[This post was originally published on The Living Room Tumblr.]

Huge win yesterday for the “reformists” on the Denver Board of Education, who improved their majority from 4-3 to 6-1 with a sweep of all four races up for a vote.

Incumbent Landri Taylor won 66-34 over Roger Kilgore in our district (Stapleton & Northeast Denver); former Colorado lieutenant governor Barbara O’Brien won 60-31 over Michael Kiley for the citywide at-large seat (minor candidate Joan Polson got 9%); and the other two reformists won 57-43 and 63-37 in Lowry/East Denver and Southwest Denver, respectively.

Some commentators furiously disagree, but I think this is a good thing, on balance. I’m not anti-union, but I do think the reformists are mostly on the right track in this instance. (This isn’t some sort of Scott Walker thing. These are Democratic reformists. Here’s a helpful backgrounder for those unfamiliar with the local dynamics.)

Certainly, to this busy voter who didn’t obsess about the race but did try to read up & be educated about it, it seemed the anti-reformists didn’t make their case well. The election felt like an argument pitting forward-looking reformers, with an imperfect but generally good platform, against preaching-to-the-converted reactionaries with no real agenda except cherry-picked criticisms of the ongoing reform efforts & a desire to go back to the old way of doing things (without seriously analyzing the flaws of the old, pre-Michael Bennet, pre-Denver Plan status quo). Sort of like an ideologically flipped version of the health-care debate circa ~1992 through 2009: an imperfect but genuine effort at desperately needed reform vs. a “party of no” offering no viable alternative. In that sort of scenario, I’m almost always going to prefer the side that’s trying new ideas over the one that’s just naysaying. In this case, if that puts me on the more “conservative” side, so be it. I have no specific ideological agenda here; I just want a good education for my kids and the rest of Denver’s kids.

This might feel like concern-trolling, but here’s my honest, humble suggestion for David Sirota and the anti-reformists: Next time, instead of vacuous sloganeering, frustrated assertion, and defeatist whining about a massive funding disadvantage to the “oligarchy” and “national money,” use whatever resources you have – including free media – to make a more persuasive argument to voters about why you’re right (rather than just asserting that you are, or thinking that’s self-evident) and what you’ll do going forward if you win. Some of us are genuinely listening to both sides, not just voting for whoever has the most & shiniest ads. But you won’t win our votes if you aren’t saying anything meaningful about your forward-looking agenda.