Flutterby™! : Local Politics & the meta game

This weekend I went to North Bay Python. It's a great tech conference, walking distance from home, but was essentially away for the weekend. I came home on Sunday evening, Charlene was doing something, the phone was ringing, I went to pick it up and she shook her head and said "Don't answer it, it's been like this all weekend."

(Let the record show I did answer it. My bad.) One of the calls that Petalumans were getting showered with was a nasty attack against D'Lynda Fischer, one of the council candidates. The attack was presumed to have come from the Michael Regan campaign, because there were 3 candidates viable for the 3rd council slot, and his politics are the most orthogonal to the other two. And he's generally been associated with the folks who tend toward such things.

We were at an election night party last night, and somewhere around 8:30 mashed reload on the Sonoma County Registrar of voters web site, and with about 12k absentee ballots counted the results showed Michael Regan in 3rd place (for 3 slots), with D'Lynda and Dennis pretty much tied at 4th. This morning, with a little over 17k total ballots counted (in a city whose total population is 58k) D'Lynda has a roughly 100 count lead, 14.1% to Regan's 13.9%.

My guess is that the nasty politics backfired and motivated late voters. Seems like we might be entering into a new era of politics in the meta-game.