Even though I didn’t win the Columbus Township Trustee race (it was unbelievably close!), we accomplished a lot of great things this election.
The biggest accomplishment was securing every single advisory board position in the Columbus Township office.
The final vote total was 6,953 for my opponent and 6,876 for me. A difference of 77 votes, a mere .56%!
Meanwhile, our three Democratic candidates for Columbus Township board were all elected, with our third-place finisher beating the top Republican by 438 votes. And that’s great news. Two of the Republicans running in this race “advised” former trustee Bern Jackson, while he was stealing $1.12 million from the township.
Considering straight-party voting included the township trustee race, but not the advisory board race, and that 6,549 voted straight Republican and only 3,636 voted straight Democrat, this tells me if the trustee race wasn’t part of straight-party voting, I’d have easily won. It also told me that we got our message out, and it resonated with voters.
Our message was that we needed to restore checks and balances in this one-party county and the one-party Columbus Township office because one-party rule for so long anywhere usually results in corruption, which it has here.
We also got the message out that if elected, we’d do a great job being stewards of the taxpayer’s money and we’d do a great job helping the people that the township trustees office is supposed to help.
While I didn’t win, we made plenty of progress in this race. We were 12 points higher than four years ago and 21 points over 12 years ago (we didn’t have a candidate eight years ago).
We also for the first Democrat elected to county council in 40 years. Congratulations to Jane Garner-Kelley.
So, things are looking up.
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