Two things are clear from the recent election. This is not due to a dramatic shift in the voting population but because the issues they've championed have so completely passed into the mainstream.
Most voices fall in between.
Whether this is a significant shift in community sensibility or just a shift in lip service is debatable. So, the gloatings of the daily to the contrary, I think this election was more in keeping with the past few, rather than a departure. The second obvious fact to learn from this election is that Austin's campaign finance reform ordinance sucks. Even one of the ordinance's proponents, Linda Curtis, admitted this. In arguing against it, Chronicle publisher Nick Barbaro and I thought up a number of worst-case scenarios.