My guess is that the governor "won." The people who vote on these questions seem to be predominantly those with kids in the schools and most of them vote "yes." So defeating more than half of the budgets seems to me to be rather significant.
ML/NJ
Indeed. Most of these elections, the resistance is made up of a few senior citizens. I used to get annoyed at the old people who had probably seen their kids through public school already and were now happy to vote against the budget in their own self interest. This time, however, the sentiment against school budgets is more universal and turnout was much higher.