Page Lemel made two pots of chili, one with meat and one with sweet potatoes and beans, for her friends and the campaign volunteers who had gathered to await election returns. They sat around a fire pit on her back deck in Brevard, North Carolina, where her house occupies a hill above Keystone Camp, the girls’ summer camp that she owns, the evergreens of the Pisgah National Forest visible in the distance. There were fourteen people in all, and the results from Transylvania County, where Lemel was running for a third term on the Board of Commissioners, had come in quickly, an hour after the polls closed.
“They were all far more depressed and upset than I was,” Lemel said the next day, as she considered her fall to fifth place in a competition for three spots. “I’m not the idealist that twenty-five- or twenty-six-year-olds are. They believe just because they will it, it’s supposed to happen.” She had known the risk she was taking, last December, when she quit the Republican Party in dismay over its priorities and values, particularly the ones exhibited by the President of the United States. She ran, and lost, on a ballot that listed her party registration as unaffiliated. She had no regrets, she said, her voice calm, with no self-pity. “You have to live true to who you are. You get to the pearly gates by yourself.”
Mike Hawkins, the county-commission chair, took the same risk, ditching the Republicans, and did even worse, finishing behind Lemel in sixth place, ending his tenure on the commission after twelve years. He was more unsettled about the outcome. After stopping by Lemel’s gathering, he drove home, where he learned the results, talked things over with his wife, and went straight to bed. The next morning, he couldn’t bear to check how the close-run U.S. Senate race in North Carolina was going, or whether Donald Trump would win a second term. “Page,” he said, when they met on a Zoom call on Wednesday night, with Hawkins still in the dark, “I’ve never, ever felt this way before, where I just want to go into my bubble.”
It all started with Hawkins. Or with Trump, if you want to look at it that way. Last year, at a rally at East Carolina University, Trump vilified Representative Ilhan Omar, a Somali-born refugee, and three of her colleagues, all women of color, as “hate-filled extremists.” The crowd chanted, “Send her back!” Hawkins, who is white, was indignant, and he said so publicly at the next Transylvania commission meeting, vowing to “oppose this poison every way I can.” One thing led to another, his frustration with Party leaders grew deeper, and, a few months later, Hawkins, Lemel, and a fellow-commissioner, W. David Guice, quit the Republican Party. When they pondered their political future, they hoped that becoming actively nonpartisan might inspire voters to focus on their work—schools, mental health, early-childhood education—and not labels, or the national wedge issues that don’t mean much in local governance. Lemel and Hawkins even ran as a team for reëlection, creating a joint Web site and social-media spots. When their defection drew notice, contributors sent nearly forty thousand dollars, with no real effort.The last time Hawkins ran, he spent less than a thousand, and won.
This time, the winners were three straight-up Republicans. How bad was the thrashing? One of Lemel’s employees at Keystone Camp withdrew from the race for Transylvania’s Board of Education, but her name remained on the ballot. A Democrat in a county dominated by Republicans, she still attracted more votes than Lemel or Hawkins, who think partisanship, and the very labels they disdained, were their undoing. “It just gives you a pit in your stomach. Where are we going?” Hawkins asked on the Zoom call. He was further dismayed, the next day, when his wife told him that the first, mocking tweet from Madison Cawthorn, a tart-tongued twenty-five-year-old conservative Republican, elected to represent Mark Meadows’s former congressional district, which includes Brevard, was “Cry more, lib.” Hawkins saw the comment as “just appalling. The opposite of anything any leader should say, or even think.”
After eight years in office and months of drama, Lemel felt suddenly unburdened, and it surprised her. She carried her laptop to the deck, to display the view, revelling in the thought of idling there. She then moved indoors to a table where she has a stack of books that she aims to read. She held them up, one by one. Anne Applebaum’s “Twilight of Democracy.” Jennifer M. Silva’s study of blue-collar workers, “We’re Still Here: Pain and Politics in the Heart of America.” Jon Meacham’s “American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House.” “My staff, I think, was frustrated that I wasn’t more emotional today,” she said. “I am quite peaceful about this. It wasn’t that Mike and I did anything wrong. We will always be considered people of high principles. What better compliment is there in the world? We can go to bed at night. We can sleep. We’re fine, you know?”
