Posts by Gary Pearce
Winning and Losing
Fall is in the air, college football is back and I’ll be at Carter-Finley Stadium, pulling for the Wolfpack. In a couple of months, I’ll be in the Lenovo Center (or whatever it’s named now) hoping Will Wade can restore our basketball glory in the era of NIL (“Now It’s Legal”). I’ll learn the players’…
Read MoreBleeding Democrats
If the Democratic Party were a hospital patient, every monitor would be blaring emergency alarms. The party is bleeding voter registrations – nationally and in North Carolina. After the 2020 election, there were over 373,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans (2,620,162 to 2,246,540) in North Carolina. Today, there are just over 15,800 more registered Democrats…
Read MoreTuning In
A big thing that people in politics don’t understand is how little attention people pay to politics. We politicos dive in and swim deep in the daily river of news – every Breaking News flash, every headline, every talking head, every twist and turn in every story. But most people take only an occasional dip…
Read MoreBoliek’s 435 Pages
My friend Ron is cynical about government, and he couldn’t contain himself when he read that State Auditor Dave Boliek produced a 435-page report on fixing the N.C. Division of Motor Vehicles. “435 pages!?” Ron sputtered. “How much time and taxpayer money did that take?” He raged on, “And Boliek’s big idea is to move…
Read MoreCopydesk Days
My wife was chatting with a man as we waited for a table at a beachside restaurant. Suddenly she grabbed me, “You need to talk to him. He was a copy editor at The New York Times.” My first full-time job at The News & Observer was as a copy editor, so Andy and I…
Read MoreSick
“I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished,” President Franklin D. Roosevelt said in 1937, in his second inaugural address. Today, 88 years later, FDR would see one-third of Americans going without medical care. A national poll by Embold Research (1,736 registered voters, July 1-7) found that “nearly 30% of Americans indicated that they faced…
Read MoreStraight Talk
A veteran Democrat who doesn’t get excited by much texted me at night: “This is solid. Democrats forgot how to talk to people like this.” He’d seen this video by Jamie Ager, who’s taking on a tough but intriguing race in the 11th Congressional District of Western North Carolina Ager delivers a direct message and…
Read More2024 Might-Have-Beens
Kamala Harris could have won. She could have overcome President Biden’s poor polls, voters’ discontent and her campaign’s short timeline. That’s what I take from 2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America – by three newspaper reporters, Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager, and Isaac Arnsdorf. Their reporting shows that campaigns matter;…
Read MoreRoy vs DC
It’s Down Home Roy versus D.C. politicians. Roy Cooper’s announcement video is how Opie Taylor of Mayberry would look and sound if he grew up to run for Senator. Cooper begins nostalgically: “It wasn’t always this hard, because being in the middle class meant something. You could afford a home. Your kids went to good…
Read MoreHad Enough?
North Carolina’s U.S. Senate race will be nasty and brutal. It also will be our chance to reject the nasty, brutal politics that Trump has inflicted on America for 10 years. A spokesman for the state Republican Party sounded like Trump: “We just look forward to welcoming Roy Cooper to the most miserable campaign he’s…
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