#NCGA Insider: Record of aid and comfort to Paul Tine from Team Tillis, NCGOP
I got a call yesterday from someone — very familiar with the inner workings of the state House Republican Caucus — who had just read my item on Democrat Paul Tine’s departure from the Democrat Caucus. This source was very much in agreement with my theory that the NCGOP establishment reached out to Tine to block the advances of the Tea Party in Tine’s Outer Banks-centered district:
”Representative Tine beat his Republican opponent in 2012 by only 500 votes. That’s a close race. I’ve been in this game a while. You would think the state party would be heavily involved in the district in the next cycle. But House leadership and the party spent nothing on ads to help out Tine’s opponent. That’s mighty peculiar. I can’t think of another instance where a Republican lost a close race one year, and party leaders do nothing to help that Republican in a rematch two years later. Some of us asked around about this particular decision. We were told that Tine’s Republican opponent was the devil — a crazy person who had to be put down. None of us knew anything about Tine’s opponent, but that is what we were told by House leaders and folks over at the state party.”
“The devil” in question here is Outer Banks Tea Party leader Mattie Lawson. In 2012, Lawson knocked off in the primary a former Democrat legislator who switched parties and got backed heavily by Thom Tillis and the rest of his leadership team. In November, she faced off with Tine while Raleigh basically sat on its hands.
Bolstered by her close 2012 race, Lawson came back at Tine in 2014. By August 2014, Tine had a 63-1 fundraising advantage over Lawson — much of which was provided by Raleigh-based sources and others with interests before the NCGA. My source said allowing Tine into the GOP caucus is outrageous:
”This guy was regularly out there trying to kill conservative legislation. Comparing him to Bert Jones is ridiculous. Bert was unaffiliated, but he was a diehard conservative. His case made more sense. In the case of representative Tine, you have some folks in Raleigh who are interested in blocking the advance of The Tea Party in that district. They’re putting out the word that Tine has not been offered anything. But just wait. He’ll get some sweet office space or a desirable committee post. Then, the party switch will come. And voters in the 6th district will be stuck with an incumbent Republican picked for them by Raleigh insiders — who is an avowed big government fan and a donor to Democrat campaigns as late as November 2014.”
Mattie Lawson was a neocon….
One of those Democrat campaigns that Tine contributed to was Barack Hussein Obama. These blockheads have let an Obama Democrat into the GOP caucus. Tine says his ideology has not changed, so he is the same Obama Democrat today as he was yesterday.
If you can’t Beat’em Join them !!!
Sorry Mattie you are to conservative therefore you don’t qualify. Try again, from your Rino friends
In the end it is all about “electability.”
Liberal Democrat Paul Tine, masquerading as a Republican, is not going to be any more ”electable” in a Republican primary than liberal Democrat Arthur Williams was, and Mattie Lawson beat him like a drum in the primary. And it would be the same in a general election. With a choice between two liberal Democrats, one masquerading as a Republican, most conservative voters would not even have a reason to vote in that race.
But let us look a little farther back on this district. It was a GOP leaning district, represented by conservative Bill Cook, until Tillis got mad at Cook and sliced up his district the same time at redistricting that he sliced up the Franklin County district of Glen Bradley because he was mad at that conservative GOP legislator, too. Cook found himself double bunked with an incumbent Democrat in a district where his own county was divided and the geography favored the Democrat, while the partisan dynamics were iffy. The Senate district was more favorable, so he ran there and won, after overcoming a primary opponent the beltway boys put in his path. In the end, the incumbent Democrat in the 6th district decided to retire, and Tillis and his lot recruited liberal Democrat Arthur Williams to masquerade as a Republican. Local party leaders knew what Williams was and wanted no part of him. Williams had two ”not Williams” primary opponents and was trounced in the primary runoff (as Tine will be if he goes that route). Local party leaders also know what Tine is, and from my information were blindsided on this maneuver, as they had been on Williams.
In 2014, a Ron Paul activist who had some personal skeletons in his closet announced he was going to run in the district. Lawson had much earlier announced she would not, as she wanted to spend her efforts in the US Senate primary. Members of the 3rd Congressional District GOP executive committee became very concerned about the personal background of the Ron Paul activist and convinced Lawson to run again. The Ron Paul activist never filed. However the Tillis crowd made some calls and recruited a primary challenger to Lawson, whom she beat in the primary. The challenger recruited by Tillis’ crowd was a highly credible candidate, and this time a genuine Republican, and ran an active campaign but lost to Lawson, which surprised many.
The Raleigh GOP mafia largely stayed out of the general election in both 2012 and 2014, and the latest Tine move makes one wonder if they had some backroom arrangement with him all the time. They may well have stayed out of the general elections previously even if their candidates had won the primaries. Maybe they were supposed to be sacrificial lambs.
The key is that it is the local parties who are supposed to recruit their legislative candidates, not an arrogant and out of touch Raleigh GOP mafia. The local parties have been blindsided in the 6th district and a lot of other places in NC. Hopefully the Raleigh mafia will get the message and start working through local parties instead of around them, but this Tine maneuver is not a good sign.
It says a lot that NCGOP dumped at least $90,000 into a somewhat less likely NC House district 2 race and nothing into this race.
Hardly. LD-2 was an open seat, while Tine was an incumbent with a massive war chest and an opponent [Lawson] who did very little to raise money. Larry Yarborough in LD-2 actually tried to win his race and he did. Mattie Lawson, bless her heart, must have thought that getting elected was something she had no control over at all. She’s a principled woman, but she owed it to her supporters – and conservatives across this state – to put in more effort in such an extremely winnable district. For such an allegedly active base of conservatives in LD-6, they did very little to campaign for Lawson after the primary. When I met her in April she was energized about winning, but it seems like things fell off here for conservatives in the Outer Banks after the Brannon loss. People ought to stop with these bold assumptions about Raleigh and realize that no one is going to help you as a candidate if you’re not willing to first help yourself. You can’t distrust Raleigh and then blame Raleigh for not getting you elected and spending enough money on you. Now who’s the hypocrite?
Raleigh can’t stand Paul Tine; that is why Raleigh recruited Ashley Woolard to initially beat the Democrat. Tine’s a sheep walking into a lion’s den if he thinks anyone in the GA will start to trust him now. Instead, he has violated Rule #1 and managed to make himself more despised than he is respected or feared – and he’s despised statewide now, not just by the Beaufort County Tea Party. He revealed his ambition too early. Rank and file Republicans will have nothing to do with Tine. The NCGOP showed it has loyalty by helping people win races like LD-2 and still doing what little it could to help Lawson. Paul Tine is to the GOP what Edward Snowden is to Russia – they could care less about him personally, his only value to them is that taking him is a blow to the opposition. It’s Tine who shows that he’ll even abandon his Democrat friends if it’s advantageous, despite being such a raging liberal that he gave as much as possible to Barack Obama in 2008. Mattie Lawson is right about one thing though – start finding candidates to crush Tine in whatever election he ends up running in next. Hopefully it will be candidates who won’t allow themselves to be outspent 63-1.
Thou dost protest too much.
The real Colin Powell is a liberal Obama Republican, so I hope using that name does not reflect what you are.
Eastern North Carolina is not happy when Raleigh interferes in our legislative races, with no concern whatsoever for the local party organizations, and neither are other parts of the state where it has been happening too often. They have no reason to consult the local Tea Parties, but not consulting the local party organizations is another thing entirely. It is the local party organization that has the primary responsibility in recruiting GOP candidates.
A good example is the Carteret-Pamlico-Craven Senate district. When that became an open seat in 2012, local party leaders supported State Rep. Norm Sanderson moving up to the Senate. Raleigh however recruited a major Democrat contributor and fundraiser to run for that seat as a Republican. The Raleigh GOP mafia’s candidate had even been one of the unindicted airplane contributors to Bev Purdue. Even through he was massively outspent, Sanderson won by a landslide in the primary and then won the general.
The same year, the Raleigh GOP mafia put another warmed over Democrat in the primary against Bill Cook for Senate District 1. In this case, their newly minted ”Republican” had run unsuccessfully for county commissioner the previous election as an Obama Democrat.
It is time for Raleigh and local Republican leaders to work together to find a solid Republican candidate who represents the principles of the party to win HD6, and no more warmed over liberal Democrats, please! Perhaps with the new team in the House leadership, there will be a more productive approach to working with the local party organizations around the state, but we will at this point have to keep our fingers crossed on that.
to bad very very few people elected or re-elected go after the tough issues ..like saving tax payer funds going to groups who claim the moral monday rallys are legit and spending last year alone 2 BILLION dollars on services from K-12 all the way down to legal services for illegal aliens and their family members. And where is the outrage at the rising crime rates in all of those sanctuary cities/counties from all the good statesmen/women in both houses of the legislature at ? http://www.fairus.org/publications/the-fiscal-burden-of-illegal-immigration-on-north-carolinians
Just goes to show there really is only one party with two different names. So that’s why I think a new party titled Constitutional Conservative Party should form calling citizens from ‘the other party with two names’ and all walks of life, red and yellow black and white to really behind and around the Constitution. Give citizens a place to go who are tired of the status quo progressive liberal ideology of the other party with two names.
The major parties in NC have made it impossible for 3rd parties and independents to get ballot access by requiring an ungodly amount of signatures in statewide races. Although it’s a little easier at the local level.