Liberal Landslide
When a neighbor asked me Tuesday afternoon for tips on the best way to keep up with election results that would come rolling in later that evening, my advice was fairly simple: start drinking early and hope to pass out before things get too ugly.
I should have taken my own advice. With 100 percent of precincts reporting, unofficial results from the elections board showed the local GOP strewn bloody across the electoral battlefield, wallowing in a waist-deep pool of carnage from the top of the ticket to the bottom: Incumbent Mayor Anthony Foxx pummeled Republican challenger Scott Stone, capturing 67 percent of the vote and outpacing him 56,126 votes to 26,958.
And it got worse: Republicans lost all eight of the contested city council races, with Democrats sweeping the four at-large seats up for grabs and tightening their stranglehold over city governance by wresting an unprecedented 9-2 majority on council.
How bad was it for the local GOP? Incumbent at-large councilmember Edwin Peacock, a moderate Republican who had amassed a $53,000 campaign war chest, was knocked off by Beth Pickering, a political newcomer who has lived in Charlotte all of five years and ran a shoestring campaign. Pickering topped Peacock by a 5,499-vote margin – 40,499 to 35,000 – to snag the fourth of four at-large seats. Curtis Watkins, a Republican who ran an aggressive and well-financed campaign, limped in with 10.7 percent of the vote and a sixth-place showing.
Leading the at-large pack was incumbent Mayor Pro Tem Patrick Cannon, who scored 13.7 percent of the vote with 53,851 ballots, followed by incumbent at-large councilmember David Howard, with 15.8 percent of the total and 47,906 votes, and Mecklenburg Planning Commission member Claire Fallon, who captured 13.7 percent of the vote with 41,773 ballots.
The plundering of the at-large race was indicative of how entrenched and monolithic the Democrat vote has become in Charlotte, where Republicans are outnumbered by twice the count, a mathematical doomsday machine against which even robust get-out-the-vote efforts come up short. Indeed, a quick look at Tuesday’s electoral map shows some of the highest voter turnout from traditional Republican strongholds in southeast Charlotte. At the same time, Democrats trounced Republicans with the straight-party vote, 67.5 percent and 23,845 ballots to 32 percent and 11,339, nearly identical to the 2-to-1 hammer that Foxx pounded Stone.
Always outnumbered, always outgunned, and never more evident than in the council’s District 5 race, where voters gave the nod to Democrat John Autry, who largely pledged to carry through with the same failed big-government, liberal policies embraced by incumbent Nancy Carter, who did not seek reelection, and have left large swaths of east Charlotte looking like a third-world tribal war zone. Autry received 76 percent of the vote, beating Republican challenger Dennis Peterson by a 7,080 to 2,215 margin.
In District 3, Democrat LaWana Mayfield became the city’s first openly gay elected official after defeating incumbent Warren Turner in the primary and rolling Republican Ed Toney under a general election landslide, raking in nearly 80 percent of the vote.
The story and numbers were largely the same for the other contested district races: Democrat Michael Barnes hauled in 79 percent of the vote to retain his District 4 seat, besting Republican challenger Larry Shannon by a 8,293 to 2,189 margin; while in District 1, incumbent Democrat Patsy Kinsey reeled in 75 percent of the vote, dealing Republican challenger David Rice a 8,085 to 2,728 vote thrashing. Incumbent Democrat James Mitchell nabbed 9,813 votes to beat nobody in District 2, where he ran unopposed.
The only GOP bright spots: Andy Dulin and Warren Cooksey, who both ran unopposed, managed to keep their seats representing, respectively, Districts 6 and 7.
Given the general electoral carnage wrought Tuesday night, it’s a wonder they managed to survive.
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