Epilogue: Voting "Not Lovely"

Now that the smoke has cleared from Rochester's Democratic primary we are being treated to the usual, nauseating spectacle of the media glorifying the winners, especially in the race for mayor.

We are being treated to the perfections of Malik Evans as a person and a politician that were never evident before, either in  his lackluster, nearly invisible, four years on City Council or his rather dismal ten years on the School Board.

What the media has chosen not to concentrate on, in its rush to make nice with the probable Mayor of Rochester after the November general election, is how someone like Evans could win the primary against an incumbent mayor.

Because the answer is rather embarrassing and blows to smithereens the praise they are heaping on Evans.

People chose to vote "Not Lovely" rather than to vote for Evans.

The voters were willing to choose anyone other than the mayor after her last disastrous 18 months in office.

After she fired him last year, people were pushing for ex-police chief La'Ron Singletary to run against her.

When he seemed uninterested (too much of his own share in the conspiracy of silence about Daniel Prude's death might have come to light), it seemed like a stooge of Duffy's at the Chamber of Commerce would be a viable candidate.

He never rose to the bait.

The ever-obnoxious Jose Peo, District City Councilman for the NW Quad, was also suggested as a candidate, rather late in the piece, to oppose Mayor Warren in her re-election bid, largely because he made a great deal of noise about motorbikes and all-terrain vehicles becoming nuisances on our streets and in the parks.

He reluctantly declined because it was really too late to get a campaign for mayor organized and he had already expended his resources trying to get his stooge elected to City Council.

His stooge came in last in a field of 17 candidates, which suggests that Peo's "popularity" was brief and fleeting.

That left Evans, who declared his candidacy early in the year.

Anyone with a well-financed campaign and a reasonably well-crafted public persona, regardless of competence, could have won against a mayor who had long worn out her welcome at City Hall.

Such was the case here, even if the candidate was rather a wuss who mostly agreed with everything his opponent said, proposed and promised during the campaign.

So why vote for him?

People were encouraged to vote "Not Lovely" simply to get her out of office.

Malik Evans was merely the means to that end. They weren't voting for him.

Even more telling how unimpressive both the mayor and Evans were to the voters is that nearly 70% of the city's registered Democrats stayed away from the polls. They figured one would do just as well as the other as mayor, although Evans got twice as many votes as the mayor from those voters who did show up.

In short, 16,000 voters against 8,000 determined the mayor for a city of 210,000.

Such is the reality of "democracy."

Evans must have realized this because, in his press conference the morning after the election, he barely discussed the campaign.

He knew that people voted for him because he was "not Lovely," not because he was Malik Evans.

And that will be a tough thing for him to live down, and probably a tougher thing for Rochester to live with.