- I ended up winning with 62% of the vote. True to my word I didn’t cast a vote for the position and with the low vote totals and the margin of victory if I voted for myself it would have been 63%.
- I felt bad for Crank Lady as she put some serious time and effort into the campaign, including mailers (which I judged to be too expensive for something that was going to go right in the trash) and physically visiting a good number of residents in the township. She is a long time resident, did the job for decades (winning the office, unopposed of course, five times in a row) and her and her husband are, what I would call, “well off”, and yet, couldn’t pull off a win against a relative stranger who sat in his basement for most of the campaign.
- Probably related, my brother asked about the political leanings of the “Crank” and an “H.R. lady” type of person conjures of visions of one type of character. However, that’s actually not the case here, or not directly the case. For instance, even driving by their house this morning I saw that they had not one, but two Trump for president signs on their property. The issue is that they (and probably the husband specifically) is strongly libertarian which means holding a strong deference to a moral order, a moral order which has only existed in the minds of libertarians since, I don’t know, the end of the Civil War? This leads to an odd disconnect as they believe that being sticklers for rules is a service to the community, even though those writing the rules would smash their community in heartbeat if given the chance. However, their duty fulfilled, they’re never to be seen at any function in the area (“What? Showing up for ‘community’ events sounds like ‘communism’!”).
- So, even though I rarely leave the house I ended up being seen more, at the right events, than my competitor, just because I happened to be there, not through any intention of my own. And in fact through my limited experience it’s reinforced the maxim “80% of life is just showing up”. I see this in other local elected officials who just happen to be where other people are at because they just made a point to be there.
- Speaking of which, I ran into the clerk I mentioned of the neighboring township who wasn’t running at one such event and it turned out she just never turned anything in to be on the ballot and that she just needed one person to write her name in (she got 19). She went on to mention that, even then, someone else could do it if they wanted, but there wasn’t anyone else anyway (as she was essentially drafted into the spot, as I was). Not entirely related, but in the whole county only one other township had a contested clerk job.
- Completely unrelated:
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