I’ve been asked to put on my amateur political analyst hat here for a little minute to talk about Tuesday’s primary election results in the Cascade County Sheriff’s race between incumbent Republican Jesse Slaughter and challenger Jay Groskreutz.
This race wasn’t even close. Groskreutz got ‘slaughtered’ in a 70% to 30% landslide. That’s 9,248 votes for Jesse and 3,925 for Jay.
So why was it such a drubbing? Well, I can think of three reasons:
Reason One
Groskreutz didn’t have a coherent, convincing platform. His radio ads featured his plan to fight the drug crisis in our community by educating kids. ‘Just Say No’ sounds nice but folks here understand it’s just not enough, not by a long shot.
Education is a part of the solution but I think citizens prefer a sheriff who focusses on declaring war on local drug dealers and aggressively going after and arresting them.
Reason Two
Groskreutz said and did nothing about the slimy, personal, unfair and untrue smears against Slaughter by the far left and their lapdogs in local ‘news’ media and blogs, painting Slaughter as a white supremacist, militia kook, and worse.
The problem with those kinds of outright lies is that folks in this community have known Jesse and Undersheriff Reeves personally for a long time and they understand the absurdity contained in the kind of tripe being pushed by the Great Falls Tribune and others.
Groskreutz should have and could have repudiated that sewage, which he knew to be lies, and still run an honorable and vigorous campaign. I think someone gave him bad advice.
Reason Three
Goskreutz readily accepted the endorsement of the local Democrat machine. When a Republican is the Democrat’s favorite and handpicked candidate on the GOP primary ballot no one should be surprised when the vast majority of Republican voters filling out that ballot take note and vote against the Democrat’s pick.
Sheriff Slaughter deserved the win because he’s done an outstanding job for four years as Cascade County Sheriff and because he campaigned hard and with honor in this primary. Congratulations to him and Cory Reeves.
Rick – It was mostly your second point. I believe Jesse would still have won, but It wouldn’t have been such an uneven ratio. People are tired of the nastiness, lawlessness, slander falsehoods, etc., from the left. Look at the recall in SF on Chesa Boudin