Bartosh victory had nothing to do with Surface arrest

It's time somebody came right out and said it- even if he had not been stopped by the Jasper County Sheriff's Department for drunk driving, Presiding Commissioner Chuck Surface was not going to win his primary election.
I read Joplin Globe Editor Ed Simpson's column in Sunday's paper, which mentioned toward the end that it can't be known how much of an effect the arrest had in John Bartosh's victory. I have also heard others comment on what might have happened if Surface had not been arrested.
If Surface had not been arrested, he still would have been beaten, and probably by about the same margin.
The arrest (and as this is being written, Lawrence County Prosecuting Attorney Robert George is still weighing what charge, if any, to file against Surface) was an obvious misstep for Surface, but he lost the election when he gambled on challenging Sheriff Archie Dunn's request to put a law enforcement sales tax issue on the ballot. Surface and his fellow commissioners made every possible political blunder. Dunn asked that the voters be allowed to decide, and even if you make the financial arguments against an election that the commissioners made, when you are essentially making the argument that the voters do not have the right to make the choice, you are going to suffer political consequences.
And while the Globe (and this blog) have featured the opinion that Archie Dunn is now the most powerful political figure in Jasper County, let's not make John Bartosh out to be anybody's puppet. That is simply not the case.
Bartosh put his support and his money behind Dunn's quest to put the issue on the ballot. When voters approved the issue, the next step for Dunn and Bartosh was to change the kind of thinking that forced them to take such a circuitous route to getting the issue on the ballot in the first place. The minute Bartosh filed, Chuck Surface was pretty much out of luck as far as his reelection chances were concerned.
My guess is that any people who decided not to vote for Surface based on the drunk driving allegation most likely voted for Carthage attorney James Spradling rather than Bartosh. Most of Surface's support came from Joplin supporters who were not into the rural support that Bartosh and Dunn have.
If Surface had dropped out of the race earlier, I have the feeling the election between Bartosh and Spradling would have been much closer...but Bartosh would still have emerged the winner.
John Bartosh was the winner, fair and square. While I don't know the circumstances behind Surface's arrest (and don't really care), I do know that in the end they had nothing whatsoever to do with the final result of last week's election.