As anticipation continues to mount over this fall’s Presidential election, one of Alamance County’s superior court judges has sprung what amounts to an “October surprise” ahead of November’s big vote.
Tom Lambeth, the county’s senior resident superior court judge, publicly announced that he’ll retire from his judicial position on October 1 during an otherwise unrelated appearance before the county’s board of commissioners on Monday.
Lambeth, who will turn 65 next week, was a bit coy when he shared his intentions that evening in the midst of a spontaneous encomium after the commissioners signed off on a $37 million proposal to renovate and expand the county’s criminal courts building in Graham.
“It’s pretty well known around the courthouse,” the superior court judge said after John Paisley, Jr., the chairman of Alamance County’s commissioners, invited him to announce his retirement plans. “But I retire in six weeks – on October 1 – so this will be a [courthouse] addition that I won’t get to enjoy except as a taxpaying citizen.”
A Democrat who has served on the superior court bench since 2017, Lambeth is currently serving an eight-year term in office that isn’t slated to run out until December of 2026. Yet, his decision to step down more than two years ahead of schedule seems to be more than mere happenstance.
The timing of Lambeth’s departure will give North Carolina’s Democratic governor Roy Cooper a chance to appoint a successor to fill out his remaining term ahead of a gubernatorial race that the pollsters contend could go either way.
There’s no guarantee that Lambeth’s anointed successor will win the seat outright when it comes up for a vote in 2026. Yet, the odds that Cooper’s chosen appointee will prevail at the polls are better than even based on prior experience.
In fact, Lambeth owes his own position to a gubernatorial appointment that he received from Cooper in 2018 after the retirement of the county’s then-senior resident superior court judge Wayne Abernathy.
Prior to his appointment to superior court, which preceded his outright election in 2018, Lambeth had served as one of the county’s four district court judges – a position that he originally assumed thanks to a nod from another governor in 2007.
Before he embarked on his career as a judge, Lambeth had been an attorney in private practice – although for a time, he also served seven years as a member, part of that time as chairman, of the Alamance-Burlington school board.
