Local Elections Are Not Over!

When I voted in the primary last month, I faced a fairly empty ballot.  Unlike my Republican friends, there was only one contested race, and many where there was no candidate at all.  Such is the nature of one party rule.

Many may feel that the election is basically over.  Go to the polls in November and vote that Romney fellow over that awful Obama.  Romney may not be perfect, but at least he'll help the congressional Republicans achieve their agenda of lowering the taxes yet again on the wealthy, increasing taxation on the slovenly bottom rung, cutting services to that some bottom rung, reversing and halting health care reform, gutting public education, turning Medicare into a voucher program, privatizing Social Security, ending the whole concept of women's reproductive rights, increasing the Defense Budget without regard to waste or ineffectiveness, and starting more active military conflict with Iran and whomever else comes into their radar. No need to worry about the other races.  Those were all chosen in the primaries.  They either have no political opponent, or if they do, they are so under-funded and unpublicized that they don't matter.

But times, they may be a-changin'.

I was at a meeting yesterday of The Ware County Democrats last night.  It was a small but determined group, with attendees from both Pierce and Ware County.  The candidate for State Senate, Gene Mitchell, was there, and he spoke with great eloquence and competence.  There were many ideas and efforts underway to make it known that there was intelligent and thoughtful competition still in many local races.  Not everything is over.  We don't quite live in the Soviet Union yet.

What I have noticed is that for every Democratic-leaning voter ready to come out of the shadows, there are dozen more who have not come out yet.  The volume of Republican noise around them is so loud that they fear what will happen if they make their feelings known.  This is particularly true in Pierce County, where the vote for Republicans approaches 90%.  Yet they exist.  And they are slowly growing in numbers.

There are also those who have voted Republican in the past who are beginning to doubt their own orthodoxy.  They see the effect of Republican policies, and are shaking their heads thinking, "That may be what I said, but that's not what I meant!"  They didn't mean for you to gut the public schools, reducing funding of local schools while diverting money to private groups.  They didn't know that it meant creating a second class health insurance system for public education employees who don't happen to be teachers.  They didn't realize that lower rates at the top meant more taxation at the bottom.  They didn't mean that the Hope scholarship should be eliminated for their own child.  They didn't know that the assault on reproductive rights would force rape victims to come to term, that vaginal probes would be on the table, that their own access to basic birth control would be questioned.  They're seeing all this and more and beginning to have second thoughts.


The Republicans in Georgia are on the verge of having super majorities in the Senate, the House, and they control the governorship.  I believe in checks and balances. I would be suspicious and worried if the Democrats had that kind of control.  The fact that the Republicans are likely to have it terrifies me.

But people are waking up.  November may yet hold some surprises.  If they would just wake up a little faster.....