People are waking up to discover that North Carolina is the weirdest of states. We are all sitting in a numb blogblog heap, wondering what to do next.
So we’ll do what we always do: write and process and share out and continue to try to find some slivers of civic joy in whatever comes next.
Here are some of the takeaways from last night, locally:
Cristobál Palmer won the special Carrboro Town Council race
This was the first time a Carrboro seat was up for grabs in an even-year cycle, due to the opening up of now-Mayor Foushee’s council seat in 2023. Palmer won by a decisive margin, with 77% of the votes, against Isaac Woolsey.
All of the bonds passed. This is good news.
We covered this last night, in a desperate search for decent news, but will reiterate it here: all of the local bonds passed, which is good news for our schools, parks, sidewalks, public facilities, and affordable housing.
CHALT was missing-in-action
In 2020, CHALT leaders created another PAC, called Save Orange Schools, to “prioritize school maintenance and facility funding” at the county commissioner level. Both CHALT and the SOS PAC – which shared a treasurer – backed the same commissioner candidates.
But four years later, CHALT didn’t say a word publicly about the school bond or the Chapel Hill bonds. The Local Reporter – the paper with close ties to CHALT – didn’t cover the school bond and last reported on the Chapel Hill bonds in June.
It’s disappointing but not surprising that CHALT could not muster a statement of support for a bond that did exactly what Save Orange Schools said was needed, and that they offered no public statement of support for bonds for parks and recreational facilities, which they purported to champion during the last election cycle. Their silence illustrates their true priorities.
No one realized they could vote for four county commissioners spots
Last week, we reported that a ton of people were coming to our website through the search term “Jean Hamilton vs. Marilyn Carter” – which indicated to us that people were confused about the county commissioner races.
You could vote for four candidates; there were five people running (4 Dems and 1 Republican.) All four Democrats – Hamilton, Carter, Portie-Ascott, and Fowler – won, but had wildly different vote counts, which indicates to us that many people didn’t realize that they could vote in all four of these races.
Orange County voters picked Dems
Across the board, voters in our county picked the Democratic candidates in all races and by large margins. Orange County voters also voted against the constitutional amendment, by a much smaller margin. The Orange County Democrats initially didn’t take a stand on the amendment, and then spoke strongly against it in the last days of early voting.
Kirk Ross wrote everything we’d say on this topic: “This one may seem like a talking point in the form of an amendment, but it’s important to remember that the amendment is only part of the strategy at play. If approved by the voters, it will enable the General Assembly to legislate all sorts of hurdles and impairments to voting using the peoples’ approval of the new amendment as a justification. In some states that have tried this, the number of eligible voters who have been disenfranchised runs in the tens of thousands.”
Gail Hughes maintained the largest vote margin
Judicial races don’t allow write-ins, but other races do. Gail Hughes, who was running unopposed, was elected to another term as the Orange Soil and Water Conservation District Supervisor and received 98.07% of the votes. (The rest were write-ins.) Nice work Gail.