Bayside’s Karen Brooks, who ran an unsuccessful campaign against Assm. Wes Chesbro last year, looks to be turning her attention to a more junior member of the Arcatocracy next year.

Earlier this month, Brooks, a Republican, filed campaign organization papers to set up a run against incumbent Supervisor Mark Lovelace for the Third District seat.

Glutton for punishment? Maybe. Probably. Brooks definitely got creamed in her race against The Chezz, but she didn’t get creamed quite as badly as might have been expected. She took 38.4 percent of the vote across the North Coast — not so bad, against the Chesbro juggernaut.

Still, it’s definitely hard to see how a Republican — any Republican — has any sort of path to victory in the ultraleft, Arcata-centric Third Supervisorial District. Brooks must know this.

Then again, Humboldt County electoral politics are getting a little bit more sophisticated in every cycle. Maybe the point, for people who orchestrate these things, is not to defeat Lovelace but to draw a bit of lefty energy away from other, more competitive races.

In the Second District we’re looking at a knockdown, drag-out Estelle Fennell-Clif Clendenen rematch next year, and any campaign dollar or man-hour of volunteer labor diverted Lovelace’s way is a dollar or man-hour not spent defending Clendenen. Much the same holds true in the First District, assuming some lefty champion arises to challenge Rex Bohn.

Brooks has been fairly quiet post-2010. As far as I know, the only political issue she has been involved with in her gap year has been on behalf of those local Republicans who made a stab at linking us up with Redding instead of Marin in this year’s round of legislative redistricting. You can read her work on that, along with some stuff praising the Tea Party, on the website of the Humboldt Republicans.