North Carolina – Republicans
Hail Mark Ezzell
Every great saga has a hero. The hero of the Wake County early-voting saga is Mark Ezzell. With persistence and persuasiveness, Ezzell, the lone Democrat on the Wake County elections board, prevailed in his effort to expand early voting here. He persuaded the GOP-majority state board to vote 3-2 to expand the number of voting…
Read MoreBigotry is losing big
Donald Trump has figured out, or been convinced, that Americans don’t want a bigot in high public office. Petulant Pat McCrory hasn’t learned that lesson yet in his reelection race. Trump’s “pivot” (actually more of a lurch) on race and immigration was an act of desperation. His new campaign team obviously told him he couldn’t…
Read MoreFrozen
Sean is Irish and Catholic and decades ago his great-grandfather was an immigrant; after he (Sean) graduated from Fordham and married and worked a stint in White Plains, New York, he moved to Raleigh where he now lives and earns $175,000 a year. Sean doesn’t have one ideological bone in his body and partisan politics…
Read MoreRoy is ready
As I listened to Roy Cooper set a crowd of OBX Democrats to clapping and hollering Monday evening, a wise old political vet whispered what I was thinking: “He’s come a long way.” A year or so ago, Democrats had doubts about Cooper. “He should have run before now.” “Does he really have the fire…
Read MoreThe rise of Deborah Ross
Richard Burr has his hands full. For the first time since he went to Washington 22 years ago, he faces a double whammy: a strong opponent and a bad year for Republicans. You can see his problem in the first ad for Deborah Ross. It tags Burr, sans socks, as the worst kind of Washington…
Read MoreElection-rigging
Donald Trump was right. Somebody is trying to rig the election. It’s his party. In North Carolina. Dallas Woodhouse’s email is the smoking gun. He directed Republican election board members in all 100 counties to make “party line” changes that keep Democrats from voting and keep Republican politicians in power. This is exactly what Republicans…
Read MoreRoss vs Burr and Cooper vs McCrory
A reader chided me for not writing lately about the NC Senate and Governor’s races. My excuse was that all the oxygen is taken up with “Trump said what today?” Then the Marist/Wall Street Journal poll last week showed Clinton, Ross and Cooper all leading. So here we go. The stunner was Clinton leading Trump…
Read MoreA Wager
Ole Francis De Luca over at the Civitas Institute released his latest poll and revealed an amazing fact – Donald Trump is receiving 32% of the African-American vote in North Carolina. The poll took wing and flew across right-wing websites, hailed it as proof of ‘The Donald’s’ invincibility. Who else could win a third of…
Read MoreMcCrory goes full Trump
Pat McCrory is acting more and more like Donald Trump. Like Trump, he’s thin-skinned and sensitive. Like Trump, he personally and viciously attacks anybody who disagrees with him. And like Trump, he can’t stop digging his hole deeper. McCrory had his chief of staff call a late-night press conference to accuse a career state scientist…
Read MoreThe looming Republican disaster
North Carolina Republicans this year will get to experience what we Democrats went through in so many presidential elections: how to avoid going down with the Titanic. Because the S.S. Trump is going down, and it will be hard to avoid getting sucked into the vortex. The Republican convention is officially a disaster. It didn’t…
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