OUR VIEW

Give Bladen County voters credit. Their ballots indicate that when it comes to the law, they have respect for it and want justice served.

They are like the majority of North Carolinians. The point is emphatic when considering head-to-head races for eight statewide judicial seats all went to Republicans in a year where unrest involving many social issues stretched from the national news to the chatter in races of local candidates coast to coast.

Marches and demonstrations? Yes, Bladen County had them. Organizers and participants were respectful and made sure the message wasn’t drowned out by misbehavior.

Not so in many other places, namely Fayetteville near us and beyond that in Raleigh and Charlotte. Fayetteville and Raleigh were particularly troubling, with fire started downtown in the former and merchants in the latter multiple times boarding up their businesses the way their beachfront counterparts might for a hurricane.

Both communities will suffer damage of the tangible and intangible variety. Sadly, it’s after so much work has gone into each downtown being revived through carefully planned strategies.

Bladen County numbers more than 21,000 voters, and as of last week, that includes 9,975 Democrats and 4,865 Republicans. The unaffiliated numbers 6,579.

That’s a whopping blue advantage. Yet there wasn’t a judicial candidate among the eight for our appellate courts that got anywhere close to carrying Bladen County, much less equaling the number of registered Democrats.

Cheri Beasley, who conceded her chief justice of the state Supreme Court race to Paul Newby on Saturday, was closest with 7,723. She was 1,166 votes behind him.

Mark Davis and Lucy Inman were 9- and 11-point losers to Tamara Barringer and Phil Berger Jr., respectively, in the other Supreme Court races. In the five Court of Appeals seats, the GOP representatives collected more than 9,000 votes each and the Democrats were between 7,000 and 7,300 across the board — all 11-point or more decisions in Bladen County.

Writing it off only as the unaffiliated going for a party won’t cut it. This was bipartisan support for what the judges represented.

In the campaign, Beasley said the state’s judicial system was racially unjust. Inman said the court system had systemic racism.

Those arguments failed. People do believe there are problems with race relations, from right here in Bladen County to many points across the state. But they believe also that our justice system, despite its flaws and issues, is the best in the world and works best with those dedicated to applying laws as they were created and intended.

And granted, that’s no small feat.

There’s a lot of places to find those 400 or so votes that gave Newby the victory over Beasley. In a county with twice as many Democrats, nearly three times that favored the Republican winner.

Give them their due. Bladen voters said “Yes!” to law, order and justice.