COEUR d'ALENE - For the Kootenai County Reagan Republicans, Tuesday's school board elections were all about education - and they were the students.

"On election night I was totally confused," Jeff Ward, treasurer of the Republican group, told about 30 of his members during a Thursday debriefing at Fedora Pub and Grille. "Ann (Seddon) and Brent's (Regan) races were well run, but that didn't achieve a victory."

Ward said he spent Wednesday in a foul mood until his wife told him to snap out of it, and then it came to him.

"It wasn't until late at night that it finally began to gel," he said, explaining how he has analyzed the absentee ballots. "We had about 500 to 700 new people enter the race and they showed up in very conservative precincts."

Turnout mattered. The RR strategy worked in Post Falls, where turnout was slim, but failed in Coeur d'Alene, which registered much higher turnout. At first blush, one would think that the teachers and unions came out in force to drive the vote against the Reagan Republicans, Ward said.

"But that just wasn't the case," he said.

Ward found that only about 100 teachers and their extended families turned in absentee ballots. He also checked the ballots against the signatures of the Primary Years Programme petitions and the Aggrieved Parents petitions and still came up short of the 700 new voters.

"There just wasn't enough to swing the election," Ward said, adding that's when it hit him. "They exploited relationships."

He checked the absentee ballots again and found that the aforementioned voters appeared to have been out talking with their neighbors.

"For example, if a voter lived at 1000 Main St., we looked at 100 addresses before that location and 100 addresses after that location," he explained. "So we looked at addresses from 900 Main St. to 1100 Main St."

That's where Ward said he found the numbers that beat them.

"They were talking over their backyard fences," he said. "This is still very preliminary, but the first indication is that this was an undercover and unexpected election strategy."

Ward said he has studied and lectured in the past on the power of relationships in elections, and that, he said, appears to be how this election was won.

"Relationships trump ideology. Relationships trump partisanship. Relationships even trump the truth," he said, explaining how he believes his opponents used their neighborhood relations to perpetuate a "lie."

"The lie was simple," he said. "They told everyone that disaster would happen if our people were re-elected. The impact of that was tremendous."

Ward explained how most people wouldn't believe a "lie" like that if they had heard it from a stranger, but if they hear it from a trusted neighbor it has much more of an impact.

Reagan Republicans campaigned door-to-door handing out literature and absentee ballots. They were knocking on the doors of strangers. Ward believes their opponents focused on the people they knew.

"We need to develop strong ongoing relationships with the voters," he said. "And we need someone developing those relationships in every neighborhood."

Ward believes that ideology, which he prefers to call principles, are still more important to most people than qualifications.

"But this is a matter of trust. They ran this like an old-fashioned campaign," he said. "Even if the voters agreed with us 100 percent on principles, they were told a big lie by their neighbors."

Seddon, who was in attendance, said the Reagan Republicans need to start leaning more heavily on the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee for help.

"We need to rely on the precinct people to get active in these - quote - nonpartisan races," she said.

Ward agreed, saying the Democrats actually got active in Tuesday's election by encouraging people to vote.

"On election day, the state Democratic Party made robo-calls to get people out to vote," he said. "They never considered this a nonpartisan race.

"That's just part of the big lie," Ward added. "We need to get the Republican Party just as involved."

In other business, Seddon said she has talked with state legislators about pushing legislation to change the date of the taxing elections. She would like to see them moved to the general elections in November.

Seddon also said they may pursue financial reporting requirements for the nonpartisan elections as well.

Reagan Republican President Ron Lahr opened the meeting saying that contrary to recent online comments about the outcome of the election, the group is not dead. If anything, Lahr said, this election taught him that the Reagan Republicans are going to have to double their efforts to accomplish their goals.