As expected, Democratic incumbent June Atkinson won her primary easily.
Winston-Salem attorney and school board member Mark Johnson will be the Republican candidate for Superintendent of Public Instruction.
Johnson won 96 of the state’s 100 counties. Runner-up Rosemary Stein won four – Moore, Lee, Craven, and Carteret – and J. Wesley Sills was shut-out. Both Stein and Sills failed to win a plurality of votes in their home counties of Alamance and Harnett, respectively.
Curiously, Stein won Lee County by over 1,000 votes, but only around 100 votes separated Stein and Johnson in neighboring Moore County. My hunch is that Stein’s victories in Craven and Carteret counties were the handiwork of the Coastal Carolina Taxpayers Association, an active Tea Party group in the area.
Johnson fared best in the Piedmont Triad, which includes his home county of Forsyth, but struggled somewhat in urban and suburban counties elsewhere.
The outcome of down-ballot Council of State races, particularly this one, often depend on voter turnout and name recognition. Atkinson has the latter. The former is pretty unpredictable at this point, given the rancor over the Republican’s presidential nominee and Democratic apathy toward Hillary Clinton.
Regardless, Johnson has a sizable war chest and youth on his side. Atkinson is 67 years old and started working in state government in 1972. Johnson was born in 1983.
