#ncpol: The AG, the NCDP, Michelle Nix and Grandpa join Dallas’s telephone game
As we rapidly approach the end of the candidate filing period, the action is getting fast and furious. Dallas Woodhouse, Disney’s latest cartoon character, has been burning up the phone lines begging ANYBODY, ANYBODY to file. After we broke that story, NCGOP vice chairman Michele Nix started calling around. 
This got us concerned. Where was chairman Grandpa? (Was it time to issue a Silver Alert?)
But, never fear. Someone helped Grandpa take the texting route to put the cherry on top of Dallas and Michele’s work:
Well, all of this apparently got state Democrat HQ to appeal to NC attorney general Josh Stein to inquire as to whether state laws on spamming or cold / robots-calling were violated by any of this.
Anyone could have put our absentee chairman’s name on a text. Dallas is even noted for signing a chairman’s name to a letter without even asking the chairman in question.
If we had the strong grassroots party we used to have before the toop-down control set in, the grassroots would have gotten this done. Sad.
I’m embarrassed to be a North Carolina Republican. Where’s one of those ballot access petitions for the Constitution Party? Maybe that can get somebody decent on the ballot.
Grandpa and Junior must be saboteurs.
Given his family history, Junior couldn’t get a security clearance were one required. Guess the Central Committee didn’t have any problem making a security risk ED, though.
I wouldn’t even send the clearance check paperwork in on that dude. There’s too many red flags. Says a lot about the Central Committee.
Send him back to his old job as a janitor at the state fair. He is better suited for that. Or at least see if his old handler, Karl Rove wants him back.
He may as well be working for Rove (and or his brother) where he is.
The Constitution Party platform looks pretty interesting from the parts I read of it the other week. I still need to read the whole thing but the couple hot topics they were 100% on target
The ballot petitions are being passed around at gun shows and some other civic organizations I’m familiar with. I’ve signed one and hope they get on the ballot here in North Carolina. If they do, I am pondering whether to join.
In the meantime, I did attend my Republican Party Precinct meeting last week and I am a delegate to the county convention. Maybe grassroots constitutional conservatives will find a place in the GOP this time around. It must be noted that in recent years establishment animosity toward us has reached an all time high. The coup and caliber of present leadership is an insult to us all.
I’m leaving my options open.
I imagine that gun shows are fertile territory for that petition since Phil Berger and the boys have been stalling that gun rights bill in the State Senate. They could rush though a last minute special interest Solar Goon bill that screwed electric consumers but they could not find time for a gun rights bill that had been around all session, and left it sitting in committee.
It is kicking our own base in the teeth on key issues like that while Santa Claus to the enemy base that is the big threat to the party. Berger used to be smarted than that but now he seems under control of stupid liberal consultants.
Yep. A lot of us out here are taking note. Actions have consequences.
I surely understand your wanting to keep your options open. However, the notion of dividing conservative votes is worrisome.
Part of me applauds the idea of a Constitution Party. The other part recoils and says, “Oh no! We’re about to shoot ourselves in the foot. Or worse yet, in the head. Do we want to lose our republic forever???”
what really matters on the ballot the person ? or the values they believe in ? it would be nice to be part of a party that put its platform front and center in every discussion and every situation. Just because someone has a R beside their name does not make them a good person or someone that will help save the republic
I could be wrong but if the party functioned as a platform first organization instead of a political organization then the party would be stronger and not have trouble raising money or finding good people to run for office.
What worries me is that if we have conservative Dan Forest as GOP nominee for governor and conservative Mark Meadows for US Senate, we do NOT need the conservative vote divided. On the other hand if it is Tillis for Senate and McCrory for governor, who cares?
If the party gets on the ballot, they cannot stop people filing for their primary even if the party leadership likes the GOP nominees. A better solution would be the New York cross endorsement mechanism where a candidate can be the nominee of more than one party, and the votes from each party are added together on election day. That way a candidate like Meadows or Forest could run on both the Constitution and GOP lines.
I think the greatest thing a conservative party, such as the Constitution Party, could do is to insure a conservative candidate is in a general election. We conservatives within the GOP must recognize the establishment is willing to do damned near anything to keep conservatives from getting through Republican primaries.
We may lose our republic, but it will be over my carcass.
The danger is having two conservative candidates and one liberal candidate, which helps a liberal win. I saw am analysis once of the number of Senate seats lost by the GOP because there was a Libertarian on the ballot. This comes from crunching polling numbers which tend to show that a good chunk of the votes a Libertarian gets would have otherwise voted Republican and a good chunk would probably not voted at all, but only a small portion would have otherwise voted Democrat.
That is why with third parties out there, we need the New York cross endorsements policy. Let a conservative have the opportunity to tun on both party lines and have those votes combined.
Raphael and Raynor,
I agree. We conservatives must be smart if we hope to win.
While the incompetent way this candidate recruitment mess is being orchestrated from the center is inept. , it is even more frightening the way our Stalinist attorney general Josh Stein is trying to abuse his office to interfere in the political process. This is a huge mess on all sides. Candidate recruitment is a process that should have been started months ago, not done in a panic at the last minute with cold calling and paying for polls testing a candidate you have not even talked to about running.
While the NCGOPe’s methods of candidate recruitment are a three ring circus, they are certainly not illegal or anything close. Josh Stein is behaving like he is operating in a Third World banana republic or a Stalinist police state. Having such a despicable bully as our AG is embarassing for North Carolina.
Robin Hayes’ regime at NCGOP left Roy Cooper unopposed for AG in his last run for that office, even though the SBI scandal then percolating would have made him vulnerable. We do not need to make the same mistake with Stalinist Stein next time he runs..
And our party desperately needs new leadership. Hayes and Woodhouse desperately need to go. Woodhouse and his clique seem to have spent more time plotting against grassroots conservatives in Haywood County than they did on candidate recruitment, and they have ignored the local parties in their recruitment efforts. We need a new chairman and a new ED and we need them yesterday.
I well remember how legislative recruitment used to be done under the outstanding state chairmen we have had in the past like Frank Rouse, Dave Flaherty, and Jack Hawke. They worked it through the district parties who worked with the county parties, and they started well in advance. They did not wait until the last minute. When there was a seat where no one who wanted to run could be found, someone was gotten to file to hold the seat, who could then withdraw and be replaced if an active candidate was found after the filing deadline. Sometimes to hold a seat a filing fee check would be given to a county chairman to go down and file (under today’s plan that county chairman would lose his position to do that, but not then). Legislative recruitment was discussed at Central Committee meetings and in direct telephone calls between the state chairman and district chairmen. Somehow, I doubt a single such call has been made for this election cycle.
I remember one election during the Flaherty years when there was one great candidate who had filed in the 3-seat Carteret – Onslow district that then existed, but to win his race, the district party decided they needed at least one other candidate in the district but found no one else wanting to run. They gave Jim Bob Sanders, who was an officer of the Carteret GOP a check for a filing fee to put his name on the ballot. The serious candidate running an active race beat a Democrat incumbent and Sanders came within 50 votes of doing so, without doing any campaigning whatsoever.
When Hawke was chairman, he talked frequently with the district chairmen on legislative recruitment. If a district chairman said a prospective candidate needed encouragement, Hawke would call them and talk up running. If it was a top drawer candidate in a winnable district, Hawke would call the governor’s office and get Governor Martin to call them, too, but it was the district chairmen that the prospective candidates names came from. Hawke would also sometimes get legislative leaders to call them, as well, like Senate leader Bob Shaw, but Jim Martin was the big gun. Again, this whole process started early and it was not a mad dash at the finish line.
Rouse’s day was a lot more interesting because it was back before all the campaign reports and such. Rouse also had access to the Nixon slush fund to help candidates which opened possibilities that do not exist now. An example was a Senate race in the far west. The GOP held one of the two seats in the district and the other was competitive. The GOP nominee for the second seat was a Loretta Lynn look-alike named Betty Anne Wilkie who ran under the slogan “the little woman who will represent the little man in a big district”. Wilkie was a great campaigner, but she and her husband were a one car family and when he needed it, she could not campaign. The solution came from the Nixon slush fund, and Rouse bought her a campaign car, with which she won the Senate seat.
For the record, we believe we will file candidates in a record number of House and Senate Races. 155 to 158 out of 170. Not perfect, but I am not sure we have ever had more
And for those who are interested in other parties, the NCGOP and its legislators lowered the number of signatures for a party to receive ballot access.
We also passed a provision that says that any political party with a POTUS candidate on the ballot in 35 states automatically qualifies for ours
Since you brought it up we should also remember that along with the party access requirement changes there was also the change in the percentage of vote necessary to win a primary without a runoff. The change was from a 40 percent threshold to a 30 percent threshold. In all honesty 40 percent was an abomination; 30 percent is an atrocity. In the real world 50 percent would be fair. It seems that the GOPe is not content with an advantage; they require a lock down guarantee.
This attitude of majority be damned cram down does not sit well with many of us.
J.P. Jones
The primary threshold has been debated back and forth. I think there are good arguments on both sides.
One argument for a lower threshold is that 30% in a traditional primary is still a ton more votes than 50% in a run-off
There is the conservative / grassroots side on that argument and then there is the big government / liberal side of it. You at headquarters took the latter without consulting the party base and that was very, very wrong. A 30% nominee is a bad joke. A 40% nominee was bad enough, but 30% is not going to give them cred on the ground. From what I am told you did not even bother to consult the Central Committee on that very major change. Shame on you.
Dallas Woodhouse
Yours is the kind of fallacious argument one might expect from an establishment hireling. It is just not right for a Republican Primary winner to NOT have the majority of support from Republican voters. To have our nominee picked by a financially influential segment of the party is an affront to those of us working for the principles of the party and simply reeks of corrupt cronyism.
What they did was enact an incumbent protection plan with this outrageous 30% primary standard. Any incumbent, even with a bad record is going to get 30% and if they can divide their opposition among multiple candidates, they stagger to the finish line. This is an absolute affront to vote control of our politicians.
What is also so outrageous is the little cabal in Raleigh kept the party in the dark about what they were doing. The three that were involved were Woodhouse, Hayes, and Stark. These three have no right to being making such far reaching policy for the party. This dramatic change should have had wide discussion in the party but they kept everyone else in the dark. The big player on the legislative side was establishment liberal scumbag David Lewis.
The whole game was to protect Tillis with his awful approval rating and miserable voting record. Most of those who manipulated this despicable gambit are Tillis flunkies, and that includes Woodhouse in a big way, Hayes, and Lewis. Not sure about Stark, but he is always in the thick of things with Woodhouse, whatever it is.
I categorically deny that the 30% primary bill was intended to save Thom Tillis. It may well do that, but the real intent was to save money.
Just think about it, without those pesky runoff primaries,there will be a lot less expense for the boards of election. There will be a lot less money shelled out by political contributors,, which will then still be there for the NCGOPe to get some of it, so we can use it for something important like paying my salary.
Wait until the next step to save money at election time that David Lewis and I are working on. We will eliminate primaries altogether. That will save even more money. The Executive Director of the NCGOPe will just designate who all the candidates will be. The sticking point right now is who the Democrats will have designate all of their candidates. We had thought maybe Roy Cooper, but since Bill Barber really runs their party these days, maybe it will be him. Still working on that.
Next up – how do we eliminate the costs of general elections?
Oh and this 30% primary has another benefit, too. It gives our establishment plant in the conservative movement – John Hood – something to brag about with his liberal friends in cocktail parties.
Please remember that when the Great Outhouse has spoken , the little people get no say. Get over it, peasants.
I will just point out that this “incompetent..candidate recruitment mess”r
resulted in the most contested races ever for NCGOP
169 out of 170 with a republican candidate and one GOP supported unaffiliated running in the last
Bypassing the local party structure to do it all out of Raleigh is not the way to get candidates who will support GOP principles. It is a way to build a centralized power structure.
Mr. Woodhouse,
I am not familiar with the Republican Party practice of supporting “unaffiliated” candidates.
Apologies if this candidate’s identity is common knowledge, but as I am not aware of who this “GOP supported unaffiliated” is can you please identify them?
Thank you,
Richard Carter Jr
We did not bypass anything. We worked close with our local folks
When I was working in the party structure at the county and district levels I had experience with the state party and state legislature people working “close with our local folks” on many occasions. More times than not the local folks were not part of the local party structure. A lot of times they were actively working against the county and district committees. That was back during Grandpa’s first term as Chair and when Tillis was Speaker.
I’m thinking that surely things aren’t working like that now, but the ole hound disagrees and gives me that mind out growl.