OC Political

Virtually every political analysis of the City of Anaheim references the split between Anaheim Hills and the Flatlands.

A closer look at the 2014 election results confirms that split – but in counterintuitive fashion.  Mayor Tom Tait won 61.7% of the Anaheim Hills vote in his re-election bid but less than half the vote in the Flatlands, though even then, this is a 42.5% victory margin for Tait in Anaheim Hills versus 24.1% in the Flatlands. Lucille Kring beat Lorri Galloway by 6.4% in Anaheim Hills, but Galloway beat Kring by 5.1% in the Flatlands.

In fairness to Kring, she scored fairly consistently across the city with only a 0.3% differential in Hills versus Flatlands. The big difference was for Galloway whose Flatland votes were nearly double the percentage of her votes in the Hills, with 24.6% in the Flatlands versus 12.8% in the Hills.

More intuitively, three of the candidates did better where they live than the other part of town: Kring and Fitzgerald did better on their home turf in the Flatlands while Tait did better in the Hills, where he lives. It looks like Galloway’s neighbors don’t like her, as she is an Anaheim Hills resident but did far better in the Flatlands than the Hills.

Flatlander James Vanderbilt was the top vote-getter for City Council in Anaheim Hills; he came in third in the Flatlands behind Hills resident Kris Murray and Flatlander Gail Eastman. The first through third place spread of Murray, Eastman, and Vanderbilt was 2% in the Hills and 1.1% in the Flatlands.  Nevertheless, Vanderbilt beat Eastman in Anaheim Hills by 333 votes while Eastman beat Vanderbilt in the Flatlands by 130 votes, thereby giving Vanderbilt his 203-vote citywide victory.

The number that jumps out is Jose F. Moreno’s 7% gap in the Hills.  (Either way, though, Moreno fell 3% short of the top two slots in both the Hills and the Flatlands.)  While at first, some might instinctively claim race as the reason for his 7% drop in the Hills, but before the polls closed, Matt Cunningham at Anaheim Blog found a more innocuous reason: the old-fashioned hard work of campaigning.  The title of Cunningham’s blog and the photo he showed from Moreno’s campaign office explain it all, so here they are: “Jose Moreno Campaign Ignoring Anaheim Hills”

In this photo, the Moreno campaign’s office door literally shut out Anaheim Hills.

Anaheim Hills defeated Measure N, the obscure local services measure. The Flatlands voted in favor of Measure N 53%-47%. The Hills voted against Measure N 56%-44%.

Measure L, the vote-by-district measure, won by an unexpectedly large margin. It was widely expected that the measure would have a tough time in Anaheim Hills. It did not, but Anaheim Hills did support it by a weaker margin than the Flatlands did, so in the Anaheim split did go with expectations, rather than against them, but simply in a negligible percentage. Measure L won 64% of Anaheim Hills votes while it won 72% in the Flatlands.

Measure M, the measure to grow the City Council by two seats, won in unexpectedly close fashion. In the Flatlands, it won 56% of the vote while in Anaheim Hills, it won with a much closer 51% of the vote.