Not this opposition
There had been some thought that the entire MAPS 3 package was dead in the water: not all the proposals easily lent themselves to “Yeah, we really ought to do that,” there was loud and vocal opposition for once, and the weather on election day was fairly terrible.
[T]he union (perhaps inadvertently) woke up a business and Chamber community that may have taken MAPS passage for granted. The organized opposition actually united the “yes” coalition.
On the other hand, it wasn’t that organized, says Dan Lovejoy:
The opposition was undisciplined in its message, negative toward the city, and pessimistic overall. Its visual appeals were very poor. The “Not This Maps” signs were almost illegible — black signs with red and white text. Who wants to be affiliated with this dark imagery, with this negativity toward your own city?
I heard one radio ad in which the announcer had the thickest southeastern Oklahoma accent one could possibly imagine — it was really more of a parody than a real dialect. It didn’t speak to aspiration, and it certainly didn’t speak to urban voters. I don’t know who they thought their audience was, but they missed. Overall, the NO alliance depended on negativity — they didn’t offer any meaningful alternative.
Me, I like southeastern-Oklahoma accents, but I suppose they don’t play well on (semi)-big-city radio.
In the case where something truly horrid is about to be undertaken, not offering a meaningful alternative can be considered a Good Thing: if the Republicrats propose to poison the wells with arsenic, the Demopublicans need not respond with a counteroffer to use formaldehyde instead. (Extrapolate this to Real Life however you wish.) But the opposition wasn’t in any position to make the argument that MAPS 3 was truly horrid, only that it might be ill-timed in light of the less-than-robust economy, especially since they insisted that the vast sums involved be spent, not on these pet projects, but on their own pet projects.
And as it turned out, the weather didn’t seem to stop anyone anyway. You want to see weather-impacted voting, you go back to this week in 2007 when the city was seeking approval of new bond issues in the midst of a major ice storm. Five percent of the electorate, maybe.
