Thoughts from the Ocean City mayoral and council election
Judging from the social media firestorm that preceded the May 12 election, having three candidates vying for mayor and more than a year-long public battle over the future of the Wonderland Pier amusement park property, we expected a higher turnout at the polls.
Turns out, it was just under 50 percent.
Seems a lot of people can get worked up online, but less than half of eligible voters thought it worthwhile sending in a ballot or casting one in person. Our quick take is keyboard warriors send forth a lot of vitriol, but don’t wield a lot of influence.
We are left with a lot of apathy, but at least it was the highest vote total of the past five mayoral elections. Just not by much.
For the first time, Jay Gillian did not get a majority of votes. He earned a plurality. That means he won a contested election without getting at least 50.001 percent of the vote.
Gillian earned about 43 percent of the vote, meaning about 57 percent of voters chose someone else. (These numbers are based on election days totals, but are expected to change slightly as mail-in and provisional ballots are counted.)
Keith Hartzell, in his second attempt at the mayor’s office, earned about 36 percent. Pete Madden, in his first shot, received about 21 percent.
Madden wasn’t a contender, but he appeared to have a substantial and almost equal effect on his opponents percentage wise.
Madden pulled only 939 votes to Gillian’s 1,981 and Hartzell’s 1,642, but Gillian received 367 fewer votes than he did in the 2022 election and Hartzell dropped 311 votes. With 216 more voters turning out this year than in 2022, that accounts for almost all of Madden’s votes.
He turned out to be an equal-opportunity spoiler, but there will be continuing speculation about what would have happened were the race a matchup only between Hartzell and Gillian.
Madden is all-in on Eustace Mita’s proposed eight-story hotel at Wonderland Pier, so that may have doomed him from winning the race, but it makes it even more difficult to predict where his votes would have gone given Hartzell’s anti-high rise hotel stance.
Two things are clear: the organization behind Gillian is hard to beat and a majority of voters didn’t like any candidate. Winning a plurality instead of a majority should factor into how Gillian governs.
Winning candidates sometimes claim a mandate when they barely break 50 percent. Knowing that a majority of voters chose someone else, we expect Gillian to take that into consideration heading into his fifth consecutive term in office.
As for Hartzell, it appears voters like him where he is – as a councilman. In the 2014 and 2018 elections, running at-large for council, Hartzell earned more votes than any candidate, mayor included, and when he ran in 2010, he got the second most votes.
He still has two years in his Second Ward seat and we expect him to make the most of it.
Voters re-elected a pair of familiar faces and elected one who became a familiar face over the course of the past year or so. Voters brought back incumbents Sean Barnes and Tony Polcini and among the two newcomers vying for office, chose Jim Kelly.
Kelly was outspoken as part of the advocacy group Ocean City 2050 on the future of the Wonderland Pier site, appearing regularly before City Council and then before the Planning Board. Kelly told the Sentinel he plans to be “agreeable” when he takes his seat on council July 1, but will remain strong in his positions. We envision him providing an interesting dynamic on council.
And now we await the Boardwalk Subcommittee’s report and hope for some kind of resolution – dare we say compromise – on the Wonderland site.
