Thursday, June 9, 2011

District 113 Special Election

As I point out in my upcoming column for the Banner-Herald, which I think will run on Sunday, 12 June, the partisan voting patterns revealed in the four elections held in Georgia House of Representatives District 113 as it is currently configured do not bode well for any Democrat.  Yes, the special election is “non-partisan," but that means that it will not be preceded by party primaries – not that candidates’ party affiliations will not appear on the ballot.

 
That being the case, Dan Matthews may have already started hedging his bets.  I see that his blog, formerly known as “Oconee Democrat,” as the URL still plainly indicates, has been recast as “Oconee County, GA Politics.”  I don’t know when that transformation took place – but I find it of note, nonetheless.  Also, I heard an early round of Matthews’ campaign spots on WGAU in which he was noted to be a former “Oconee County Committee Chair.”  Pointedly absent from the terminology, however, was the operative word “Democratic.”

On 09 May, before announcing his own candidacy, Matthews wrote on his blog (and what functions as his pseudo campaign web site), “I would be happy to support her [Bell] in the seemingly inevitable run off but only if she announces as soon as possible.” 

I find Matthews' candidacy interesting, as Bell did just that as noted in this article in the following day's edition of the Banner-Herald.    Also, according to the Secretary of State’s web site, Bell qualified for the election the day before Matthews did: Alan Alexander and Chuck Williams qualified on Monday, 16 May, and Sarah Bell followed on Tuesday, 17 May.  Matthews was the last to qualify on Wednesday, 18 May.

As noted above, Matthews appears to be using his blog as a pseudo campaign site.  Alan Alexander has a dedicated campaign web site.  To the best of my knowledge, neither Bell nor Williams have campaign web sites, but the former distributed this handout at a recent meeting of the Clarke County Republican Party.  Speaking of which, all four candidates are expected to be at the next meeting of the CCRC, scheduled for Monday, 13 June.

I’m not picking on Matthews, it is just that I know little about the other candidates.  Alexander appears to have the political connections, but has some issues; Bell has lots of community service experience; Williams is an unknown to me, other than what I’ve read in the newspaper about the bank failure.

Addendum - Here is the campaign web site for cCuck Williams (thanks to Shawn): http://www.votechuckwilliams.com/.  Also, sorry for the weird formatting of this post; I used a word processing progam other that WORD and it appears that Blogger doesn;t like it very much.

Sphere: Related Content

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Jesus said to do unto others as we would have them to do unto us. None of us would want our child thrown in jail with the sexual predators over marijuana. None of us would want to see an older family member’s home confiscated and sold by the police for growing a couple of marijuana plants for their aches and pains. It’s time to stop putting our own family members in jail over marijuana.

Which one of our candidates is going to help bring some common sense to this issue? How about $100 for a permit to grow a dozen plants? We can use the money for our schools, and it will put the drug gangs out of business for good!

james said...

I've long thought that the feds' "war on drugs" caused far more problems that it solved (its the libertarian in me). Alcohol prohibition did not work; gun prohibition has not worked; why should drug prohibition be any different?