wilson did it to himself.

That’s the BreakDown. More coming up on SouthsideCentral!