While the N&R’s editorial page runs tributes to Obama and Hagan, the Winston-Salem Journal takes a different tack, calling for a nonpartisan Forsyth County school board.

Leave aside for a moment the Journal’s belief that non-partisan school boards work well in other counties. A look down Interstate 40 at the Guilford County Board of Education pretty much disproves that point of view. What struck me about the editorial was the logic put forth by nonpartisan proponents:

The Rev. Kelly Carpenter, a co-chairman of the strategy team for CHANGE, said that many people probably vote for school-board members as part of a straight-party ticket, and making the race nonpartisan would encourage more people to study up on the candidates.

Now let’s turn to yesterday’s election, where, according to the state Board of Elections, 58 percent of Democrats voted a straight-party ticket, as opposed to 40 percent of Republicans. With that in mind, you have to conclude that straight-ticket voting is what propelled Bev Perdue into the governor’s chair. I simply can’t come up with another reason for her decisive victory in what was regard as an extremely tight race.

Perdue ran a horrible campaign, running all over the place on the issues. Now we’ve got a governor who, as Meck Deck puts it, “will be an utter disaster who will move to raise taxes in order to keep the pork flowing to her special interest lobbies and favored insiders.” Mind you, this is coming from someone who is no fan of (still) Mayor Pat.

Straight-party voting certainly played a role in Hagan’s decisive victory over Dole. Yes, Dole was vunerable from the start, and people are quick to cite Godless PAC ad as the deciding factor, but Hagan, in my view, reacted to the situation poorly. I talked to a liberal friend of mine yesterday who said he surprised by Hagan’s shrillness and defensiveness during a radio interview. Hagan, too, was all over the place on the issues, seemingly reacting to them as they evolved instead of taking a stand early on and sticking with it.

So now we’ve got who we’ve got, and I have to question how many voters truly studied the issues before pulling that straight-party ticket.

JLF lead man John Hood, who knows more about these things than I do, says:

Here in North Carolina, the Obama phenomenon played at least a modest role in electing Kay Hagan to the U.S. Senate and likely played a decisive role in electing Beverly Perdue as governor. Perdue faced a spirited challenge from Pat McCrory, one that she probably would have lost had turnout in Democratic regions not soared to unprecedented heights – and the vast majority of those voters came to the polls, many of them long before Election Day, to vote for Obama, not for her.