With just one in five registered voters bothering to cast a ballot, Homer’s engaged voters elected to put left-leaning Rachel Lord’s in the mayor’s office.
With roughly 1,200 out of 5,429 voters participating (about 22%), Lord enjoyed a 52% to 47% advantage over the more conservative Jim Wallace Anderson.
In the lead up to the election, columnist Greg Sarber (who runs the Seward’s Folly Substack) warned that most local elections see 10-20% voter turnout. With low participation, left leaning candidates generally win, he pointed out.
ALASKA WATCHMAN DIRECT TO YOUR INBOX
“Homer typically has a high voter turnout for presidential elections and delivers solidly conservative results,” Sarber wrote. “However, there is less enthusiasm for local elections, and voter turnout is usually very low, so the town supports left-of-center candidates and issues. That is how we have ended up with a liberal town council representing a town with a conservative majority.”
Lord has been a member of the Homer City Council since 2017, and leans to the ideological left on a host of issues.
Anderson is a registered Republican, who offered voters a chance to balance local political power, given that the left enjoys a supermajority on the Homer City Council.
3 Comments
There was a good reason I moved my family to Soldotna. Homer is a beautiful place with lots of great people, but it leans so far to the left it may fall into Katchemak Bay.
There’s a reason you register to vote. If you’re not happy with leadership- vote them out! It’s your own fault if you didn’t vote!
No sympathy for them when the fruit of liberal policies wreak havoc. VOTE PEOPLE..