Letter: Looking for local election news amid the clutter

Graphic by Lori Deaton

Every four years at this time, I get very aggravated by the tendency of next year’s hopeless presidential elections to displace and suppress coverage of this year’s local elections, in which some hope remains. The role of Asheville in this problem has changed, but not for the better, since Asheville election news promises to be even more displaced next year than it would have been this year.

I also don’t necessarily mean there is any hope in Buncombe County’s remaining 2023 municipal elections. The glimmer of hope lies with the good (meaning anti-zoning, anti-natalist, abortion-funding, unvaccinated leftist) candidates in at least one of the 35,000 or so municipalities in the U.S., a number that dwarfs the two major political parties in terms of choices. This (Grafton, N.H.) is where the hope for third parties also lies, not with Cornel West, who has far too few mayoral endorsements to bother.

The reality, though, is that coverage of these tens of thousands of races is so poor that not even modern AI search engines can find it amid the presidential clutter, and that’s a real shame.

— Alan Ditmore
Leicester

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