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Guy
Measure A is likely to fail
Just a few weeks ago, leaning on polls, and voting records, I thought Measure A was most likely to pass. This is the $517 million school bond measure. The Tamalpais Union High School District (TUHSD) wanted to raise this bond financing to improve the building infrastructure of its schools.
The votes in favor of Measure A are coming in way lower than polls and historical records suggested. As of Friday morning with vote counts updated through Wednesday afternoon, here is the contemporary situation.
So far, nearly half of the votes cast have been counted (18,570 out of 39,031). And, 9,680 are in favor or 52.1%. The latter is close to 3 percentage points short of what this school bond needs to pass (55%).
Let's figure out how many Yes votes Measure A needs among the remainder of votes not counted yet.
As shown above, out of the 20,461 votes yet to be counted Measure A would need 57.6% in favor to reach an overall total of 55%.
The 57.6% needed represents a 5.5 percentage point jump over the 52.1% among votes already counted.
The Marin County registrar indicates that all precincts are reporting. It just happens that less than half of their votes have been counted so far. Thus, the likelihood that we are missing clusters of voters that are more in favor of Measure A than otherwise appears unlikely. Given that, could we treat the partial results as a random poll with a very large sample (18,570)?
If we do that, it suggests that Measure A by now has very little chance of passing.
The larger the sample, the lower the resulting error margin. As shown above, the stats suggest that at 52.1% (associated with a sample of 18,570), this mean proportion is nearly 8 standard deviations below the 55% passing threshold. This translates into a near-zero probability of passing.
Is Measure A going to be associated with the lowest Yes % in the local history of such school measures?
It is most likely to be the case for the Tamalpais Union High School District (TUHSD) parcel tax and school bond measures.
As shown above, the lowest Yes % among the measures is 63.8%. Measure A is so far coming in at over 11 percentage points below that at 52.1%.
Looking at school bonds throughout Marin County, the lowest Yes % is 52.7%, which is still a bit higher than Measure A's current 52.1%.
How come earlier polls, historical records, and even fundraising were not indicative of the current outcome?
First, the polls were from October. So, by now they were 5 months outdated.
Second, the Marin Coalition of Sensible Taxpayers (CO$T) waged a most dynamic campaign against Measure A. The intensity of their campaign picked up much after the polls. So, the latter did not pick up on this momentum shift in the support (or lack of) for Measure A. CO$T advanced strong arguments that Measure A was too much and spent on the wrong stuff.
THE END