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.