The candidates, rightly or wrongly, were seen broadly as divided into two camps, with one generally representing a continuation of the policies of the current Town Council, and the other representing dissatisfaction with the status quo and a desire to establish, among other things, a more business-focused approach and a harder line on issues such as panhandling.

The endorsements and expressions of support tended to group the candidates into those two blocs. On the one side, getting support from groups such as the Sierra Club, were Mark Kleinschmidt for mayor and incumbents Laurin Easthom, Ed Harrison and Jim Merritt, plus challenger Penny Rich, for the council. On the other, with substantial support from the business community, you had Matt Czajkowski for mayor and Gene Pease, Matt Pohlman and John DeHart for council.

So what did voters do?

Well, those few residents who showed up chose Kleinschmidt over Czajkowski, returned incumbents Eastom and Harrison to office and elected Rich, who got the most votes. A big vote for the current path, right?

Victory, yes, but we wouldn't call it a mandate. Although both Kleinschmidt and Czajkowski are on the Town Council -- and will be until Kleinschmidt is sworn in as mayor in December -- Czajkowski, who has often voted alone against the majority on the council, was seen as the opposition candidate.

And in that role, he won substantial support; Kleinschmidt beat him by a narrow margin. More voters, in fact, voted against Kleinschmidt than voted for him; had Kevin Wolff and Augustus Cho not been on the ballot, siphoning off just enough votes from Czajkowski, things might have turned out differently.

For the Town Council, Pease was elected, unseating Merritt. Among those not elected, Pohlman was the highest vote-getter.

We mention all this not to imply that we doubt Kleinschmidt will do a good job as mayor -- we don't -- but merely to remind him and his colleagues on the board that elections, the way we do them, can be misleading as gauges of public opinion.

Although public sentiment is often split almost exactly down the middle, our system is a winner-take-all affair -- get just one vote more than the other guy and you take home the whole prize.

It's easy to forget, in that circumstance, that public sentiment is rarely as clear or definitive as that check mark that goes next to the name of the winner. We saw with our previous president how miserably things can go wrong when the victor misreads a slender win as an unfettered mandate.

The winners have earned the right and responsibility of governing, and they should do that according to the policies and principles they hold, and that the voters approved. At the same time, we trust they recognize that their recent opponents and their supporters are no longer opponents but colleagues and constituents whose views deserve the same consideration as any other.