Elections are funny things. They can suck up all the oxygen for weeks at a time, only to evaporate the moment the votes are counted. If you’re a political junky, you can probably find a few podcasts and cable news programs that will agonize over the outcomes of all the big races for a few days, but most of us waste no time getting back to worrying about the price of eggs or whatever it is the Department of Transportation wants to do to our highways.
Here in Polk County, the 2022 mid-term elections were a relatively sedate affair. No one was challenging our state house representative. The race for NC 11 in the US House was a foregone conclusion, and incumbents pretty much ran the show up and down the ballot — even in the most interesting races for the Board of Education — just as they’ve done pretty much since 2010. But that doesn’t mean that there won’t be fallout from the choices we just made. Every election has consequences, even if nothing much seems to have changed at first glance.
Now that we’ve all had a month to think about the results, I thought it would be a good idea to go over what did and didn’t happen back in November. I asked Doug Clark, a retired North Carolina journalist and an astute observer of all things political now living in Tryon. We talked about which races produced the most interesting results, what the lack of local political news coverage means when it comes to democracy, and why it is that Democrats can’t seem to get a break around these parts.
Further reading
