What’s the most dispiriting statistic of the past week out of the city of Baltimore?
a) The paltry number of thoroughbred horse racing fans from all over this great nation who showed up Saturday, May 18, for the 149th running of the Preakness Stakes?
Or:
b) The paltry number of concerned citizens from all over this great city who bothered to cast a ballot for mayor of Baltimore?
For pure dismay, let’s go with b).
Setting aside those glum years when attendance was held down by the pandemic, there haven’t been so many empty Preakness Day seats in memory. This was a racing date that routinely drew more than 130,000 fans every spring. In a lot of years, it was Pimlico’s only profitable day of the year. Preakness Day supported the track’s bank account for the rest of the year.
This year, let’s blame the turnout on the weather, which was pretty crummy. Even those plastered souls who used to crowd the track’s infield, ingesting all manner of substance, flinging around beachballs and happy expletives, and only occasionally paying attention to any actual racing action — even those folks knew enough to get out of the weather.
As the Baltimore Banner reported, by late Preakness afternoon, Pimlico’s seating areas were only one-quarter full, and the infield had only “a scattering” of people.
So let’s blame it on the weather.
But what’s the excuse for last week’s Primary Election Day?
As this is written, final figures aren’t in. But it looks like about 20 percent of eligible voters in the city bothered to cast ballots last week. Meaning, about 80 percent did not. At last count, about 65,000 votes had been cast, which is the lowest total in more than a dozen years.
Why so low?
Where’s the inspiration to vote? In the Democratic Primary — the only one that really matters in the city, which hasn’t had a Republican mayor since Theodore McKeldin roughly 60 years ago — look who was running.
There was the current mayor, Brandon Scott, whose biggest boast was that he cut homicides down a lot. Yeah, for the first time in a decade, we didn’t have 300 homicides last year.
We “only” had an appalling 263.
When 263 homicides is your biggest boast, you’re not going to inspire great masses of people. And so as he ran for a second term, Scott spent most of his messaging attacking the former mayor, Sheila Dixon, calling her embezzlement charges nearly 15 years ago a municipal disgrace.
And those two were our biggest vote getters, by far.
Where’s the voice at City Hall trumpeting a new day for the city, calling us to some semblance of the stature we knew in the post-war years when Baltimore was the nation’s sixth biggest city?
There were just under one million people living inside city limits in mid-20th century Baltimore. Now, we’re under 600,000.
Why didn’t people go to the polls last week?
Here’s just one reason: We need something to root for. We need to feel we’re contributing to something positive. We need to feel connected to the place in which we live — and who wants to feel connected to a place where thousands of people, year after year, can’t get out of town fast enough?
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books, including “Journeys to the Heart of Baltimore” (Johns Hopkins University Press) and “Michael Olesker’s Baltimore: If You Live Here, You’re Home” (Johns Hopkins University).
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