#ncsen: About those “nine” votes
It’s really kind of funny to see leftists AND Thom Tillis fanboys join forces to pile on a guy who did little more than allow people to put his name on the US Senate ballot.
IndyWeek, the progressive site from The Triangle, mocks former state Rep. John Rhodes as the guy who got NINE votes. All kinds of mouth-breathers who count the NCGOP state convention as their social outing-of-the-year have been emailing us with nanny-nanny-boo-boos about Rhodes’s “nine votes.”
Where is this coming from? The North Carolina State board of elections has election results from Tuesday on its web site. The site — which was one long, hellish malfunction on Election Eve — currently shows 5,220 write in votes for US Senate. It has a breakout showing NINE VOTES for Rhodes.
Finding that stat hard to believe, I caught up with Josh Lawson, the public information officer at the state board of elections. He told me the local boards manually count and tabulate the write-in votes. A deadline of November 14 has been set for having all of that information turned in. The nine votes currently shown on the site are only a small, small percentage of what’s out there. It’s all that has been reported to Raleigh on the write-ins. There are more than 5.200 to go.
Rhodes was one of three write-in candidates who achieved the signature threshold to allow their votes to be officially tabulated.
So, leftists, take a deep breath and resign yourself to the fact that your new imperious leader / supreme commander is Elaine Marshall. Tillis fanboys, take a deep breath and meditate on the fact that your hero became the first ever Senate candidate to go to Washington from North Carolina without ever hitting the 50 percent mark.
If you want to ensure he hangs around DC longer than six years, it might be worth cultivating these Tea Party folks and encouraging your guy to pay some attention to the GOP platform. Even HE knows most of his vote was a protest against Obama.
On my ballot, I wrote in John Rhodes’ name for U.S. Senator. I did it, proudly — no clothespin required — and I went to sleep with a clear conscience.
Mr. Rhodes, please run for Richard Burr’s seat in 2016.
I’d rather that Greg Brannon take up that challenge!
Dan Forest is my choice for Senate in 2016, or alternatively Jim Cain. Brannon would make an outstanding senator but he is only a mediocre candidate. I was not impressed with the campaign he ran this time. He should have started a lot earlier pointing out the differences between himself and Tillis.
I agree with you. Brannon was right on principles and platform, but was not a very good communicator. He needs to learn how to connect at the heart and not just the head level.
John East, elected Senator in 1980, didn’t get to 50%, either, but he was closer to it than Tillis was.
east was at 49.96 percent. I’ll give him that .04.
I was estimating prior to the election that Rhodes would probably get around 2,000 votes. There were 700 or so who signed the petition, word of mouth would round up some more die-hards.
However, those 2,000 people are the folks who get politically involved – and could have rounded up several thousand more votes if they had felt inclined. Elections have been lost by slimmer margins.
we should all grow up a little and stop insulting people that don’t agree with us. it’s enough to point out the facts and leave the readers to make up their own mind.
Sean Haugh should get the credit for pushing Tollus over the top. Haugh campaigned hard Left and undeniably took more votes away from Hag than Tollus. Haugh also had a registered Republican as his campaign manager. I suspect he was or will be rewarded in a tangible way.
I don’t think many of the normal people knew there were write-ins available in the Senate race. Many of those voters capable of rational thought figured it was down to Kay or Thom. According to the election board more people claimed to have seen Bigfoot in the voting booth than voted for a write-in.
And several thousand rational people decided the main party candidates were equally appalling, and chose to express their disgust via a write-in vote that the board of elections would be required to tally. Unlike Nevada, North Carolina does not have “none of the above” as an option.
It sounds like tens of thousands probably did that with Sean Haugh. Normally in a non-presidential year, the Libertarian gets around 60,000 votes.
And when all the wailing and gnashing of teeth dies down Senator Thom Tillis will represent North Carolina for the next six years. Hard to spin that any other way than “he won.”
And it only took about $50,000,000 in ads to convince 1.4 million people that he sucked less than Hagan. He sucked so bad that it took around $40 PER VOTE to sell him.
He’s also the first Republican elected to the US Senate from NC to get less than 50% of the vote.
You can call it a “win” but he better not think it was because Republicans liked him.
Many disgruntled GOP voters who cannot stomach the party nominee have historically used the LP line as a substitute for None of the Above. It happened in the 8th Congressional District in 2010 after Fetzer meddled in the GOP runoff in favor of the establishment choice, getting him the nomination over the previous frontrunner who was aligned to the Tea Party.
Only those who really follow politics had any idea what a loose cannon Haugh was or even knew about write-in candidates.
Still, it appears that toward the end, a lot of people hated Obama so much that they held their noses for Tillis. Tillis better realize that he is on thin ice with these voters and they hate Obama more than they like Tillis. If Tillis starts caving in on policy to Obama positions, these voters will feel betrayed.
The Tillis fan boys ought to realize that it was the Ben Carson for President campaign who pulled their chestnuts out of the fire:
http://www.redstate.com/diary/vernon/2014/11/09/tillis/
Without what the Carson folks did, Tillis would have lost.
” Hard to spin that any other way than ‘he won.’ ”
No spin on this: The people lost with the Tillis win, just like they did with the Hagan 2008 win.
“If Tillis starts caving in on policy to Obama positions, these voters will feel betrayed.”
I’m trying to figure out when was the last time I did not feel betrayed by an elected official that got my vote. Surely over the next 6 years Tillis will vote not in accordance with my wisdom and do the wrong thing.
What is that scripture about all of us being sinners?
I would like to know more about what happened to the vote counts and the Board of Elections meltdown. When we saw the site go down, it was deja vu, and sure enough, in spite of most all previous polls, Tillis was suddenly ahead. Any insights?
Here is a Facebook post from journalist Nicole Revels about the event:
“Computer glitches AGAIN, ?#?NC? ?#?SBOE????? If this is anything like the primary election, this is the point where when the results become live again, Thom Tillis takes his lead. LOL….. ?#?ooooh? ?#?Corruption?.”
I read on the internet that NC used new voting machine software this year and the software company is owned by a major donor to American Crossroads – the same PAC run by Karl Rove.
I certainly hope Brannon,Rhodes and any others you can think of run in 2016 so we can be done with them.They will never make it through a primary.
The candidates who need to run in 2016 are Dan Forest or Jim Cain. And Jim Duncan for Congress in the 2nd district.
^^^This. Forest or Cain
Brannon, while right on many issues, isn’t the total package, too many flaws.