Dave Goetze, the self-glossed “Major Dave,” the Republican nominee in the race for the Ward A seat on Waynesboro City Council, sure has a lot to say about politics on his Facebook pages.
About North Carolina politics, that is.
Goetze is the vice president of research at the North Carolina-based Electoral Education Foundation, which, yes, you can tell from his party affiliation and the group’s name what the focus is there.
Election “integrity,” is what folks on that side call it.
ICYMI: Waynesboro City Council elections
- Waynesboro: Jim Wood is putting himself on the ballot again. Vote accordingly.
- Quiet subtext to 2024 Waynesboro elections: Not letting Jim Wood become the mayor
- Waynesboro has a chance to move forward: The future is in your hands
- The next level: City Council candidate Lorie Strother looks to help Waynesboro ‘move on up’
- He’s back: Bobby Henderson eyes at-large seat on Waynesboro City Council in November
- Unfinished business: Terry Short Jr. hopeful for another term on Waynesboro City Council
Starting at the top of the ticket, North Carolina is back to being a battleground state in the 2024 election cycle. FiveThirtyEight.com has the race between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris at a virtual dead heat down there, and North Carolina is an absolute must-win state for the MAGAs in the presidential race.
There’s also a governor’s race on the ballot there, which isn’t all that competitive – the Democrat, Josh Stein, the state’s attorney general, has a double-digit lead on Mark Robinson, the MAGA lieutenant governor and Holocaust-denier who, among other things, thinks feminism “is watered by the devil, and is harvested and sold by his minions,” that the civil rights movement was a “communist plot,” and that the survivors of the 2018 mass shooting at a Florida high school are “spoiled little bastards” and “media prosti-tots.”
This Electoral Education Foundation outfit that Goetze works for itself has a direct stake in the 2024 state races in North Carolina: the EEF was founded by Hal Weatherman, the MAGA nominee for lieutenant governor, whose campaign website lists among his priorities “men out of women’s sports,” “Donald J. Trump,” “deporting illegals” and “armed guards in schools.”
Long story short, we can forgive Goetze for spending so much time and mental energy on what’s going on back home.
The surge in voter-registration activity in North Carolina, which Goetze watches like a hawk, is keeping our Ward A candidate super-busy, as the activity on his Facebook pages attests.
“Voter registrations really saw a surge this past week with a statewide net gain of twice that of last week and almost as much as the last two weeks combined,” Goetze wrote in a post to his Major Dave page, dated Sept. 14. “A few counties are showing their first real surge this cycle like Burke, Carteret, Haywood, Lincoln, Moore, Pasquotank, Vance and Watauga. Vance stands out because their net gain last week is roughly half of their total gain since May, and clearly students are returning to campus in Boone!”
“Once again I am recruiting Election Contest Monitors for the November Election. You will need to be available on Election Night from when the polls close until 100% of the Precincts have reported. We need to have all 100 counties covered and as many specific contests as we can,” Goetze wrote on his personal Facebook page, in a post dated Sept. 9.
There are dozens of posts of a similar nature on both pages.
I scanned both back to the spring.
The mentions of his campaign for the Ward A seat on Waynesboro City Council come to a total of two.
One, from Aug. 15, featured a photo of a campaign sign, with the accompanying message: “The yard signs are finally in and assembled so they are ready when we start knocking doors to introduce myself.”
The other goes way back to April 16, when he announced that he was running for the seat.
“I am delighted to announce that I am running for the Ward A seat on the Waynesboro City Council in November! I hope to have a website up by next week with more on my background and goals upon winning this election.”
Goetze also started a Facebook page for his campaign on April 16.
For all the activity on his other two pages detailing his work on North Carolina politics, Goetze’s Waynesboro City Council campaign page has one post, dated, you guessed it, April 16.
“I am excited to announce that I am running for the Ward A seat on the Waynesboro City Council in November. I wish to bring my career in planning, organizational effectiveness, statistical analysis and budgeting to address the current challenges of growth Waynesboro is experiencing that is going to expand good paying job opportunities and help keep taxes low. I will soon have a website where you can learn more about me but feel free to discuss any relevant issue here on this page.”
The discussion of “relevant issue” hasn’t yet materialized: the April 16 post has two comments, one from a follower promising to pray for him, the other lamenting that she’d vote for Goetze if she lived in Waynesboro.
I’ve scoured the interwebs trying to find the campaign website that was “soon” to come back in April, and haven’t been able to track it down.
Totally understandable; he’s a busy guy.
Look, there’s nothing wrong with the guy still having his head and his heart in North Carolina politics, and from reading through his descriptions of what he does, he puts a ton of his time and effort into what he does there.
If you live in Ward A in Waynesboro, though, you might wonder why he put his name on the ballot here, or if it’s more a matter of, the Republicans needed somebody who lived in Ward A to run, and he’s the somebody.
Video: ‘Major Dave’ is a busy guy
Share
Chris Graham
