When, a couple of months ago, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum were still
battling for the Republican presidential nomination, there was talk that a
still-disputed nomination race here on May 8 could spell trouble for the
Duneland School property-tax referendum, by giving more conservative voters
another reason to go to the polls in force.
Few people perhaps reckoned on the impact of the Luger/Mourdock race,
however, which appears to have come very close to doing what some thought a
Romney/Santorum contest would: consolidating conservatives suspicious of new
taxes.
The Duneland School referendum did win but by a wafer-thin margin: 4,093
Yes votes or 50.95 percent of the 8,033 ballots cast, to 3,940 No
votes or 49.05 percent. That difference of 153 votes represents only 1.90
percent of all ballots cast.
In fact, only 13 of Duneland’s 30 precincts voted a majority Yes on
the referendum; the other 17 voted a majority No.
Begin with the precincts which voted No:
•All precincts in Porter.
•The single precinct in Burns Harbor.
•The single precinct in Dune Acres.
•Westchester 4 in Chesterton, representing the blue-collar neighborhoods
north of West Porter Ave. between 12th and 23rd streets and south of West
Porter Ave. between South Jackson Blvd. and 23rd Street and north of
Washington Ave.
•Westchester 8 in Chesterton, representing the whole of the town north of
the Norfolk-Southern line.
•All unincorporated Westchester Township precincts.
•Both Pine Township precincts.
•All but one of the five Jackson Township precincts: J2, J3, J4, and J5.
•And one of seven Liberty Township precincts: L1.
In many of the No precincts, the referendum was defeated just
narrowly: by 10 votes in W6, by six in P2, by four in J2, and by a single
vote in W8. In others, the margin was more substantial, given the closeness
of the balloting: by 25 votes in P1, by 29 in W9, by 32 in J4, by 33 in W4,
and by 47 in W11.
And a trend emerges when the vote totals in the Lugar/Mourdock race are
broken out: although Lugar lost every single precinct in Duneland—with the
exception of P2, which he tied—those precincts in which he was not only
trounced but crushed were those which tended to vote No on the
referendum.
Brass tacks: in the 17 precincts which voted majority No on the
referendum, Lugar garnered an average 38 percent of the vote in his race
with Mourdock; in the 13 precincts which voted majority Yes, Lugar
took 43 percent of the vote.
On balance, in other words, the No precincts also skewed more
conservative in the Lugar/Mourdock race.
The Yes
Precincts
Of the 13 precincts which voted majority Yes, this generalization can
be made: four precincts did the yeoman’s work, three of them representing
newer subdivisions and one precinct representing two older, more established
subdivisions.
•L5, with a margin of fully 81 votes, representing the newer subdivisions of
Tamarack and Tanglewood.
•W14, with a margin of 68 votes, also representing two newer subdivisions,
the Estates of Sand Creek and the Villages of Sand Creek.
•W3, with a margin of 66 votes, representing the older subdivisions of
Westchester South and a portion of Chestnut Hills.
•W18, with a margin of 48 votes, representing the newer subdivisions of
Golfview Estates and Dogwood Estates.
L7—with the not-quite-so-new Woods of the Winding Creek—contributed a
45-vote margin; J1—with some older neighborhoods but also the newer
Whitethorne Woods—contributed a 44-vote margin.
Other Yes precincts posted much closer results: L3 with a margin of
23 votes; L6 and W12 each with a margin of 17; W1, a margin of 14; and L4, a
margin of 10.
Turnout
Turnout in all
30 Duneland precincts was considerably higher than would be expected in a
primary election—33 percent—with a high of 45 percent in W14 (a Yes
precinct) and 44 percent in J4 (a No precinct).
That turnout
rate of 33 percent compares to a countywide turnout—including Duneland’s 30
precincts, bringing the average up—of 21 percent.
There was no
significant difference between the turnout rates of Yes precincts
versus No precincts: Yes posted a total turnout of 35 percent,
No a total turnout of 33 percent.
Of the 8,033
votes cast in the referendum, 608 or around 8 percent were “non-partisan”
ballots: that is, voters cast a ballot only in the referendum.
There’s no way of knowing how non-partisan voters voted, whether the
majority cast Yes or No ballots.
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