John Lassiter pauses Election Day campaigning to grip-and-grin at the unveiling of Uptown’s new Disco Chicken. Pat McCrory is off shilling for trains in Tampa but hurries back in time to give Lassiter a consolation hug.

Local Republicans need to think long and hard about what comes next.

The turnout map for 2009 is eerily similar to that of 2007. The further you get from GOP ground zero at roughly Providence and Sharon Amity, the lower the turnout. Lassiter ran as a McCrory Republican. I don’t think you can discount the connection.

Lassiter needed more of the large suburban precincts to turn out above 30 percent, like Olde Providence did for him, giving him over 900 votes, 700 more than Anthony Foxx received. Instead he got GOP precincts along Rea Road and into Ballantyne turning out at 24 percent (Pct. 232), 27 percent (Pct. 112), 29 percent (Pct. 90), 20 percent (Pct. 226), 26 percent (Pct. 144), and 24 percent (Pct. 137). That last one — Providence Country Club — has over 5100 upper middle-class voters who went 80-20 for Lassiter, yet the local GOP could not even get one quarter of them to the polls.

Last year the Official Excuse for this dismal performance was the Obamawave coupled with biased reporting discouraging people from coming out to vote for GOP candidates. Maybe it was the weather this year: It was too nice out so all Repubs went golfing instead of to the polls.

Meanwhile, Greensboro just booted out its first incumbent mayor ever in favor of a first-time candidate running on a platform of fiscal conservatism. No one expected Bill Knight to top Yvonne Johnson, but he did:

Knight, a retired certified public accountant, has promised to cut tens of millions of dollars from the city budget — an appealing prospect for voters who are disappointed that Greensboro has the highest tax rate among large North Carolina cities.

“I want an efficient city government. Let’s remake what a municipal government is all about,” Knight said.

Huh. And Knight will have a city council committed to the same thing. Double huh.

Special bonus incompetency to the Uptown paper of record, which omitted Libertarian Party at-large candidate Travis Wheat from its Election Day candidate rundown and today does not even bother to run a correction.

Oh, and look, today’s edit on the new city council continues to make the mistake of identifying Tariq Bokhari’s candidacy with the Tea Party movement. The Dilworth libs want to do this so they can claim that voters “rejected” the “extremism” of Tea Party issues. Check out this fairy tale:

With voters choosing a Democrat for mayor, adding a Democrat to the at-large lineup and giving a thumbs down to three conservative Republicans running at-large, it’s tempting to conclude that Tuesday’s election was a rejection of the more extreme wing of the Republican Party. Candidates Bokhari and Ridenhour were organizers of the anti-tax Tea Party rallies earlier this year and had courted the party’s conservatives. Peacock ran a more middle-of-the-road campaign, a strategy that paid off, despite some grumbling about his lack of conservative credentials from the right wing in his party.

This is a fabrication. We pointed out the differences between Bokhari and Ridenhour back in September when this myth first surfaced.

Bokhari ran for city council in 2007, Ridenhour had not sought office before he used the Tea Party structure he put together to seek office this year. Bokhari and Ridenhour are friends and share many of the same positions, but they are not both creations of the Tea Party movement. Bokhari was endorsed by former mayor and transit tax supporter Richard Vinroot. McCrory did a robocall for Bokhari (and Jaye Rao) and to my knowledge not for Ridenhour.

Further, any objective take on their campaigns would put Ridenhour further away from Peacock than Bokhari. In fact, it would not be unfair to put Bokhari equidistant between Ridenhour and Peacock, with Ridenhour slightly to the right, and Peacock to the middle. But such details mess up the simplistic narrative the Uptown paper wants to hawk. As ever, I simply cannot tell if the Tryon Street crew believes its own propaganda or just does not care to get the facts straight.

For now, understand that the Uptown paper wants you to know that any city-wide candidate who is not the son of a former mayor and does not support a publicly subsidized farmers market in Uptown cannot possibly be elected.

Bonus 2010 Prediction: The state GOP is gonna rue the day it decided to stand by and watch Charlotte turn into a blue-vote generating machine.