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.

Watauga GOP Planning to "One-Shot" Jason Cornett for School Board

It's pretty clear from the Watauga Republican Party Facebook page that the administrators are endorsing Jason Cornette and throwing the other two Republican candidates, Ron Henries and Adam L. Trivette, under the bus.

Interesting.

Currently, there's a 3-2 Republican majority on the School Board: Dr. Lee Warren, Delora Hodges, and Ron Henries. Warren and Hodges chose not to run for reelection this year. Henries is in hot water with the Republican Party because he didn't side with the book banners over the Isabel Allende novel.

Rather than adopting a strategy of trying to win all three of their Republican candidates and thus continue a majority on the Board, the local Party leaders appear to be resigned to Jason Cornett alone.

He was the only real bright spot for Republican hopes on the May primary ballot, coming in third with 14% of the vote.

Republican Primary Contests in Watauga County

Don't you just love it when Congresswoman Virginia Foxx brags! At a Republican banquet last Saturdaynight in Statesville, Foxx said, "There is no division in the Republican Party. I consider myself a member of the TEA party, and we are all members of the TEA party, Taxed Enough Already."

I believe that she also considers herself a member of the other Tea Party, the one that doesn't capitalize all the letters in "tea," but if she really believes there's no division in the Republican Party -- which she demonstrably does not, the old liar … oh never mind! It was an absurd statement on its face.

In Watauga, it looks very much like Tea v. Money, or in one case, maybe Tea v. Tea, but it certainly ain't kumbaya time around the old campfire. Even Virginia Foxx herself has a primary.

County Commissioner Race, Dist. 5

         Allen Trivette (R)

         Jimmy Hodges (R)

Former County Commissioner Allen Trivette is the very embodiment of Tea Party, while his primary opponent, former County Commissioner Jimmy Hodges, is the very embodiment of Chamber of Commerce money. The fact that Hodges was registered as a Democrat while he was on the County Commission years ago may play a role in this contest. The fact that Allen Trivette once actually suggested that the women parents of elementary school children could clean school buildings to save the county money may also play a role in this contest.

County Commissioner Race, Dist. 3

         Karen Lerch (R)

         Matt Klutz (R)

Karen Lerch is running with the apparent blessing of the local GOP. Matt Klutz, perhaps not so much. Judging from her Facebook posts, Karen Lerch is something of a "birther," believing that President Obama is a socialist from Kenya and needs to go back to Africa. Matt Klutz's father Tommy was a very conservative Blowing Rock Town Commissioner until the last election, but that doesn't necessarily define the son.

Watauga County Board of Education

Yes, there's a primary, and two of eight candidates will be eliminated. Five of the eight are either registered Republicans or have taken conservative stances on education, particularly on the subject of banning certain books from the classroom:

            Tiffany Christian

         Ron Henries

         Adam L. Trivette

         Jason Cornett

         Josh Kanoy

The best explanation for this piling on of conservative personnel is that the local GOP didn't do candidate recruitment, so someone is going to get thrown under the primary bus on May 6. Incumbert School Board member Ron Henries is the stand-out "moderate" in this group, comparatively so because of his recent vote not to ban Allende's House of the Spirits from sophomore Honors English classes. He may be in trouble if this primary attracts a plurality of far-right voters.

BREAKING: Watauga Board of Education Just Voted 3-2 to Retain Allende Book in Curriculum

Delora Hodges and Lee Warren (neither of whom have filed for reelection) voted to remove the book from the curriculum (though Hodges made an earlier motion to keep the book in the library while taking it out of the 10th grade classroom).

Brenda Reese, Barbara Kinsey, and Ron Henries voted to retain the book in the curriculum.

Game over.

North Carolina: Redder Than a Boiled Lobster

So now what? We've got, for the first time since the cooling of the earth's crust, a Republican governor in North Carolina, with a Republican General Assembly just itching to pass that voter photo ID law. Oh yes, they'll take those steps to make it harder for minorities to vote, and college students, which is going to make those segments of the population just that much angrier and more motivated to defy them. Fun times!

The Republican lock on North Carolina is the by-product of gerrymandering and a rural backlash against President Obama, and luckily for them, they'll have the president to concentrate their spite on for another four years.

Meanwhile, the Republican surge yesterday did nothing for a couple of Republican candidates for the Watauga BOC, so there were some surprises. The local School Board election was another bright spot, with the most experienced educators winning (and one seat still pending: Jay Fenwick is just 100 votes behind Ron Henries, with over 300 provisional votes still to be determined).

We'll need popcorn (and a good deal of Bourbon) to watch how Pat McCrory behaves with his Tea Party General Assembly, whether he'll revert to the big-city moderate he used to be or go along with the anti-government serum coursing through Republican veins right now. The tear-it-all-down and privatize-everything impulse has a short shelf life, and McCrory is probably going to want to be reelected in 2016.

Job one for Democrats will be rebuilding the state party. May have to move from Bourbon to Vodka for that one!