On the weekend before the Georgia runoff for U.S. Senate, the state’s Republican lieutenant governor called Herschel Walker, the GOP nominee, “one of the worst candidates in our party’s history.” He was right and voters rejected the Heisman Trophy winner and re-elected Raphael Warnock. The margin was disturbing, though, because so many Republicans showed they are willing to vote for a demonstrably incompetent candidate with a history of domestic violence, infidelity, and lying besides Donald Trump.
In Georgia, middle of the road voters and Republicans with a moral compass saved the day. Haywood County, North Carolina, wasn’t so lucky. Voters there rejected the current tax collector “who had achieved the highest tax collection rate in the county’s history,” according the newspaper, The Mountaineer, and elected a 21-year-old college student who has never held a job and still lives with his parents. The college student, Sebastian Cochran, is a Republican and the outgoing tax collector, Greg West, is a Democrat.
Cochran disputes his lack of experience, saying he serves as treasurer of the college Republicans and sells stuff on e-bay. He also mows lawns for spending money. At least he’s motivated.
I don’t want to disparage Cochran. He just put his name on the ballot. I do want to chastise Republican voters who put partisanship over the interests of their community. Tax collector is not a partisan position. Hell, it probably shouldn’t even be an elected office, but it is in Haywood County. Despite saying they didn’t know Cochran, Republicans put him on voter guides, telling the party faithful to vote for the candidate who has never drawn a paycheck to oversee collecting $40 million in revenue for the county.
When Republicans took control of the legislature in 2011, they made judicial and many local elections, like school board and city council, partisan. They politicized positions that should be about more about good government than party ideology. Now, we’re seeing the impact of their actions—unqualified candidates winning elections for positions that demand competence and experience.
Republicans will argue that both sides behave the same, but that’s not true. Democrats have generally weeded out extremists and incompetence in the primary process. Republicans have done the opposite—they’ve nominated them. The GOP is largely controlled by extremists who ensure that people like Herschel Walker, Blake Masters, Kari Lake, and Doug Mastriano become nominees while more moderate or mainstream candidates can’t win primaries. While the GOP extremists lose general elections in races with large electorates, they win rural and suburban areas where Republicans heavily outnumber Democrats.
In North Carolina, the GOP seems poised to nominate Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson in 2024. He won in 2020 because nobody knew who he was. In 2024, everybody will know him and they’ll know all of his extremist positions that alienate moderate voters. In other races, though, Republicans will nominate unqualified judicial candidates and local candidates in rural counties who win handily in general elections purely because they have an “R” behind their name. Those positions become jobs for people who otherwise can’t hold one.
I wish Sebastian Cochran all the best. If he has management skills, maybe he can surround himself with competent administrators. Regardless, his election should be a cautionary tell to elected officials who want everything politicized.
Thomas Mills is the founder and publisher of PoliticsNC.com. Before beginning PoliticsNC, Thomas spent twenty years as a political and public affairs consultant. Learn more >
Democrats have weeded out incompetence in the primary process…?? Seriously?? You say that with a straight face? Need I point out the astonishing incompetence, and the utter lack of credibility, of Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman? This guy can’t even talk a coherent sentence, but we’re supposed to believe he represents the brightest and the best for Pennsylvania???
While we’re at it, let’s look at the BIGGER picture. YEP–No better, nor more sterling example of sheer cognitive competency, than Joe Biden himself! Yessir–if ever there was a poster child for cognitive dysfunction, it would be Joe Biden! Biden is a fumbling, stumbling fossil who should be shuffled off into a nursing home, but Leftists prop him up because they need a ‘face’—a public image that they can manipulate, all while—from behind—a cabal of radical Leftists leverages their influence across the body politic, the media, the courts, and the school systems to ‘win the hearts and minds of the people’—which simply means that their goal is to exercise full control over every single aspect of American life! Democrats are not at all about good governance; they are all about control!
While we are at it—let’s look at some other sterling examples of Democrat leadership: For example, there is Elizabeth Warren—a woman who can’t seem to figure out that she is a white, Anglo woman, and not a Native American Indian, as she has so staunchly asserted! Flat-out lie, folks—but by promoting it, she managed to leverage the lie to get where she is today!
But since we ARE talking about the Biden’s, let’s not forget that young man who represents the very best of today’s youth—Mr. Hunter Biden himself!! Yessir—no talent, no functional know-how, a strung-out druggie– yet he managed to pull in millions from foreign countries thru sheer corruption and criminal behavior, all while shamelessly leveraging the influence of his family name for financial gain. Yeahhh…every parent would be proud of a kid like this, right???
WAY too many other examples to cite, but let’s not forget Adam Schiff and Hillary Clinton—two other examples of venal, shameless politicians whose lies were never allowed to be challenged at the time, but which have since been shredded and discredited, one by one, since Trump’s two illicit impeachments. We can now know that those lies have been credibly disproven, and to have been baseless fantasies generated for the sheer purpose of removing a President whom Democrats were afraid would expose their lies and corruption! Don’t accuse Republicans of extremism, or of being elected to a job for which they are otherwise not competent nor qualified to hold. The Democrat Party is the poster child for dysfunctional incompetency—witness our babbling idiot, aka the Vice President—and your accusations against Republicans falls absolutely flat. If you want to blather about no experience, no moral compass, or no job skills—you better look at the Democrat Party first!
Every other county in NC has an appointed Tax Collector. But our state representatives won’t support that for us. They’re republicans.
The republican wave happened in WNC ! Gives you a great insight about the people that live here ‘
This piece should go viral–it explains so much of what is wrong in our politics.
Come on Haywood County! Doesn’t anyone there read this blog, or is there just no defense for this apparent travesty?
When I lived in far western Kentucky some years ago, candidates for political offices would actually run on a platform simply of “I need a job!”
Elect a clown, expect a circus.
In McDowell County (as in many other places in this country) a dead squirrel could run for office, and as long as it had an (R) next to its name, get elected.
Unbelievable