America went MAGA: Waynesboro said, nah, and went in the other direction

MAGA aimed to take over Waynesboro in the 2024 election cycle. We did our job, and as a result, our version of Donald Trump is basically neutered politically.

Jim Wood, our 2020 election denier/resident homophobe former vice mayor, give him credit, he had aims.

As the chair of the Waynesboro Republican Committee, Wood signed off on a three-candidate slate of Republican candidates for the open seats on Waynesboro City Council in the 2024 cycle.

---

ICYMI

• Meeting the moment: Kenny Lee proud to be first African American mayor in Waynesboro

---

One, a guy who calls himself Major Dave, barely ran, and lost to Lorie Jean Akanbi in the Ward A race.

A MAGA assistant prosecutor, Will Flory, lost to Terry Short in Ward B, so even with Jeremy Sloat, a MAGA-lite retread who lost in 2022, winning the At-Large seat, a center and center-left coalition including Akanbi, Short and Kenny Lee, who represents Ward C, has the majority on the five-member public body.

That group selected Lee to be the city’s first-ever African-American mayor, and Akanbi, who is also African-American, as the vice mayor.

Meaning, Waynesboro is about as Barack Obama America circa mid-2010s as we can get, in a country that is going the other way.

The Lee-Akanbi-Short majority is the right one to lead us forward given the immediate challenges we’re facing here in Waynesboro, the most pressing being addressing the dramatic shortage of affordable housing.

We wouldn’t have expected a majority led by a guy who used a Facebook talk show to insult the Biden administration and top congressional leaders as letters from the city with his name on the letterhead asked the feds for grant money to take something like affordable housing seriously.

---

ICYMI

• Waynesboro City Council member asks Jim Wood to resign over Pete Buttigieg slur
• Jim Wood: The MAGA guy who thinks it’s funny to hit Democrats with a hammer

---

The Jim Wood type would be more focused on getting ICE here to round up immigrants than working to get more good-paying jobs here, and thinking through ways we can come up with more money for our chronically underfunded public schools.

That’s the direction 49.8 percent of America has us going in.

Waynesboro, in the first time in forever, is going in the right direction.

Waynesboro: Moving forward in the face of America’s embrace of MAGA

---