I desperately wanted to win the raffle at the Durham GOP open house on Tuesday night.
In the new headquarters in a refurbished garage on Hillsborough Road, I sipped my champagne punch and anxiously checked my ticket number. As one of 40 or so attendees, I thought I had a pretty decent shot at walking out with a prize.
It’s not that I particularly wanted the actual prize—the Trump and MAGA merch, piled high on a table in the corner, would not win me many friends in ultra-blue Durham—but I never win raffles, and I was hoping that fortune would smile upon my effort to check in with the Bull City’s minority party and see what, if anything, the new headquarters said about the local group’s outlook. Did the new building lease coincide with a new lease on life for the Durham Republicans?…