On the face of it, 2014 looks like it was a pretty good year for libraries at the ballot box: some 148 libraries reporting for this tally won and 42 lost. About 78% of libraries passed funding, bonds, or authority measures in 2014. Over 1.7 million Americans voted yes for their libraries. Only 22% lost. While unfortunate, it doesn’t seem tragic or perilous. But at EveryLibrary, we’re worried about the 1.1 million Americans who voted no this year.

Nonetheless, we’d like to figure out why winners win and losers lose, in order to help ensure that there are more of the former and fewer of the latter in the future. At EveryLibrary, we hear stories from both winning and losing campaigns that try to make sense of an election, that try to put a frame around voter behavior. The winning campaigns must have played all their cards right; the losing campaigns must have missed something. What elusive but critical error did the losers make? It’s probably just a matter of tinkering with the campaign and running it again. They’ll get there eventually. In any given year, somewhere between 65% and 80% campaigns succeed.

NO SHORTHAND TO SUCCESS

To help get there, we’d like the 2014 election results to coalesce into a new version of conventional wisdom, something our industry can look to for best practices and shorthand planning. Unfortunately, the 2014 library election results yield no simple guide. There are no significant reportable differences in the win/loss rate or the margin of victory/defeat when considering the timing, type, demographics, or dollar amount of the library ballot measures.

“We won because…” often focuses on timing. The generally accepted belief is that it’s better to run a measure during a primary or special election instead of a general election, but this year’s numbers don’t bear that out. On general elections in 2014, we saw 79% win and 21% lose. On primary or special elections, 77% were winners and 23% were losers.

“We lost because…” sometimes focuses on the type of tax, questioning voter tolerance for a bond over an operating levy, or a lack of a “sunset” provision as the reason it failed. Some libraries even wonder if they won because they didn’t ask for enough money, or lost because they asked for too much. However, these individual narratives are contradictory and lack strong patterns.

It didn’t appear to matter whether the state flipped from blue to red or back. The outliers weren’t that far out: the smallest margin of victory was 12 votes; the smallest defeat was by 18. The largest point spread was 80% yes to 20% no; there is a loss that went the other way, too. Still, another ballot measure asked voters for the first increase to the levy since 1959. And another was a November rerun of a voided August election. The 2014 referendum landscape is littered with four-, five-, seven-, ten-, and 20-year levy renewals that won or lost for no reason we can discern in the data. Trim off the outliers, and the median looks like a median.

Urban, suburban, exurban, and rural libraries fared about the same. We can look up and down the list trying to tease out a system. For every measure in the loss column, there were two in the win column with similar characteristics. New libraries, reestablished libraries, big money, small money, advisory referenda, operating funds, bonds, sunsets, or perpetual levies, it didn’t seem to matter in 2014.

RAZOR THIN MARGINS

We at EveryLibrary are concerned about what we see as a softness in voter support, e.g., the close margins of victory and loss. While the numbers in the aggregate look good, with only 22% of referenda going down to defeat, it is curious that both large communities like Jacksonville/Duval County, FL (population 885,000), and small places like Hudson, MI (population 2,270), had razor-thin margins.

Of nearly 200 campaigns, 32 were won or lost by fewer than ten percentage points, with 17 of those having less than a five-point margin (e.g., 52% yes to 48% no is a four-point margin).

BEYOND THE NUMBERS

Based on the data, there should be no conventional wisdom about library elections. The conversations we have with one another about library elections have been relying on rules of thumb that don’t actually exist. We need to look at what doesn’t appear in the results column, something specifically qualitative: the local political climate and the role that opposition to libraries and librarians played in some of the losing ballots.

EveryLibrary is the first organization to participate in the entire life cycle of multiple library referenda campaigns nationwide. We help library communities win funding in two ways: at the ballot box and through more effective budget negotiations with local government. As such, we are more concerned with the opposition than with those who already support libraries. Since we started work in fall 2012, we have been involved with about 35 library communities as they consider, plan, and move through to a vote. What we discovered is the missing ingredient in the 2014 campaign ­analysis.

THE FORCES OF “NO”

Library leaders need to look deeper into the characteristics of the 1.1 million Americans who voted no this year and the as-yet-unknown number who will vote no in 2015. We must have a frank conversation about why we lose elections that look, from the data, to be strikingly similar to those that won. EveryLibrary is starting to see what happens when opposition to libraries and librarians hits. In 2014, active opposition killed a few library campaigns—even when organized and invested local advocates worked in support of those measures.

Opposition forces influence voters in two ways: through voter suppression and through Vote No activation. For example, negative direct mail can flood a community before an election either to bring out the preexisting No base or to make otherwise positive-leaning people who are soft Yes voters simply skip the question on the ballot. When the local political leadership is not aligned behind the library, leaders’ questions, comments, and publicly expressed concerns can deter voters from supporting the library. Organized antitax groups and negative-facing local pols are both powerful forces against library measures. Both work to sow confusion or otherwise weaken the Yes vote for libraries.

It’s true that images of the library as outmoded in an Internet age are present in the electorate, but in our experience the majority of antitax and local opponents don’t focus on the institution. The brand and the image of the library is still too good for political organizations and most politicians to go in that direction. Instead, they focus on the management of the director, the worth of the librarians, and the lack of good governance by trustees or commissioners. This works against libraries because librarians and trustees too often cannot answer these challenges in the court of public ­opinion.

A TAXING PROBLEM

When a library goes out for a vote, the librarians stop being partners in education, skills building, personal enrichment, and community identity. We turn into the Tax Man. Even if for just one day, some voters and the public (even those who use library services) look at libraries as a cost center instead of a shared resource. On Election Day, libraries and the amazing, transformative work they do get reduced to being simply another tax—and library communities hate to talk about taxes.

There is a fundamental philosophical difference between the progressive tax policies that fund libraries and tax policies espoused by the Tea Party and similar organizations. The philosophical discussion plays out in town hall meetings, city council budget hearings, and at the ballot box. The strange occurrences in the November 2014 elections when states went red for statewide offices while still voting Yes on issues such as legalizing medical marijuana and increasing the minimum wage are a symptom of this tension between individual liberty and public policy around the role of taxes in civic life.

We saw glimpses of organized and unorganized antitax sentiments in other campaigns around the country as well in 2014. Two notable losses were in Pomona, CA, and Birmingham, MI. Pomona asked voters to reestablish a core parcel tax that had been defeated in 2012. After that loss, the library reorganized as a volunteer-led and donor-supported organization. The basic tax support, in addition to the staffing, collections, programs, and services that go along with it, is missing. By contrast, the Baldwin Public Library in Birmingham asked if the community wanted to replace an outdated part of the facility with a modern wing. The building plan went through years of work by the staff, trustees, and professional consultants. It was developed in response to community input, taking future demographic changes and use patterns into account.

Both Pomona and Birmingham engaged the public in a long process of voter education and outreach. (EveryLibrary was involved with Pomona from the start.) However, within a week to ten days before the vote, organized anti­tax groups from outside their immediate areas damaged each campaign. In Pomona, the California Association of Realtors spent at least $35,000 in negative direct mail to voters right before the election. Three separate mailings that were engineered to cast doubt on the measure, question the integrity of the process, and frame the library tax as putting a regressive burden on households arrived in the last few days before the election. It worked. In Birmingham, two different out-of-state Tea Party groups took aim at the building referendum. Those efforts were also successful.

Library leaders can work to neutralize antitax opposition like this. One standout this year was the Kent District Library in Michigan. Under the leadership of Director Lance Werner, the library actively engaged local antitax groups a full year before going out for the August 2014 ballot. Werner knew that the only way to neutralize the opposition was to engage radically and transparently with them about how the library spends public money. It isn’t always successful, but this type of engagement is our responsibility and our opportunity to redefine the library tax as different from “any tax.”

ALL POLITICS IS LOCAL

Librarians are in political jobs. As department heads, they sit next to every other town, city, or county official, and their revenue comes from the same general fund. As leaders of independent districts, they work in an eco­system of other taxing bodies and units of government subjected to the same tax caps. Taxes mean money, and money is power. And in the local political eco­system, the power of politics can also play a role against libraries.

We saw this most dramatically in campaigns we worked on in places as diverse as Jacksonville, FL; Monroeville, PA; Northvale, NJ; and on the eastern shore of Virginia. EveryLibrary got involved in these campaigns precisely because of the local friction between the political establishment and local library advocates. The friction came from both sides of the political spectrum. We only won one of them, but we’re noting them because the situations are not unique. Other stories of local politicians acting against the library are less visible to us, but we estimate that at least 10% of the 2014 losses were owing to recalcitrant local politicos.

A pernicious approach to local opposition revolves around the people in power deciding to sit out the election. They won’t say anything negative about the library, but they also won’t bring out their political organizations in support of a measure. When folks who should be our friends remain silent, it can be enough to chip away a winning margin at the polls. In 2014, 20 libraries won or lost by five-point margins. It doesn’t take much to swing a community.

Campaigns can work to neutralize local political opposition, too. In Corning, NY, the Southeast Steuben County Library reran and won an October 2014 referendum to reestablish the library as an independent taxing body. A similar measure had narrowly failed a year prior, partially due to resistance from state senators and assembly members. At that time, there was a concern that the library district would create a double-taxing situation and those members of the state legislature were publicly opposed to the library measure. Director Pauline Emery actively incorporated the concerns of constituents and restructured the measure. The win puts the library back on the tax rolls and ensures stable operating funds for years to come.

In 2014, not every election that answered the opposition won. Still, there is little doubt that every library community that had an answer built a stronger community of supporters.

START EARLY

What the presence of obstacles points to is the need to start campaigning earlier. As much as we need time to introduce our ideas to the voters, we need time to let the opposition surface. If we wait for the last few weeks before the election to see what might pop up, we’re running the risk of being too late to respond.

Library leadership needs to start campaigns early, even before having ballot language. Start engaging the opposition now, even before a site is selected or a tax rate is set. Start drawing in the other side now because it is the only way to quiet them and educate them. It is up to us to tell the opposition why the tax used for this project—this funding measure that supports the future of our mutual community—is different from any other tax; how it potentially supports a mutual goal. Then, be ready to tell your public that you have had that conversation, shown the budget, and met the competition. The public expects libraries and librarians to have the answers to tough questions: let’s show them they’re right.

TABLE 1: OPERATING REFERENDA 2014

TABLE 3: TEN-YEAR TRENDS

TABLE 4: LIBRARY GOVERNANCE REFERENDA 2014

TABLE 5: BUILDING REFERENDA 2014

John Chrastka, an LJ 2014 Mover & Shaker, is Founder and Executive Director of EveryLibrary, the first national political action committee for libraries. Rachel Korman, EveryLibrary’s 2014 Intern and a 2014 MLIS graduate of Drexel University’s College of Computing, has most recently been a Senior Circulation Assistant at the Drexel University Thomas R. Kline School of Law, Philadelphia.

This article was published in Library Journal. Subscribe today and save up to 35% off the regular subscription rate.