Consultants such as Tim Baker who ran Daniel Davis’ campaign coach their clients to raise as much money as they can because as they always say – “Money wins.” That’s their number one strategy with their clients and they may rethink it after what happened in the Mayor’s race this week.

Daniel Davis raised more than $8 million compared to Donna Deegan’s contributions totaling a little over $2 million. Davis raised 4 times the amount than Deegan did but Deegan raised more voters at the end of the day.

There was a 33% turnout in voters with 98,500 Republicans, 91,300 Democrats, and 25,106 Independents.

Deegan won because of the many Republicans who voted for her. Here’s what experts told Eye about the voting tabulations:

• The first votes to be reported were those who voted by mail and early voted and Democrats came out with a 6,000 voter lead.
• Upon results being released, Deegan was 17,000 votes ahead. If you take the 6,000 voters away from the 17,000 vote lead – at a minimum 11,000 were not Dems — probably 2,000 were NPAs because they were leaning her way as polling indicated.
• Therefore the rough math indicates, before Election Day, almost 9,000 Republicans most likely crossed over to vote for Deegan. That gave her 9,000+ Republicans.
• On Election Day 12,000 more Republicans voted and her lead diminished from 17,000 to 9,000.
• With that 12,000+ Republicans and her lead only dropping 8,000 that means she had another 4,000 that crossed over on Election Day.
• Most likely close to 12,000 to 13,000 Republicans crossed over in this election.

Daniel Davis’ loss wasn’t because Republicans didn’t show up to vote. It was they decided to vote for a Democrat or leave the spot blank. We know this because the top vote getter on the GOP ticket was Chris Miller, City Council at Large. He only got 559 votes less than Deegan while Davis got 9,027 votes less than Deegan!

Think about that for a minute. Mind-boggling to say the least!

And especially mind-boggling for Davis’ big contributors such as: Tom Petway ($250,000), First Coast Energy LLP ($200,000), and those who gave more than $100,000 were Summit Contracting, John Baker et al, Gary Chartrand, Dream Finder Homes, Gate Petroleum, JB Coxwell and Miller Electric.

These big donors got bamboozled by Davis’ campaign consultant who pushed the big “money wins” scenario. Today Davis is home licking his wounds and wondering what the heck happened and the donors’ bank accounts are smaller and their pride has been bruised.

But…drum roll please…the true winners on the losing team are…the campaign consultants!! They go home rich, win or lose, and off they go to find another puppet to manipulate and a slew of donors to convince “Money wins.”

Davis’ donors are all successful business people in their own right and should be applauded for their successes. They are good stewards of the community too and not bad guys/gals. We just pray they have learned some valuable lessons from this election and we will give them a hint:

Campaign consultants are not your friends and moving forward you should put your support behind a candidate who runs his own campaign and doesn’t let the consultant wag the dog. In other words, support a true leader vs. a puppet of the consultant. Do your research on the candidate and ask yourself, “Would I hire him/her to run my own company?” If the answer is “No” then don’t give them a dime!

There is so much to uncover about this huge political shake-up in Jacksonville and as we have time to marinate in the data, we’ll share more thoughts.

At the end of the day, the people spoke and it’s time to get to work and work together to make our city the best she can be.