Federal indictments for corruption are not enough to convince Buncombe County Democrats to vote for a Republican.
Democrats enjoy a 4-3 majority on the Board of County Commissioners. If Republicans could hold their District 3 seat and win the District 2 seat, the GOP could flip the Board.
It didn't happen.
And the GOP incumbent in District 3 - Robert Pressley - barely hung on to win re-election.
Pressley seemed stunned last night discussing the results.
We'll have to wait to see more data on turnout to gather more information about whether Buncombe County has gone so far left that it's no longer a place where conservatives can expect representation on County Commission. (See: Mecklenburg County)
The City of Asheville is already such a place.
Goalposts on the move
The Democratic campaign to "Break the Majority" is now re-branded as "Break the SuperMajority." You can see it in real time on social media and in news reports. Democrats were intent on winning back control of the NC General Assembly. They fell short of that goal. But they did win enough seats to prevent the GOP legislature from having enough votes to automatically override the Democratic Governor's vetoes.
Of note, there are no Republicans in the House of Representatives from Buncombe and Wake.
There is only one from Mecklenburg - but he's ahead by only 50 votes and looking at a recount.
Further evidence of the growing urban/rural divide in the state... and America.
Four of six constitutional amendments pass
Hunting & fishing, victim's rights, a 7% cap on the state income tax rate, and voter ID all won by comfortable margins. (Maybe the left will drop the obviously hollow charge that voter ID is racist voter suppression, now that their own voters approved it.)
The referenda on judicial vacancies and the composition of the Board of Elections both failed after receiving opposition from both the left and the right.
NC Supreme Court troll campaign worked well enough
The Democrat who registered to run as a Republican in the Supreme Court race apparently siphoned enough votes from the actual Republican to propel the leftist Democrat into office.
Chris Anglin was the troll candidate, and he picked up 589,580 votes - placing third.
Barbara Jackson was the actual conservative. She won 1,227,267 votes. She came in second.
Add their votes and you have 1,816,847 --- which is enough to beat the Democrat, Anita Earls, by about 37,000 votes.
Granted, it likely would've prompted a recount, and it's impossible to know whether every single Angin vote would've gone to Jackson... but it's likely that virtually all of them would have.
Anglin, his leftist campaign manager, the Democratic Party, and far too many in the NC media pretended that this troll campaign was somehow not the thing that it obviously was. Today they are smiling at the success of the slimy tactic, and smugly nodding to themselves that, "Yes, Republican voters ARE so stupid that they split their votes and lost."
So, congratulations on the win. Your effort to use voter ignorance to punish the GOP worked.
And congratulations to the NC Republican legislative leaders who discarded the judicial primaries in an attempt to help Jackson, when she probably didn't need it. They did such a crappy job at it, that it left the door open for the Democrats to implement such an unethical strategy. Good job, guys!
(By the way, you might have noticed how both tactics operated under the same assumption that voters are ignorant.)
This is now two NC Supreme Court seats the Republican leaders lost due to what can only be described as utter incompetence. In 2016, they put judges' party affiliation back on the ballots - but NOT for the Supreme Court. Republicans won every judicial race - EXCEPT the Supreme Court seat held by GOP incumbent Bob Edmunds.
So, the legislature puts the voter affiliation on for Supreme Court, but eliminated the primary - opening the door for unscrupulous lawyer to run his fake campaign.
If the GOP legislature was trying to give the Supreme Court to Democrats, I'm not sure what they would have done differently over the past three years.