Thursday, November 06, 2014

That Was Not Our Last Calf-Roping

That was not our first rodeo. Won't be our last, either. We know the taste of arena-floor dirt. Improves your perspective and adds nutriments that are otherwise rare to the diet. You know the old saying: What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

2016 won't be the same for either party. Turn-out for Democrats and the unaffiliated is bound to be much stronger, even if all the voter suppression practiced by our General Assembly and The Guv stands up in court.

Locally, progressives held their own and even improved their situation. Sheriff Hagaman buried Randy Townsend, despite an early voting site in Deep Gap generously provided by our partisan Board of Elections.

It's steady-state on the county's Board of Commissioners, two Democrats and three Republicans. But at least the Nathan Miller Era will be over come the first of December. He has no more public office to abuse the power of. Republican Commissioner David Blust will have to run again in 2016 along with Republican Perry Yates. Without Miller pulling their strings, what will they do for direction? Will they put Democrat-turned-Republican Jimmy Hodges in as their Chair?

Democrats will now dominate the Watauga County Board of Education, first time in a long time. Republican Ron Henries, who got thrown under the party bus back in May because he voted not to ban books, is now being celebrated on the local conservative blog as one of their wins on Tuesday, as though we all don't remember how he was treated months ago. Bottomline: Wataugans have only one book-banner left on the school board, and that took a good deal of "single-shotting" by the conservatives.

NC House member Jonathan Jordan lost Watauga County, and state Senator Dan Soucek came within 226 votes of losing his home county too. If voters want more backwardness and bullshit, they'll certainly get it from Jordan and Soucek. But 2016 is coming.

For those without love for the North Carolina General Assembly -- which means those who've been paying attention to the extremist agenda in Raleigh -- the brightest spots on Tuesday night were in Buncombe and in Wake counties.

Tim Moffitt, the smug Buncombe County representative who engineered the seizing of Asheville's water system without compensation to the city, was defeated by Democrat Brian Turner. Moffitt thought he might be in line to succeed Thom Tillis as Speaker of the NC House. Oops.

Another Buncombe County Republican House member, freshman Nathan Ramsey, also lost to John Ager.

But Wake County was the real stand-out for a local slaughter of Republican office-holders. Another Republican NC House member, Tom Murry, used an election-day stunt to try to fool pro-education voters. The Murry campaign paid temp workers to hand out fake endorsement cards from the NC Association of Educators. The NCAE had actually endorsed Murry’s opponent, Gale Adcock. The fake endorsement cards were exposed on local television, and Adcock went on to beat the faker.

All four incumbent Republican county commissioners in Wake County, including Jesse Helms's nephew Paul Coble, were swept out of office by four Democrats.

Perhaps most significant of all races statewide, Democratic Supreme Court and Court of Appeals judges won all their races, except for that 19-candidate race for the Court of Appeals, where Republican John Tyson won because all Democrats did not unite behind one candidate.


7 comments:

  1. Steve Harrison11:13 AM

    Yeah, but it felt like I almost lost my shorts after being tossed over a fence by one of those bulls in Pamplona. That's not really a rodeo reference, but it's hard to concentrate when your boxer-briefs are still around your knees...

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  2. Anonymous1:10 PM

    This post is clearly sour grapes. And by the way, Mr. Williamson, the Board of Education is a non-partisan election, there is no Democrat or Republican control.

    Work together.

    Wake up Mayor Ball, and reconcile the differences, don't spend our taxpayer money on silly law suits.

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  3. bettywhite4:41 PM

    I think it's so funny when conservatives say "Work together." What they really mean is "Do it my way, and we'll get along just fine. Defy me, and pay the price." WHEN did these conservatives in the last few years even TRY to work with the other side?

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  4. Anonymous6:26 PM

    I knew it would take a couple of days for liberals to come up with a favorable post election spin. So you won in Wake and Buncombe Counties, You lost traditional Democratic counties all over the state, especially down East.

    The GOP still enjoys a veto proof super majority in the NC House, while they actually gained one seat in the state Senate, even after all the Money Monday protests that the media fawned over.

    Jordan ran better in Watauga than he did in 2012 against a well known local resident and Soucek may have too, even after all the flap over his ETJ removal bill. In fact, I was shocked that he carried the County after all the negative outrage from the Town and some ETJ residents.

    The real losers in this election, along with the Democrat Party, were the state and national teachers' unions (NCAE & NEA), who spent millions trying to defeat Tillis by blatantly distorting his record as House leader. Another big loser was the biggest demagogue of them all, the Rev Barber and his MM coalition.

    So revel in the fact that you won a couple of liberal, urban counties. The Democrat Party came out of this election in a substantially weakened position.

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  5. Anonagain7:08 AM

    Wow, talk about distortion... For the zillionth time, there are no teacher's unions in North Carolina!! Those organizations you mention are not unions, and they have no bargaining power in this state. Also, the Republicans have gerrymandered this state so severely that it is virtually impossible for Democrats to take back seats, especially in a lower turnout off-year election. 10 out of 13 House seats are now held by Republicans....that's 77 percent. This state is pretty much evenly divided, if you look at how close the Senate election was and how close the last Presidential election was. It is not fair to the state's residents that we have 10 Republicans in the House. And one more thing.... It's the DEMOCRATIC Party, not the "Democrat Party,"

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  6. Anonymous9:28 AM

    maybe the democrat party sheep can explain how the gerrymandering is the reason Tillis beat Hagan?
    What fools you are to lie to yourselves instead of doing an honest analysis and taking a hard look at why your message didn't resonate with voters.

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  7. Anonagain11:37 AM

    I didn't blame Hagan's defeat on gerrymandering. I was talking about our US House seats, and also the state house and senate seats. Hagan lost because she didn't give Democrats a reason to vote for her. She ran from Obama and tried to hide the fact that she's a Democrat. And, I'm no "democrat sheep" as you folks love to label us. Democrats frustrate me to no end because they don't stick to their principles, and they seem afraid to mention their own accomplishments because they don't want Republicans to be mean to them. Guess what, Dems? Republicans are ALWAYS going to be mean to you, and they are going to label the most innocuous things as "liberal" because that's what they do! Democrats never learn these things. Mid-term elections are all about the base - NOT about trying to appeal to some vaguely defined "centrist" voter. If you lose your base, you lose!

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