Posted on 05/22/2019 7:38:36 AM PDT by Vigilanteman
Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania is in the news again. Last year, you may recall all the hype about Democrat Connor Lamb narrowly winning a special congressional district election in a district overwhelmingly won by Donald Trump in 2016.
Westmoreland County alone, in fact, provided a bigger vote margin for Trump than he won throughout the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, which put him over the 270 vote threshold to win the presidency.
What they did not tell you is that Lamb's margin of victory came entirely from neighboring Allegheny County, home to the deep blue city of Pittsburgh and that Lamb's appeal was as a fresh face (and lots of hard work and distancing himself from Nancy Pelosi) against disgraced former congressman Tim Murphy, who had the resigned the previous autumn after being caught urging his mistress to have an abortion, revealing not only his inability to control his zipper but disgracing his overwhelmingly pro-life constituency.
Fast forward one year later and Lamb has faithfully returned to Pelosi's plantation and arranged to have the PA Supreme Court draw all of Westmoreland County out of his new district.
The bigger story is local elections, especially at the school board level. The pattern here has always been the local education union chooses the candidates, turns out 100% of their supporters and, since they cross-file, the public has little choice in the fall except to pick the union backed candidates or make write-in vote protests. Well, maybe not this time.
The public has seen school board budgets tinkled away as the school board rewards their friends (the education union) and punishes their enemies (the taxpayers).
The big story in Hempfield School District (one of the largest in Westmoreland County) is that only two of the three union backed candidates will advance to general election ballot on the Democrat ballots where they came in 2nd and 4th for five available positions and only one will advance to general election ballot on the Republican side where she came in 5th (same person who finished 2nd on the Democrat Ballot). So the likely outcome is that only one will win the general election to play stooge to the education union.
The top vote getter in both primaries was a former school board member who was openly critical of the stooge arrangement and pledged changes with a low budget campaign confined mostly to social media, no lawn signs and the like.
All the other winners (2 in the Democrat, 3 in the Republican primary) were equally critical of the board's stooge arrangement, but actively campaigned.
The story was even more dramatic in the Southmoreland School District which extends into Fayette County. All five candidate were union backed on both primaries because there were no challengers so they would be running unopposed to the five positions available. However, a reform slate decided to conduct a write-in campaign and appears on track to win three and possibly as many as four of the ballot positions.
The GOP does not even bother to field candidates for many of these races in Allegheny County. Pathetic.
GOP barely took the registration edge in Westmoreland County this year. This is the first time in the 17 years I have lived here that they actually issued recommendations on school board candidates. At least, it is a start.
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