ELECTION DAY: 5:32 PM EST

Michael and I left the place about 2:30. There was nothing to eat here and the boy was starving - and good candidate that I aspire to be I gotta keep my volunteers well-fed and happy - so we stopped at Wendy's and he got a triple-decker cheeseburger with fries and a Coke. I had nothing. I didn't want to eat anything at this juncture. Last year when I was helping Melody Hallman Daniel (who did an awesome job on the voice-over for the first commercial!) with some filmmaking she made sure the lunches we had were pretty light, 'cuz according to her - and it makes a lot of sense - eating a lot increases the levels of serotonin (I think) in the brain i.e. makes one tend to be a little slow/sleepy. That's good advice and I've tried to bear it in mind whenever doing something that might demand some attention.

So after we got this kid fed (Michael doesn't give a flip about the serotonin levels in his brain) we headed into western Rockingham County. We did a few precincts, including Bethany: which I've always thought of having one of the most urban mindsets for a place so admittedly rural in geography. We were at Bethany Civic Center for almost an hour. Then we got on Highway 65 toward Wentworth then took 87 to Eden, where we did some stops there.

Along the way we had a pretty wild range of music we listened to: "Ring of Fire" by Johnny Cash, "Walking Around In Women's Underwear" by Bob Rivers, "I'm Alright" by Kenny Loggins, and some stuff from my peculiar collection of showtunes, including the opening theme to the old Charlton Heston movie The Omega Man (horribly dated film but I've always liked it: when the Apocalypse come this is the music that I'm going to be listening to while I drive around the wasted landscape).

So we get to Eden and while we're at this one precinct, about 5 o'clock my cellphone rings. It was Eric Smith, a fellow school board candidate (he's one of those that produced some of the offbeat commercials that have been running this past month on WGSR, and a really nice guy). He asked me if I'd heard the news. I said no, and he tells me: another school board candidate turned himself into police after being caught taking down campaign signs. At this time I won't comment on what my thoughts are on this matter.

So not long after that, Michael and I decided we had done as much as we probably could, and we needed to get inside and warm and dry and I did especially 'cuz the rain had thoroughly soaked the seat of my pants! We got back here a little while ago. He's back to playing Gamecube again and Lisa is gonna make lasagna for dinner for all three of us. Then I have to take Michael back home to Greensboro and then...

...then, I don't know what else is going to happen tonight.

I'm still debating what to do: go to the governmental center, go to this candidates' party at the Pennrose Mall, go to the TV station I work at and probably be held hostage by the general manager until I give some kind of interview (especially if I wind up winning a seat), or... yes, maybe just come back here and spend a nice quiet evening at home. I haven't decided yet.

Okay well, that about wraps it up for this report, but there will be a couple more in the next few hours. Who knows, I might even have something fun to post then :-)

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ELECTION DAY: 12:35 PM EST

Back again, this time from spending almost two hours at Monroeton Elementary a few miles down US 158. This was my original precinct when I first registered to vote. Monroeton is also the school that Lisa is the music teacher at. While we were there Mom came to vote (I guess she's voting for me :-) One of Tom Schoolfield's poll workers let Michael borrow an umbrella, since his hoody was starting to get slopping wet from the drizzle, and that was really nice. Also saw quite a few other people I know but hadn't seen in awhile.

Okay, well...

While I was there I thought it would be neat to see my wife. The thing is, they're using HER classroom for the polling site! So not only is my wife dislocated from her regular classroom today but because I'm a candidate I'm legally not allowed to get too close the the place. Lisa came out about 11:15 to see how we were doing (it's still VERY cold and rainy) but I just had to see my girl again before we left. Well, turns out everything is cool so long as I took off my candidate name tag and we left our signs in the car. So we got to hang out for a little while with her during lunch after all. Here she is in the classroom she's temporarily using today:
We headed back a little before 12:30. Michael and I have opted to take a break for lunch (although he's actually right now immersed in another Gamecube game: this time one from the Legend of Zelda series) and then hit some precincts to the north and west. One thing that is surprising me somewhat: apart from two other candidates, we've seen no one working the polls from the other school board campaigns. That's probably due to nothing more than the fact that this is an at-large election, whereas before under the all-district plan it would have been much easier to work the polls in your respective district. It's much harder to mount a campaign and have volunteers in place at all the precincts throughout the county, throughout the day. I'm expecting more campaigns to be represented as the afternoon progresses.

That's all for this report. Now let's see what we can scrounge up for lunch...

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ELECTION DAY 10:27 AM EST

Back at homebase for a short while. Michael and I drove to Reidsville Middle School a little after 9 this morning. He waited outside while I went in and voted. And lemme tell ya: that was hands-down the most surreal moment of my life... and that's saying something! Seeing my own name on the ballot like that, it seemed so weird. Then I went back outside and it was still raining, as it has been all morning. I had no umbrella but Tom Schoolfield, one of the candidates for County Commissioner came by a short while later and let me have one that he had: wasn't that nice? :-) I think it's like a promotional umbrella but I don't care: it keeps the rain of of ya right? Well anyway, after voting I went back behind The Line (the one beyond which no campaigning is allowed) and we held aloft some signs and I greeted voters as they went in. We were there for about 45 minutes then came back here for a bit before we head out to hit another precinct. While we were at Reidsville Middle I also met up with Lorie Booth McKinney, another school board candidate (she was in my portion of the televised forum two weeks ago and she did a really great job). Funny thing about this election: there's almost one school board candidate for every precinct in the county :-)

Okay, time for some photos. This first pic was actually taken this morning about 3:10 a.m., at the Bethany Civic Center. I already had one sign there but I deployed another one all the same...
Here's Michael outside of Reidsville Middle School, being a good campaign staffer :-) By the way, the t-shirt I tried to make for him didn't work out that hot (it was one of those self-print, then iron-on deals you can buy in the computer paper section of Wal-Mart and such). But since it's pretty cold out today that's okay: I don't want to freeze my staffers to death ;-)
And here's the pic that Michael shot of me from where he was standing...
Okay, we're gonna head out again. Something I feel almost wrong about saying here, but for sake of completeness I'll add it here for the record: quite a few people at Reidsville Middle told me that they either were going to vote for me or already had voted for me. I mean, that isn't something I'd normally report on, but the sheer number of people who've told me that...

I'm not going to speculate. I'm not going to see things that may or may not be there. But I am very much amazed and delighted at how many have said they're supporting me. But I would have been happy if only ten people said they were going to vote for me. It's just that right now... I'm wondering just how far this might be set to go before this night is over.

Well, I'll leave that to the voters, and to God. For now it's just do what I've always tried to do during this thing: give it my best effort, and let the chips fall where they may. So now it's time to visit another precinct :-)

More later.

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ELECTION DAY: 9:01 AM EST

Well, we're off. For me to cast my own vote and then to visit various polls and stand as close to them as legally allowed.

More later.

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ELECTION DAY: 8:12 AM EST

Bojangles' doesn't take debit cards :-( And we were so hungry for some biscuits from there too. They need to get with the program 'cuz they're losing business to the Hardees down the street (which is where I did get some biscuits). So breakfast is taken care of...

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ELECTION DAY: 7:18 AM EST

Waiting for Michael to wake up but since he fried his eyeballs on videogames until way late it may take awhile. He's a really good kid from church and his parents said it might be a great experience if he got to help me today. Basically I'm going to plop this "Christopher Knight for Rockingham County Board of Education" t-shirt onto him and turn him into a walking billboard for me at whatever polls we go to.

I'm getting ready to eat breakfast and get this day going. Right now the Fox 8 Morning News has some outfit called Power Force on: they're a bunch of born-again Christian musclemen who go to high schools and lay it down for the kids. Here's one of them that was just on the show doing stuff like tearing apart phone books with his bare hands...

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ELECTION DAY: 6:47 AM EST

Forecast is for rain today and a high of around 54.

Considering how weather conditions have been known to have a dampering effect on voter turnout, this may be an election where whatever happened during the early voting may be a big deciding factor. When you figure in a race involving sixteen candidates, all the more so. It's altogether possible that there might be ten or less votes' difference between candidates.

And the polls have now been open for 17 minutes. Here we go, fast and furious...

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ELECTION DAY: 4:42 AM EST

I spent the past almost-three hours driving 70 miles across the county, getting signs up at the last four precincts. They're all covered now.

Remember I said that earlier tonight when it was Michael and me doing this that we were listening to that music from that Christian college group I used to be part of? That's what I listened to all the last little while. I've actually listened to it quite a lot during the course of this campaign. It's really helped to sustain and inspire me through everything. I'm glad I thought to put them all on my MP3 player awhile back. And there's another little bit of music, several songs actually, that a friend from college did years ago that I was listening to a lot during this last trip out into the darkness. That went a long way, too.

In so many ways, I can't help but believe that, regardless of whether I win or don't win, God has really been providing for me the whole way through this. Something really curious that I realized tonight, that had to do with why I couldn't put out signs as much as I wanted to last week... but now I wonder if maybe it was supposed to be that I couldn't put them out then. I might talk more about that later.

Well, it's around quarter-til 5 in the morning, and I need to catch some ZZZs. It's gonna be an interesting day. And I gotta see it through all the way to the end. Will try to file reports periodically throughout the day as I can manage it. In the meantime, please keep me in your prayers: they really are what keep me going.

More later. Me go crash now :-)

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ELECTION DAY: 1:51 AM EST

I wasn't able to start putting signs out at precincts until late. Like, after 6 p.m. last night. I got Reidsville taken care of then went to Greensboro to pick up our friend Michael from church. It was 9 p.m. when we set out to get the rest of the precincts...

...and, we still haven't gotten them all yet! But there's only four more, and I think I'm going to knock them out in the next little while. We just came back home for a quick respite. He's playing Star Wars: Bounty Hunter on the Gamecube right now while I figure out the next moves. We tore this county apart tonight, putting signs everywhere we legally could at the polling places. Along the way we had some good music to listen to: the Children of Eden soundtrack, some "homegrown" Christian stuff from InterVarsity Christian Fellowship back when I was in college, and some really weird stuff that Michael, young as he is, has never heard before (he now thinks that "They're Coming To Take Me Away" by Napoleon XIV is one of the greatest songs ever).

Well, time to wrap this up and get crackin'. There's a little over 4 and a half hours to go before the polls open. And I still need to figure in some sleep in there somewhere.

And a-waaaaay we go!

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Worst political websites

CNET News.com has found what have to be the WORST political websites on the Internet for this election season. They're pretty bad, like the one for incumbent Rep. Dan Burton pictured above. I'm just glad that my own site didn't make the list :-)

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How the GOP pimps gay marriage for votes

There's a TV ad that's running here that ever since it started airing, it's disgusted me. It's for one of the congressional candidates: at one point in the commercial it says that he's "protecting traditional marriage with a constitutional amendment".

Here's why it sickens me: the Republicans have had the White House, the House of Representatives and the Senate for almost six years now. They've had more than enough time to put a "conservative agenda" into enacted legislation and they've had the political power to accomplish it too. They could have very easily passed an amendment to the Constitution "protecting traditional marriage" (someday I'm going to write here about how it is that marriage - as something instituted by God - doesn't need "protecting" by man). In all the time that they've been controlling everything, the Republicans have done diddly-squat about it. So on what grounds are we to trust them that they are going to do anything about it now?

Here's what I believe: there will never be a "constitutional amendment" against gay marriage... at least not with the Republican Party controlling things. This is always going to be nothing more than a bone that the Republicans throw to the evangelical Christian community to keep them coming back to the polls to vote GOP. It's really not much more than fear-based politicking: "keep voting for us or the Democrats will give you gay marriage"... nevermind that the Republicans have no interest whatsoever in doing anything about it at all. What's more, if they did outlaw "gay marriage" (reiterating what I said earlier: I don't believe it's possible for the concept of marriage to include homosexuality), the Republican Party would have nothing to keep drawing the conservative Christians to the polls to continue voting them into power. It's the same reason why abortion - as heinous as it is - will only be addressed superficially by the Republicans... and abortion as a political issue isn't something they're that passionate about anymore, anyway.

Ya see, this is why my campaign commercials have been so "peculiar": Number One, they're not negative or othewise aimed at somone else... and they never will be for however long my political career lasts. And Number Two, I'm not going to use commercial airtime - that I'm paying good money for - to make myself out to be a hypocrite.

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Three hundred thousand

In the past little while this blog received its 300,000th visitor. Remember that just a few weeks ago the meter was around 54,000 after almost three years of being online. Thanks again to everyone who's helped this site reach another milestone.

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What should I do on Election Night?

48 hours from now I'll be doing... something. I'm not sure exactly what though. All day Tuesday I'm going to be visit as many polling places as I can, putting in some last-minute personal appearances before the voters go through the doors to vote. But for the past week or so I've been trying to figure out what to be doing on Election Night as the returns come in. And... I don't know how I should be spending the evening.

Here are the options that I've got so far:

- Go to the county's governmental center and be there as the ballots from the precincts come rolling in and the results posted. This is probably where most of the news media will be at in the county on Tuesday night. No doubt this is the place to be for the absolute first reported results.

- Go to the TV station where I work at as the results come in there. Which if I win a seat I've already been told that I'm going to have to give them my very first interview if I wind up hanging around there that night.

- There's something of a "party" that a few other local candidates are having at Pennrose Mall in Reidsville that night. I could go and join them there.

- Spend a nice quiet night at home with Lisa, only using the TV to watch a movie, or playing a game together on the Xbox. Go to bed without knowing anything about the election results and wait until waking up the next morning to see what happened the night before.

- Spend the evening doing some personal Bible study... which has really sustained me a lot during the past few months.

- Finally, finally sit down and get to work on the script for the full-length movie project that I'm still planning on shooting next year. I haven't been able to work on this at all since filing to run in early August. And let myself be absorbed in working on that when the phone rings and I find out that I haven't won or there's a six-way tie calling for a runoff or whatever...

- Spend tomorrow finally learning how to make martinis: a project that I've been wanting to pick up since April. Then mix a bunch up on Tuesday night so that I'll be too - as the French put it - "pees droonk" to care about the election results.

- Leave Tuesday afternoon for a cabin deep in the woods, strip to my waist and start primal screaming as a means of exerting all the pent-up frustration and rage that comes with running a political campaign.

- Before the polls close that evening, I leave everything behind, hit the wide open road, and end up hiring myself out to work on a shrimp boat.

So many choices to pick from. Maybe I'm leaving some out: what do you think I should be doing on Election Night? Post your comments here!

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THE CHARLOTTE OBSERVER is calling me a Jedi

Here's the item in today's edition of The Charlotte Observer:

May the votes be with you

A Luke Skywalker wanna- be is running for Rockingham County school board.

Christopher Knight has produced a "Star Wars"-themed TV ad that includes the Death Star space station blowing up a little red schoolhouse while the voice-over talks about how No Child Left Behind is "targeting and destroying our ability to best teach our children."

Then the ad shows Knight, a 32-year-old TV station master control technician from Reidsville, wielding a light saber while he talks about giving more local control to schools.

Knight told the (Raleigh) News & Observer that some folks have said the ad does not make him look like a serious candidate. The Jedi quipped: "I'm taking it a lot more seriously than a lot of people do in D.C."

Look, it could have been worse: don't think that the thought of putting my name on the ballot as "Chris 'Jedi' Knight" didn't cross my mind... but I'm not too much of a geek to know how totally inappropriate and childish that would have been (even though that was my college nickname). Still, being officially dubbed a "Jedi" by The Charlotte Observer is a pretty neat thing in my book :-) Awesome thanks to Matt Smith - my co-worker at the TV station and all-around cool guy - for finding this.

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NEWS & OBSERVER article mentions the "lightsaber" commercial

Two days ago it was The New York Times. Then yesterday my hometown paper The Reidsville Review did a story about school board candidates using the Internet... featuring a huge pic on the front page of me from the first commercial wielding my lightsaber. Well, this morning The News & Observer out of Raleigh is the latest to mention my first campaign ad, and I've received word that another pic of me with the lightsaber is on the front page of that paper this morning, too. From the article...

Hopefuls pin hopes on wit
Lynn Bonner, Staff Writer

A mailbox full of wordy fliers, static television commercials and droning robotic telephone calls can take all the excitement out of picking a candidate.

But some campaigns are trying to break through the clutter and grab voters by the funny bone.

Voters in Cary got to see Republican state Rep. Nelson Dollar's head, encircled by hearts, alongside a cruise ship. The ad, which looked like the opening credits of "The Love Boat" television show, poked fun at Dollar's taxpayer-funded trip during the tall ships festival in Beaufort. He later reimbursed the state for the cost.

Vernon Robinson, a Republican congressional candidate, cut a radio ad that's a takeoff on the "Beverly Hillbillies" TV theme, rapping his opponent on illegal immigration.

In a legislative primary in Iredell County this year, Republican Robert Brawley saw himself cast by his opponent as John Travolta in "Saturday Night Fever," white three-piece suit and all, alongside what the ad called "Robert Brawley's Worst Hits." It was a reference to an earlier stint Brawley served in the legislature.

Campaigns often use witty ads to criticize their opponents.

(snip)

Not all campaign humor is aimed at someone else. A candidate for Rockingham County school board, Christopher Knight, has gotten free air time outside his county and national attention for a self-produced television ad with a "Star Wars" theme.

In it, a Death Star beam destroys a red schoolhouse while the voice-over talks about the federal legislation, No Child Left Behind, "targeting and destroying our ability to best teach our children."

Knight wields a light saber as he talks about defending the future of the county's children.

Knight, 32, a "Star Wars" fan from Reidsville, said the ad helped him stand out from 15 other candidates running for five at-large seats on the school board. Knight is basking in the attention but said he has heard some say the ad makes him look as if he is not serious enough to be on the board.

"I'm taking it a lot more seriously than a lot of people do in D.C.," he said...

It's now starting to dawn on me, that the image of me and my lightsaber is probably going to be the defining image of my political career for the rest of my life: Truman had his "Dewey defeats..." newspaper, Churchill had his "V for victory" salute, Reagan had his Berlin Wall... and Chris Knight will have his lightsaber :-P

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Video: Three candidates talk about making THE NEW YORK TIMES

Last night about 6:30 on WGSR (the TV station that I work) Charles Roark did a live interview with school board candidates Eric Smith, Richard Moore (via telephone) and myself about our making it into Thursday's edition of The New York Times in regards to our offbeat television commercials. I just got finished uploading it to YouTube. It's a neat little segment with a lot of great interaction between Eric, Richard, Charles and myself. You also get to hear fellow candidate Reida Drum (off-camera). Among other things Richard got to show off photos of his very first grandchild who was born yesterday. Richard's wife Debbie gets on the phone at one point.
I think this segment is a great example of how this race has gone in the past few months. Ya see, this has been a positive, upbeat electoral race. And I mean what I say during the interview: it doesn't matter to me if my actual name wasn't mentioned in the Times article. What does matter is that if the nation's eyes can be turned to this school board race and see how it's going, maybe it can inspire other political races to drop the negativity and embrace individuality and creativity (by the way, that was Jennifer Olwin who first commented about that on the original post about the Times article.) Anyway, the video is a lil' bit of primary source material about this election, so being a good historian I went and archived it and made it available for others to watch. So, enjoy! :-)

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A candidate for Congress that we can finally support!

This honest man should be sent to Washington post-haste!
Find out more about Josh Jennings on his Myspace page and his page on YouTube.

(Special thanks to Marc for the find!)

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