Carter Wrenn
Gary Pearce
The newspaper, strapped for cash, heard about a ‘Rally Against Racism’ in a small town an hour’s drive away and thought, Click bait. After the rally a headline popped up on the newspaper’s website: ‘We cannot live in fear’: Activist condemns racism, gun violence at rally in Hillsborough – and every time someone clicked to…
“I crawled along with my bayonet in my hand, sticking it in the ground ahead of me trying to find mines.” Joe Dickerson, describing the terrible 400 yards between the water and the seawall on Omaha Beach, D-Day, June 6, 1944. My stepfather Joe Dickerson, who died Monday at age 96, was a veteran of…
Size matters in politics. Yes, physical size: Think Trump looming over Hillary in their debates, or Reagan vs. Carter or George H.W. Bush vs. Dukakis. But just as important is political size, psychic size – call it heft, command presence or the aura of leadership. The Presidency is a big job. To get there, a…
Apparently, we all agree on one thing: Washington is corrupt. That’s the central message from two challengers to Senator Thom Tillis, one a Democrat and one a Republican. In his announcement video this week, Democratic challenger Cal Cunningham says we must “reform the corrupt system in Washington.” He says, “the corruption in D.C. and politicians…
Many Democrats are torn over impeaching Trump. They think he deserves it, but fear it may reelect him and decimate them in 2020. Here’s an alternative from an unlikely source, Reagan speechwriter and Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan: Congress should censure Trump. She wrote: “The harrowing part of the Mueller report is part 2,…
Democrats have been circulating and celebrating an Emerson College poll that shows Trump losing North Carolina to Joe Biden by 12 points, to Bernie Sanders by eight points, to Pete Buttigieg by four and tied with Elizabeth Warren. The poll shows State Senator Erica Smith leading Senator Thom Tillis 46-39, and Governor Roy Cooper leading…
Healthcare was a winning issue for Democrats in North Carolina and across the country in 2018. Republicans in Raleigh seem bound and determined to make it an even bigger winner for Democrats next year. Governor Roy Cooper is building on 2018 by making Medicaid expansion a big part of his budget showdown with the Republican-led…
Governor Roy Cooper has picked the same fight over North Carolina’s future that Terry Sanford picked more than 60 years ago. The issue is the same. Then, powerful people in Raleigh wanted the legislature to pass corporate tax cuts. Sanford said that was wrong. He said North Carolina needed to invest in education. This year,…
Back in 1989, not long after John McLaughlin began doing polls, I asked him to poll for Jesse Helms’s campaign. 29 years later I asked John to do a poll to find the answer to one question: Could Garland Tucker defeat Thom Tillis in the Republican Primary for Senate? We found that – with Republican…
Carter Wrenn and I are moving to Substack. That’s where you’ll find our blogs in the…
The political sniping began even as chaos still reigned at the White House Correspondents Dinner. My…
A new nationwide poll shows that, if they could run against each other in 2028, Barack…