Hey, Big Political Media — You MISSED Tuesday’s NC Political Earthquake!

So 2025 is a municipal election year in North Carolina, with seemingly little to catch wider public attention. A crowd  of candidates with only local name recognition was running for council and mayoral seats in scores of small and medium-size towns — not the ones on those annoying clickbait lists of 20-best-places-to-retire-as-a-left-handed-nearsighted-single-cat-person; such as Swepsonville, Gibsonville or Graham.

On November 4, all eyes were rightly turned early toward Jersey and Virginia and the chatterers churned out takeaways from the Big Apple & California races, and crowed about how bad JD Vance’s kin got clobbered in Cincinnati.

Yeah, me too. But not 100 %. I was also closely following races in one central North Carolina county. That wasn’t easy, as local media was either busy elsewhere, or — given its mostly dilapidated state, understaffed, underfunded, sliding toward Chapter 13, had closed for the night.

But I finally got caught up, after the big stories were clearly in view. And what I felt then was the aftershock of a political earthquake.

Okay, it was a tiny tremor, in one of the Tarheel state’s 100 counties, spread across our 420-mile wide expanse. But it gave me, as another very thirsty Democrat, another welcome belt of the night’s 40-proof optimism.

After all, Alamance has been home to a strong neo-Confederate, gerrymander-loving, mask/vaxx hating faction. Their symbol, a tall statue of a rebel soldier, still stands guard in front of the old courthouse in the county seat of Graham.

When anti-monument protesters showed up, back in the long-ago days of Black Lives Matter, they were met with tear gas and arrests. The statue emerged from the skirmish unmoved, and surrounded by a thick new wrought-iron spearpoint-topped fence.

There’s more. The militant county sheriff was proudly stashing ICE detainees in his jail years before it was cool. The last Democratic president to carry Alamance was Jimmy Carter, 49 years ago.

Although I live a couple counties east, in very Blue Durham, I’ve been attending meetings of the Alamance County Democratic Party (ACDP) off and on over the past year. One reason was because it was definitely outside my daily liberal bubble. (Durham’s smaller rebel statue was toppled by a raiding party of college radicals, who then beat the rap for destroying ”historic” property.)

Another reason, though, was to find out what the party was doing in a county (one of many here) where Democrats’ hopes usually go to die. And to see what happens after death.

2024 was a mixed bag for ACDP: yes, the state dodged the bullets of bigly crazy GOP candidates for governor and state superintendent of education. But then it also voted for the winner at the top of the ticket. And locally, despite lots of door-knocking and shoe leather, town and county Dem candidates lost in droves.

As usual.

When the ACDP county chair asked for a show of hands by officeholders at one meeting, only one or maybe two hands went up, even in a crowded hall.

But Alamance Dems are blessed to have a superb team of co-chairs in Ron and Elizabeth Osborne. Ron is a retired electrical engineer, who organized many a team of lineworkers in several states to get the lights on after natural disasters; so he understands about detail work, which is the everyday menu of on-the-ground politicking. Elizabeth has been a schoolteacher, and knows about tests.  Party politics is full of tests, financial, organizational, and building/rebuilding morale after “flunking” electoral contests.

Morale building among Tarheel Democrats is a constant struggle: at the state level, with only a few exceptions a proto-MAGA Republican machine has been in the saddle since 2011, and has made North Carolina a continuing test lab for the main elements of Project 2025.

Ron Osborne, though, besides being an engineer, is an articulate history buff and a Quaker, with Carolina Quaker ancestors back to before the (American) revolution. He has deployed this heritage, and links to the Quakers’ long struggle for abolition, women’s rights, and other noble (but often losing) causes to enrich county party meetings.

Using a combination of calm revival homilies, celebrations of civil rights history, as well as the standard fundraising pitches and campaign nuts and bolts, he and Elizabeth have grown and shepherded a remarkably diverse membership through the gloomiest days of post-Kamala PTSD. They have successfully added inspiration, inclusion and encouragement to the mix of preparations to get Democrats up off the floor and charged up to do better next time.

Next time came November 4. And the Osborne labors paid off bigtime—well, big for this relatively small county. Dems won three —count ‘em!— contested mayor’s offices, including those in Burlington, the largest city, and Graham, the county seat. Those plus five town/city council seats. That amounts to an earthquake here.

This is an outcome so far missed by big media: is Alamance just an obscure smalltime  fluke? — or can some insight be extracted from it for next time? Maybe, perhaps it might be a bellwether?

We’ll soon see. After all, the NEXT next time is coming in less than a year. And it will be for ACDP what the army calls a “target rich” environment: A U. S. Senate seat is up, plus fourteen House seats, and there’s a veto-proof MAGA majority in the legislature that is overdue for busting up. Not to mention, the ICEman MAGA county sheriff to send packing.

Plenty of history for Ron Osborne to preach about. Plenty of nuts and bolts too, plus money to  raise.

And hopefully, there’ll be plenty more for some go-getter reporters to wake up & tell the world about.