Hit Coffee is not a partisan political blog, so I am going to avoid making any sort of direct commentary on the goodness or badness of the GOP’s success in Tuesday’s elections. Everyone’s got their opinion (some excited, some mixed). Everything I have to say about the Republican success this year applies equally to the Democratic success in 2006.

Among the Democratic casualties this time around was the local County Board Member, Mona Garacci. Think of a Delosian CBM as a cross between a city councilman and a mayor of sorts. They vote on county policy, but also have some executive authority on how money within their district is spent. District Four, which includes East Oak and the larger Mayne area where I was raised, really hit the jackpot when a former Colosse City Treasurer decided to make her landing place as our district and decided to represent us when term limited out of her previous job. Despite having no real connections to the area that I am aware of, she relocated to Mayne and represented the district quite well. My mother, who almost never votes for Democrats, voted for her twice. My only complaint was that she didn’t run for mayor or something more substantial. After two terms in office, she’s been unseated.

This happens in Colosse and Delosa, as well as the rest of the country I am sure, any time a party has a particularly good showing in national elections (usually in an off-year election). I knew of some really good Republican judges that were wiped out four years ago. Twelve years before that, when the Republicans started taking over the state, I didn’t know many of the Democrats that got unseated but there were a lot of Republicans that got elected that had no business in public office. I don’t mean that they had ideas with which I disagreed. I mean that someone was elected to the State Supreme Court who hadn’t yet passed the bar. But he was the only Republican that declared for that race, won the nomination on that basis, and then was swept in with a general Republican sentiment.

As Delosa became more Republican generally, this kept happening though less and less with each passing election as more Republicans of substance started running. Then the local and state party apparatuses started making sure that those that mistakenly got in started getting opponents that would unseat them. The system ultimately worked itself out save for some of the misjudgments of Republican politics in the south more generally (but that’s a matter of subjective judgment).

When the Democrats stormed in in the 2006 elections, you actually saw the same things except in the other direction at the county level which flipped from red to blue. Colosse has hundreds of elected judges and so unless a judge is particularly notorious, it doesn’t really matter what they stand for (if such things should matter with judges) or what their ethics are (which should matter). One judge all but refused to allow prosecutions to go forward if the law was one he did not agree with. A district attorney in neighboring Southport County announced that it was county policy never to pursue the death penalty (which I oppose, but such broad policy-making should not be a DA’s job). And so on, and so on.

Little is known of Board Member Garacci’s opponent even by those that actually follow local politics. He was, like some of the kooky Republicans of 1994 and Democrats in 2006, the guy who just happened to decide to run. Garacci, for her part, speaks well of the guy. She also shot down some pretty shameful attempts by the Colosse Herald to suggest that her loss had something to do with the fact that she was a woman and a childless and unmarried one at that. Losing with class was perhaps her best revenge.