Macias Throws In The Towel
You could say that I am a day late and a dollar short with this post, but hopefully by now you have picked up on that this blog is not about breaking the news, it’s about reflecting on it. Over the weekend, State Representative Nathan Macias officially dropped his election challenge lawsuit, thus ending a two and one half month ordeal that has left up in the air who exactly the Republican nominee for HD 73 is.
So just like that, it is over, Doug Miller can now be crowned the official winner, but why? Why did Mr. Macias take his protest this far, mere days away from his day in court, only to back off?
Like everyone with too much time on their hands, I have my theories. Given the emphasis that Mr. Macias put in removing the assigned Judge from his trial, I think it would be fair to assume that Mr. Macias had a good early indication that his particular Judge was not going to rule favorably. Why else would Mr. Macias take his quest to have him removed from the trial as far as he did? If there are other good theories to that question, I would love to hear them in the comment section.
Also, I imagine that Mr. Macias took a good look at the long uphill battle he had in front of him to actually get the courts to overturn his election results. Long precedence was working against him there. To my knowledge, the last person to give it a legitimate try was Bill Welch in ’92 with his challenge to election results that had him losing to Susan Combs for a State Rep. seat by less than ten votes. It didn’t work out well for Mr. Welch then, and odds are it wasn’t going to work out well for Mr. Macias today.
But even if it did, even if the courts threw the results out and ordered a new election or crowned Mr. Macias the outright champ, what could he really expect? To get thumped. Either way, if he had to run again this cycle or in the 2010 cycle, a sore loser image would have likely sunk him.
People adore graceful losers. Case in point, Harrison Keller. His gracious bow out of his runoff and subsequent donation to the ACC system has a lot of people viewing him as a stand up guy, and a likely repeat candidate down the road. Whether it was the right move or not, Mr. Macias’ challenge was having the extreme opposite effect on his image.
So now we as the Republican Party find ourselves with the daunting task of getting past this ordeal, and focusing on the future, which for HD 73 is Doug Miller. Moving past, unifying, and everyone coming together to accept this is critical for a region that is going to be working on their third member in just four cycles.
I don’t know if Doug Miller is the right guy for this district, but to be fair, I don’t know that he isn’t either. But either way, the question that has to be asked is does HD73 want to continue the trend of being represented by a near revolving door of freshmen lawmakers, or do they want to bring a little stability to their representation in the lower chamber?
Only time will tell.