Western, northwest turnout pushed Knight’s mayoral win
GREENSBORO — Galvanizing newly annexed residents to vote buoyed Bill Knight to victory in Tuesday’s mayoral election, observers say, while overconfidence in key districts for incumbent Yvonne Johnson sped her loss.
“I did not anticipate that people would have this attitude,” Johnson said, “that people didn’t think about voting and thought, 'She would be all right.’”
Maps showing majority support by precinct across Greensboro reveal a split of the city. The western half generally supported Knight, and the eastern half got behind Johnson.
But a deeper dig shows a discrepancy in turnout. Turnouts in the northwest and west precincts generally exceeded 10 percent, occasionally topping 40 percent, of registered voters.
Areas in the south and east saw lower turnout.
In a small election — 18 percent of registered voters cast ballots — every vote counts even more.
It’s something Knight and Johnson understand, for different reasons.
Johnson said supporters from some of her key precincts called Wednesday to say they didn’t vote because they believed she was a lock to win a second term.
Bill Burckley, an adviser to Knight’s campaign, said the campaign concentrated on northwest Greensboro and the Cardinal, where parts of the neighborhood had resisted annexation in 2007.
Knight bought print and television ads and also worked his contacts in service clubs and through people he knew as a member of the Cardinal Country Club. Knight also spoke to residents and visited service clubs.
Burckley said Knight needed to make up about 4,800 votes, the margin Johnson beat Milton Kern in 2007.
Knight won the city Tuesday by 935 votes, a margin that he collected across six of those newly annexed areas near Piedmont Triad International Airport.
Meanwhile, precincts in Johnson strongholds had much lower turnout than in 2007.
In the previous election, Johnson beat Kern 346-4 in one southeast Greensboro precinct.
In that same precinct Tuesday, only 286 voted for Johnson while two voted for Knight.
Johnson dropped votes throughout districts 1 and 2, which are traditionally black neighborhoods with a history of supporting Johnson.
Johnson said she and her campaign volunteers went door-to-door to win votes, made calls and mailed fliers. She even made appearances in the Cardinal neighborhood to talk directly to voters.
She said that poor turnout and “that lackadaisical, apathetic attitude that says 'everything is going to be all right’” led to her loss.
Others repeated that message.
Burckley has worked for both Melvin “Skip” Alston, the chairman of the county commissioners, and former City Councilman Earl Jones. He said he heard some dissatisfaction with Johnson because of what he called more of a focus on consensus-building than on building jobs and handling other issues in the city.
“Based upon that, I just had a feeling that the black community was not going to turn out like they had a couple of years ago,” Burckley said.
Not that turnout overall was too different. In 2007, a total of 32,845 voted in the mayoral race. In Tuesday’s vote, 34,347 voted.
Burckley said Knight focused on reaching middle-class voters who were likely to go vote for the bond issue.
“He was good at networking and using the network to get his message out,” Burckley said.
One third-party observer suggested that backlash politics — which some national pundits said influenced Republican wins in gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey — did not play into Johnson’s loss.
“The backlash will percolate rather than trickle down,” said Hunter Bacot, director of the Elon University Poll. “And in North Carolina, the two largest cites have Democrats as mayors. There’s no real pattern there.”
With Knight’s victory and other new faces on the nonpartisan City Council, there will be a majority of Republican-affiliated council members sworn in Dec. 1.
Sharon Hightower, who leads the Guilford Unity Effort, sees the election result as a local backlash against local leadership.
The mayor, schools superintendent, commissioners chairman and city manager are black.
“Too much African American leadership in this town prompted people to go out and remove and eradicate what they may have viewed as too much liberalism,” said Hightower, who did not work on Johnson’s campaign but backed her candidacy.
“I can’t blame it on anything other than we didn’t get out to vote,” Hightower said.
Contact Gerald Witt at 373-7008 or gerald.witt@news-record.com
Accompanying Photos
Photo Caption: Mayor-elect Bill Knight receives congratulations from Julie Latimer during lunch at Stamey's Barbecue in Greensboro on Wednesday.
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