Hold onto your wallets: The Guilford County Board of Commissioners already has a solid Democratic majority, but come early December, it’ll be a solid Democratic board entirely.
Republican Commissioners Alan Perdue and Pat Tillman both lost their reelection bids on Tuesday, Nov. 3. They were the only two Republicans on the nine-member board, and both of their successors are Democrats. When the new commissioners are sworn early in next month, all nine seats will be held by Democrats for the first time this century – and for the first time anyone can remember.
In District 2, Democrat Scott Jones – who often is a speaker from the floor regarding housing at meetings – defeated Perdue by 712 votes, 13,076 to 12,364, according to unofficial returns. Jones took 51 percent of the vote. It was the second time the two had faced each other for the seat. Perdue won their first matchup in 2018.
This year, voters frustrations with Trump and Republican members of Congress, voiced their anger by voting Democratic straight up and down the ticket.
In District 3, Democrat Derek Mobley turned the tables on Tillman, who beat him with 52 percent of the vote four years ago. This time, Mobley got 19,274 votes, or 54 percent, to Tillman’s 15,329, or 43 percent.
(Green Party candidate Jeanine Couto received 862 votes.)
The Guilford County Board of Elections is scheduled to certify the results on Friday, Nov. 13, which may be a scary day for Guilford County property owners given how much the Democrats have been increasing taxes. Perdue and Tillman didn’t have the power to overrule Democrats when it came to spending, but they have been sane conservative voices on a board that has raised taxes immensely in the last six years after a Republican majority board held power for eight years and lowered taxes during that time but never raised them.
Democrats also held the three other commissioners’ seats on the ballot. Greg Drumwright won the at-large seat being vacated by longtime Commissioner Kay Cashion. Lisa McMillan ran unopposed for the District 7 seat that Frankie Jones is leaving, and District 1 Commissioner Carlvena Foster was unopposed for another term.
Perdue will leave the board after 12 years. He was elected without opposition in 2014 and took office that December after retiring as Guilford County’s emergency services director. He’d worked his way up through the department, and, when he won his 2022 primary, the Rhino Times noted that his “standout career” in emergency services had earned him the respect of firefighters and law enforcement officers across the county.
He’s also served as the executive director of the Safer Buildings Coalition – where his work has focused on making sure first responders can communicate inside buildings during emergencies. Perdue often travels around the country to give talks on public safety.
That background came in handy on the board. In 2024, after the commissioners adopted a budget that left money for replacing aging emergency vehicles on the cutting-room floor, Perdue kept pressing the issue – and he got the board to take it seriously. The Rhino Times ran a story with the headline “Commissioner Alan Perdue Convinces Board That Keeping County Residents Alive Is Important Too.”
Tillman, a Marine Corps combat veteran who served in Iraq, joined the commissioners on Dec. 5, 2022, succeeding Republican Justin Conrad. He’d spent six years representing District 3 on the Guilford County Board of Education, where he helped launch five Career Academies.
In 2019, Tillman took a lead role in developing the program, which was designed to give students skills they could use to land good jobs. When Tillman won his commissioners’ seat he brought a lot of leadership experience and an impressive resume with him.
It wasn’t all that long ago that Republicans were the ones calling the shots. They took control of the board n 2012 and held it for eight years. Democrats won it back in 2020 and had a 7-to-2 majority going into Tuesday’s election. They spending and tax property tax hikes started right away and now the group has spent a pile of savings the Republicans left them with down to levels that state financial oversight officers consider dangerously low. County’s need a solid savings account to handle emergencies and provide liquidity throughout the year since revenues come in unevenly.
The board’s current Democratic majority is already enough to pass a budget over Republican objections – as the board did in June when Perdue and Tillman cast the only two votes against the spending plan and its 5.9-cent property tax rate increase.
When the next budget comes up, any opposition from the commissioners’ side of the room will have to come from a Democrat. But you can expect to unanimous budget votes for the next couple of years at least.
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What worries me is the unrelenting leftward movement of the Overton Window. When I came to America the President was a rock-ribbed Republican and former California Governor named Ronald Reagan.
Today no Republican has a snowball in Hell’s chance of becoming California Governor, because the demographics of the state have changed so much.
The Greensboto City Council used to be split between the two parties, and the Guilford County Board of Commissioners was normally Republican.
All that has changed.
In the long run, the Left seems invincible. In another example, the UK could never elect a genuine right-winger like Margaret Thatcher today.
In a fundamental sense, I wonder what’s going on. Is it Biblical?
It’s that conservatives have ignored the average American’s struggles as politics has become only about money since Citizen United (2010) for them…..at least Democrats give lip service to trying to help the average Americans with access to healthcare, jobs, and a helping hand when needed. They even gave us a solution for affordable healthcare until conservatives ruined it by claiming they would ‘repeal and replace’ and instead only broke it and made it worse.
The best thing about this election is that we learned that billionaires can’t actually buy elections results in our democracy. Think of what better uses for Americans could have been made of the $400+ million Elon spent trying to buy elections for a failed republican party that ignored the struggles of the average American.
Cheers
Greensboro is lost. Been going downhill with the democrats in the majority, now they have free rein. Watch what happens next.
One of the reasons I left. In a much better place now.
As it should be…we get what we vote for…they will continue to rob us blind as well as the city council and sheriff’s department and there is not a thing we can do about it…we deserve exactly what we got…as it should be folks!