Tsunami Hits Boone

It was a wave election, propelled in no small part by the seismic shifts at the Watauga County Board of Elections and the shenanigans of the #EggersBros.

Bertrand Gutierrez's lede in the Winston-Salem Journal cuts to the chase: "For a couple of Republicans who, according to Democrats, were intent on suppressing votes, Luke Eggers and Bill Aceto did a poor job."

Eggers and Aceto are busily saying, "See, we're not a partisan Board of Elections. See, we didn't attempt to suppress the vote."

The eleven hundred plus Boone voters who did not choose #TeamTempleton are saying, "See what happens when you try to monkey with ballot access."

Mayor-Elect Andy Ball said it effectively in the Gutierrez article: “This result in some ways speaks to the visceral reaction people have when you try to take people’s voting rights away.”

Meanwhile, near the River Nile, Mark Templeton, who had suggested that he was going to show progressive activists the quickest way to get the hell outta Dodge, was fingering Boone as a "liberal college town" in explaining #TeamTempleton's massive losses.

That will become the company line (and of course doubles back to explain what the #EggersBros were up to all along): the ASU college student vote and the local Republican belief that all their electoral woes are a result of it.

Based on our phone canvassing and door-knocking during the last several months, the Templeton ownership of the local Republican Party had a major depressive influence on registered Republicans. Many Republicans were as offended by the treatment of ASU student voters as Democrats were. I think analysis of "party performance" in yesterday's election is going to show that it wasn't the student vote that won it as much as failure of the Republican base to turn out in support of #TeamTempleton.

Let's face it: the current management of the Watauga GOP has caused its own train wreck, and one wonders what the rank and file will do to untangle to wreckage.