Why Republican Confusion?
Public Sensed Inequality
RightCheer.com put out a very intriguing report of what Omaha area Republicans are thinking on why Stothert lost her Mayoral campaign (https://rightcheer.substack.com/p/what-went-wrong-with-the-stothert). I am stunned by the confusion.
People keep mentioning the streetcar, but this was not what necessarily flipped voters from Stothert to Ewing. The streetcar could arguably be the poster child of a multitude of problems.
You don’t need to read the data, but City expenditures were going up as well as property tax revenues (https://andrewlsullivan.substack.com/p/omaha-why-property-taxes). Instead of making Omaha less dependent on property taxes, instead of reducing government spending, Stothert started doing the opposite, and people could tell.
Dodge Street is the main corridor in Omaha. Between 70th and 80th street on Dodge, you can see a public library being built next to a dirt field formerly known as Crossroads. For West Omaha residents driving on this corridor, they had to ask: Why the new library? What of the roads, and what is this dirt field? Stothert gave them nothing to wash down this discord. Instead, all the parking charges the City receives are going to a streetcar instead of paying for the roads or reducing property taxes. This is why I was and am still agnostic on the streetcar, but I still supported Stothert.
There were numerous other matters, and I wrote of them before (https://andrewlsullivan.substack.com/p/how-ewing-won). Also, Democrats were surprisingly absent, particularly in City Districts Two and Four (https://andrewlsullivan.substack.com/p/omaha-democrats-shrugged). If I was a political strategist, I would do vast more surveys of how West Omaha feels about numerous issues.
Stothert made numerous mistakes, but the biggest one was losing focus on the City as a whole and instead focused on sections. If she had cut the growth of City government and lowered the property tax levy again in 2023 or 2024, she would have had much more credibility on the streetcar and roads. Such cuts would have benefited the whole City, but without such cuts, the City began to look poorly managed and directed to special interest groups. So she lost.