The pro-toll road side — in the Park Cities, anyway. I drove around there Sunday afternoon, and was stunned by all the Vote No! yard signs. Those people are serious.
Of course, since no one in the Park Cities can vote in the referendum, all that passion is pretty much irrelevant. So what will happen tomorrow? Here is my dead-solid, gold-plated, 100-percent lock prediction (tempered by the fact that this is politics and anything is possible until the votes are counted):
The toll road is defeated, and it isn’t especially close.
How did I come to this conclusion?
• The predicted low turnout, which looks like it will be especially low. Early voting was about three-quarters of May’s mayoral race, and that includes a whopping turnout in Mesquite, where there is a wet-dry election. Almost 12 percent of the early votes in Dallas County were at one location in Mesquite. Throw those out, and early turnout goes down to two-thirds of May, when overall turnout was 11 percent. The smart guys said that the pro-toll road side had to get people to vote who normally wouldn’t. That hasn’t happened.
• The truly sad behavior of Dallas’ Only Daily Newspaper. The weekend story about the ineffectiveness of mass transit was the last act of a desperate newspaper which sees victory slipping away. The News has been one of DART’s staunchest supporters since mass transit came to Dallas 20 years ago, which makes the story even more bizarre.
• No leaks about polling from the pro-toll road side. I didn’t expect The News to do a poll, but I did expect stories on blogs at the paper and at D trumpeting how close the pro-toll road side was to winning and how the momentum had shifted. That hasn’t happened, either.
• Matt Pulle’s prediction on the Observer blog on Friday that the pro-toll road side would "eke out a victory." Pulle does a fine job, and this is no knock on him. But he wrote in May that he didn’t expect Tom Leppert to make the mayoral runoff, and he wrote, with the usual caveats, that he thought Don Hill, Sam Coats and Ed Oakley would be the top three finishers. (Though, to be fair, my top three were Max Wells, Leppert, and Hill.) Pulle should look at the numbers and spend less time listening to Carol Reed.
And yes, when my prediction is completely wrong and the toll road wins by a 3-1 margin, everyone is allowed to make fun of me. Isn’t that what blogs are for?
