Here in North Carolina, we had municipal elections yesterday. The results may be of interest to conservatives elsewhere.

The only major city in North Carolina with a Republican mayor going into Tuesday’s balloting was Charlotte. In a expensive and hard-fought race, a Democratic city councilman, Anthony Foxx, defeated fellow Republican councilman John Lassiter last night, thus taking the top job back for the Democrats for the first time since the late 1980s. Lassiter ran as a moderate, fudging the differences between the two men on virtually every issue and generating little enthusiasm from GOP-leaning voters.

In North Carolina’s third-largest city, something very different happened. Greensboro’s municipal elections are nonpartisan, but both parties are extremely active supporting their candidates. The incumbent mayor, Yvonne Johnson, is a longtime Democratic politician in Greensboro. She was upset last night by Republican Bill Knight, who’s never held political office and who ran on a strongly conservative platform on fiscal and criminal-justice issues. The GOP now holds a majority on that city council for the first time ever, as far as I can tell.

Both cities voted for Barack Obama last year. Both Democratic candidates were black. The difference was the content of the Republican message.