By Howard Wilkinson
The Cincinnati Enquirer

All Cincinnati Public Schools officials had to do to get their $480 million bond issue passed the second time around was to thin out the electorate.

The difference between losing a general election campaign in November on a crowded ballot and winning a May contest - where most voters had only one hole to punch on the ballot cards - came down to numbers.

A lot fewer people voted Tuesday than voted in the general-election campaign last fall - about 47,000 compared with the 90,000 who cast ballots in the fall and defeated the school bond issue by a scant 611 votes.

After it was all over Tuesday night and the school bond issue had passed unofficially by 2,166 votes, Brewster Rhoads - the longtime Cincinnati political strategist who helped CPS run both the fall and spring campaigns - shouted into his cell phone, over the din of a CPS victory celebration, one of the great truisms of politics:

"It's a whole lot easier to target your voters in a small-turnout election."

In other words, find people you are certain will vote with you, light a fire under them and keep your fingers crossed that it will slip the minds of the opposition that there is an election going on.

The turnout Tuesday was 21 percent countywide, which, strange as it seems, is a fairly high number for a spring primary election in an odd-numbered year, when there is little else on the ballot.

But it was far smaller than in November, when voters turned out to cast ballots on a whole raft of races and issues.

Last fall, the areas of the Cincinnati school district with the highest home-ownership rates - 62 percent in Cheviot and 87 percent in Green Township - voted nearly 4-to-1 against a bond issue that will take about $135 annually out of the pocket of a property owner whose home is worth $100,000.

They did nearly the same Tuesday, but not with the high turnout numbers that dwarfed that of the inner-city wards in Cincinnati, where homeownership percentages are low and most children will end up attending the new public-school buildings the bond issue will build.

For example, some election officials said turnout in neighborhoods like Roselawn, Avondale and Evanston - all predominantly black areas of the city - was higher than the district average.

Those were the voters CPS targeted, and targeted hard. Those were the voters who, for the past several weeks, could hardly avoid the school bond issue campaign.

"This wasn't won with a couple of TV spots," Rhoads said.

"This was won with shoe leather."

Targeted voters were inundated with messages from the pro-bond-issue campaign, even if they never turned on their television sets.

The bond issue campaign committee mailed 324,000 pieces of direct mail to targeted voters and made 119,000 phone calls to the same people, while volunteers knocked on 58,000 doors.

Tuesday, the campaign committee had 60 volunteers on the streets of the district, along with four sound trucks blaring out a message to vote.

"We found our people and got them to the polls," Rhoads said. "The others stayed home."

E-mail hwilkinson@enquirer.com