Elections 2017?

This ball game may have just changed big-league, as Trump would say. The referees in federal court threw the penalty flag on the Republican legislature for unconstitutional gerrymandering. This means loss of down, possible loss of possession and maybe a replay in just 12 months. No doubt candidates and contributors, still exhausted from this year,…

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Pat and Roy

Pat laid his offer on the table Saturday: Recount Durham’s votes and I’ll drop my request for recounts in other counties, he told the State Board of Elections. It sounded reasonable. And fair. But like a lot of knotty problems there’s more than one way to look at it. The chance of a Durham recount…

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Dining with D.G.

You can have your Anthony Bourdains and your Phil Rosenthals. If I’m eating on the road, I’m going with North Carolina’s own D.G. Martin. Now you can drive and dine with D.G. by picking up his new book, “North Carolina’s Roadside Eateries: A Traveler’s Guide to Local Restaurants, Diners, and Barbecue Joints,” published by UNC…

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Flunking the Electoral College

As Hillary Clinton’s popular vote lead passes 2 million, the quadrennial question arises: Why elect Presidents differently from the way we elect every other public official? And why not change it? The practical answer is that it’s impossible today to amend the Constitution. Half the country would automatically oppose it, given how divided we are.…

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Depressed – and deploring Trump

Happy Thanksgiving? Bah, humbug, say a lot of Democrats. Two weeks after a loss they didn’t see coming, they’re still sorting through four of the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining and depression. The fifth and final stage, acceptance, is a ways off. So let’s pause and calmly assess the situation. Here’s some advice…

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Connecting the Dots: Broken Journalism

After a year of waking up every morning to listen to name-calling and howling on TV I figured, Enough politics – after the election what everyone needed was a break to calm down. About a week later I read an article about the demise of journalism during the election, thought, Amen – then a couple…

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Twenty-Something Gunslingers

Ole Pat labored faithfully day-in and day-out and did his best to whip Roy for almost two years but no matter how hard he tried he couldn’t quite catch up – on Election Night when the first returns rolled in it looked like the polls were right: Pat trailed. But within an hour the world…

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You lost. Give it up.

This message is for Pat McCrory AND for Democrats who want the Electoral College to dump Trump: It’s over. You lost. Move on. Prolonging these fights is doomed, divisive, delusional, self-defeating and just plain dumb. Doesn’t McCrory know this? He should break free of the lawyers, consultants and spokesmen who want to keep fighting so…

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Radio therapy

The day after the election, I taped an interview with Chris Fitzsimon on the NC Policy Watch website. I talked about what happened and what comes next, including Roy Cooper vs the legislature, potential splits inside the Republican Party and why Deborah Ross should run against Thom Tillis in 2020. You can hear it here.…

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Therapy for Democrats

My Facebook page looks like a mass therapy session for Democrats cycling through the various stages of grief. They not only vent their anger at Trump and his angry voters, they also lash out at other Democrats and lecture them on how they should feel and what they should do. No. You should feel how…

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