And exactly who thought that Mark McMains — the Libertarian nominee for Insurance Commissionerwould be by far the top LP vote-getter? McMains 152K votes swamped the barely 25K votes that Bob Barr got from North Carolina.

Elsewhere Chris Cole finished with a little over 3 percent of the vote with 131K votes while Mike Munger came in a tad under 3 percent with almost 121K votes.

Update: Larry Kissell crushed Robin Hayes the district’s Meck precincts. Fully 20 percent of Kissell’s votes came from the sliver of Mecklenburg that Hayes represented. Dabbing more in as I go:

  • Jennifer Roberts’ support pretty much tracked one-for-one with the park & rec bond. Both got around 232K votes countywide. Republicans did not so much as sniff any of the at-large seats. Maybe they’ll rethink running as Democrats Lite. Nah.
  • Truly shocking that Pat McCrory could not even carry Mecklenburg, losing by a couple hundred votes. East Charlotte all the way to the county line left their mayor hanging.
  • Local Republicans must be wondering if the previously safe county District 1 has forever flipped to competitive. S. Rao Kommareddi piled up huge vote totals in the close-in “hips” of the district.
  • Funny stuff from a Munger release — While conceding that “one of the other two candidates will become governor,” Munger claimed a victory on behalf of all Libertarians for besting the states “enormous requirements to stay on the ballot and not have to get the damn signatures” on petitions.

    “This is just the first step,” Munger said. “We got the signatures and we satisfied the requirements of the State by playing Simon Says in just the way they wants us to.”

  • Not funny stuff from Dan Ramirez via the Uptown paper of record. “I knew all along the problem is numbers. We are outnumbered by Democrats and it shows there. It’s not a question of ideas or philosophy or anything.” No, of course not. How could it be?
  • And scary stuff from Harold Cogdell. “There are people hurting in this community and we need to stay focused on helping them out.” That’s called vote-buying. Hang onto your wallets.