It’s not the first time. I’m sure it won’t be the last. But each election day we find a story of some spot in America where voters elect a candidate who falls outside the mainstream of politics. This year is no exception, so from the thriving metropolis of Aredale, Iowa, meet the new mayor elect: 18 year old high school student Jeremy Minnier.

The newly elected mayor of Aredale, an Iowa town of just 74 residents in Butler County, was in the middle of his high school business class Thursday morning when I interrupted to ask how the launch of his political career was going — barely a day into it.

“A lot of people were surprised because I’m not the most outspoken person at school,” Jeremy Minnier, 18, said of the reaction among his Hampton-Dumont classmates…

“I’ve been a leader my whole life,” Minnier added. And he reckons that he’s cleaned the gutters of literally every home in Aredale — a feat that no urban mayoral candidate could hope to match.

It was a landslide victory, with Minnier receiving 24 write-in votes. The incumbent mayor, Virgil Homer, age 76, only got eight. Clearly, he was furious at losing to an underage upstart like Minnier.

“I’m glad,” was Homer’s reaction to his surprise election defeat. “The only reason I ran is because nobody else wanted to do it. … We’re all friendly.”

He had tried to goad one of his city councilmen to run for mayor, to no avail.

Homer, a retired truck driver, moved to Aredale from Kansas in 1947 and occasionally served on the City Council through the decades before his current mayoral term.

What kind of reform platform do you need to run on to win over the savvy voters of Aredale, Iowa? Apparently it involves hooking up the town to municipal water rather than relying on private wells, upgrading the septic system with a new leach field, and sprucing up the town by planting flowers in street front window boxes.

Is that even a paid position in a town with 74 residents? I’m guessing not. Either way, as soon as he picks out some controversial types of flowers, somebody will be along to call him a RINO, I’m sure.