By Ray Gronberg

gronberg@heraldsun.com; 419-6648

DURHAM — City Council incumbents Cora Cole-McFadden and Howard Clement powered to wins in Tuesday’s Ward 1 and Ward 2 primaries, taking majorities in their respective races to set themselves up for the general election.

Unofficial returns from the county Board of Elections show that Cole-McFadden led the Ward 1 balloting with 4,095 votes, or 69 percent. Second-place finisher Donald Hughes qualified for a place on the November ballot with 1,040 votes, nearly 18 percent.

Third-place finisher John Tarantino got 771 votes, about 13 percent.

Clement led the Ward 2 ballot with 3,496 votes, about 60 percent.

Now, “the real race begins for Nov. 3,” Clement said as the last of the returns came in. “I’m grateful to the voters for allowing me the opportunity to be in [it].”

The Ward 2 balloting produced the night’s big surprise in the form of its second-place finisher. Matt Drew, a registered Libertarian, polled 725 votes, close to 12½ percent.

That was enough to carry him past fellow challenger Sylvester Williams, who got 634 votes, nearly 11 percent. Darius Little finished fourth with 630 votes, also around 11 percent, and Sandra Howell trailed the field with 332 votes, not quite 6 percent.

Drew credited his showing to his being the only Ward 2 challenger who voiced a small-government philosophy. The others, he said, had relatively similar platforms and split their potential support.

“I had a very focused constituency,” Drew said. “The three candidates eliminated in the primary got far more votes than I did. There clearly was a divide [among] people interested in the other platform.”

Both challengers, however, acknowledged that the majorities pulled down by the incumbents leave them facing uphill fights.

Hughes nonetheless voiced confidence.

“Approximately 31 percent of the citizens so far showed they’re ready for new leadership,” he said. “I’m optimistic that if we can continue organizing, we can make up some ground.”

He conceded that Cole-McFadden’s two terms’ worth of incumbency gives her the opening advantage. “Quite frankly, we have eight years’ worth of ground to make up,” he said.

Drew, meanwhile, said he would “keep pitching” the idea that “there’s been too much spending and too much building of things that government shouldn’t be doing.”

Ward 2 third-place finisher Williams chalked up his apparent loss to organizational failures and perhaps a bit of complacency.

“We were not able to get our people to turn out the way we thought we would,” he said, adding that some likely supporters may have thought it “a given we’d make it to the general election” after he picked up a couple of endorsements.

Drew’s finish was the best ever — success-wise if not by actual number of votes — for a Libertarian in Durham. But it had been predicted Tuesday morning by former City Councilman Frank Hyman.

In a guest posting at the Bull City Rising blog, Hyman said a good number of moderate and conservative white voters — some 40 to 60 percent of those who normally take their cue from the Friends of Durham political group — might throw their support to Drew and Tarantino rather than vote for a black candidate.

Drew, who saw the posting, maintained that the relatively similar platforms of Williams, Little and Howell were the bigger factor. But he didn’t entirely discount Hyman’s theory.

“I don’t know [that the vote] was particularly racial,” he said. “I certainly would hope not. But this being Durham politics, you can’t eliminate that possibility.”

Turnout across the board was poor. The elections board said 5,988 people — about 4.3 percent of registered voters — cast ballots. Slightly more than twice that many voted in October 2005, the last time the city held a ward primary.