A.N. EXCLUSIVE – Last week’s meeting at Morgantown Baptist Church, where Rev. Greg Drumwright announced his newest plans for a march in Graham, was also an opportunity for other like-minded speakers to lay out their vision for the future, as well as their disappointments about the local results of the 2020 elections, and critiques about what went wrong and how to improve in the future.
Among the speakers was Quinn Ray, alderman on the non-partisan Elon Board of Aldermen. Included here are some of the highlights of his remarks (about 2 minutes from his 20-minute talk).
In what he himself termed “rambling” comments to the group, Quinn outlined Democratic Party shortcomings from 2020, opportunities to “infiltrate” city councils in Burlington, Graham, and Mebane in the non-partisan municipal elections of 2021, and a potential strategy of uniting behind one Democratic candidate for one of the two county commissioner seats up in 2022.
Ray also took a jab at former Democratic county commissioner Bob Byrd, whom Ray described as a centrist, for being too quiet during his four previous years on the county board when he was the lone Democratic member. “Maybe we get one Democrat on board who will run their damn mouth the whole time,” Ray suggested.
Byrd was the top Democratic vote-getter among the six candidates for a seat on the board on November 3, but he ran 4,500 votes behind the third-place Republican. The top three candidates, all Republicans, won the seats, maintaining the all-Republican board that took over when Byrd lost in 2018. Democrats Kristen Powers and Dreama Caldwell placed fifth and sixth, respectively.
