The Morning After
Oh, we had a wee bit of news yesterday, didn’t we? The state board of elections site gives us the obvious winners and losers, but let’s look at it from some other angles:
It’s good to be an incumbent. It’s pretty clear that lobbyists and their PACs and super PACs went into overdrive to save the chestnuts of their friends on Jone
s Street. The Hospital Association spent bucket-loads on N&O website ads for Nelson Dollar. After all, they owed him. He helped handcuff efforts to reform Medicaid and threw monkeywrench after monkeywrench into certificate of need reform. (Certificates of Need are pure protectionism for hospitals.)
Conservatives for THIS. Americans for THAT. North Carolinians for THIS and THAT. All kinds of vaguely-named groups popped up to spend five to six figures on candidates seeking election (or re-election) to jobs paying $13,000 per year.
If you’ve got a committee chairmanship, you have at least one lobbyist’s attention. If you have his or her attention, you likely are very close to getting something from their checkbook.
Charles Jeter, head of the House Republicans’ campaign team, sits not-so-pretty this morning with a 28-vote lead over his challen
ger — a guy who did little more than pay his filing fee. Rep. Justin Burr appears to have pulled out a narrow win over a challenger who got a lot of help from shadowy Raleigh-based groups with deep pockets.
Chris Millis and the NC Conservatives PAC. The Pender County legislator debuted his political action committee aimed at promoting conservative candidates in GOP primaries. Millis and NCCPAC endorsed 11 candidates for NC House and two for Council of State. They went 8-3 on House races and 1-1 on the Council of State. The group opposed three incumbent House Republicans — knocking off ONE. It looks like Millis and his conservative cabal in the House might have a little more help this next session. It also looks like we might have found a new significant player in state politics.
Dems got what they wanted for November. Blacks and women on the statewide ticket. They nominated 
Dan Blue III for state treasurer and Linda Coleman for Lt. Governor. (Coleman gave Dan Forest quite the close call in 2012.) They nominated Hillary Clinton for president and Deborah Ross for US Senate. High-level black candidates will surely help fire up a highly-important voter bloc for the Democrats. High-profile female candidates — Coleman, Clinton, and Ross — will surely inspire some sisterhood at the polls like we saw with Elizabeth Dole in 2002 and Bev Perdue and Kay Hagan in 2008.
Is the Tea Party movement dead? We didn’t really see the political earthquake many were anticipating here in the Trump era. Several incumbents got closer than expected challenges. Ted Cruz closed the gap with Donald Trump — making that race closer than expected in North Carolina. (It’s interesting that the two favorite political candidates of the elected establishment here in NC came in a distant third and fourth.)
Of course — with the exception of the presidential and senatorial races — yesterday was all statewide. Perhaps Republicans are happy with what they have. Or perhaps informed folks are outnumber by low-information voters who can be swayed by those TV ads during breaks from Wheel of Fortune.
It will be inter
esting to see how our congressional candidates fare with the voters on June 7.
Lying Works. Liberties with the truth are nothing new in politics. But things seemed to descend to all new lows this time. ConnectNC was nothing but ONE BIG LIE. It passed overwhelmingly, though. We paid for the marketing of this scam. And we will end up providing the cash for this political slush fund. We cited the campaigns of Nelson Dollar and David Lewis as two of the more egregious examples among the various campaigns.
I am left with the feeling that I have less and less to vote for in November.
Yep, a Senate seat, a Governor’s race, and a Presidential race… and I’m just about left with no one to actually vote for in any of those races, and it’s only March. *sigh*
Holding the other primaries the same day as the presidential primary was an incumbent protection racket engineered by David Lewis. Eliminating runoffs helped the establishment in at least one race for a state senate seat, where the establishment candidate got under 40% and would have been in trouble in a runoff. The manipulation of election timing and procedures was a rotten insider move that screwed the general voting public.
Yesterday was very instructive. The lessons learned were hard, but we will not give, and are now better armed than before.
Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.
Winston Churchill
Well said.
OTOH, both Johnston County Commissioners that were running for an office (one for NC House Seat District 28 and one for re-election to the JoCo board) lost.
🙂
But, I also think that it is time for introspection and a re-examination of the effectiveness of the conservative messaging machine (assuming there is such a thing). Our voice is falling flat — and on deaf ears. And, yesterday’s results prove it. We must be more tactical, louder, less ideological rigid (give it a rest you Trump haters) and much more willing to put in hard time NOW helping good candidates like Dan Forrest, Jim Duncan and Buck Newton win. Sitting behind your keyboard on your high horse is getting us nowhere.
I think one of the problems out there are the false conservatives, those who use the conservative label but are nothing close to being conservative. Last election cycle, we saw the open borders crowd funded by Obama bundler Zuckerburg doing that. This election, it has been environmental extremist Jay Faison and Dee Stewart. We need to find a way to call out these phonies.
Getting a central conservative organization up and running statewide is important and Chris Millis deserves a lot of credit for getting the ball rollling on that. His organization got in at the very end of the campaign and still has a lot to do to become what it needs to be. We all need to work to help them do that.
Next year’s new district elections are an opportunity to elect genuine conservatives as District Chairmen to the Central Committee as well.
This is absolutely true. We must rally around Chris Millis and his group. They are going to be making a huge difference here in NC. We must support their efforts financially as well as in the voting booth.
I feel sorry for the old cotton tops who still keep donating, due to those scary letters and push polls.
But I think the pressure is on the NCGOP. Those old loyalists are dying off and the next generations of voters want to see more accountability, and actual *results*. As fundraising dries up, the snake will continue to eat its tail, until it is too weak not to transform.
The main thing I will give the party credit for is reducing income taxes and lifting the charter school cap. Beyond that, I see so many false promises, or forgotten promises (like reforming the “education lottery” and fair redistricting.)
I keep putting it off, but I really need to change my cell phone number. It’s the only one I gave the party while I volunteered, and I mainly leave the phone OFF nowadays so that I will not hear from them, or the campaigns they hand it out to.
Can anyone explain the AJ Daoud results? His campaign finance report shows $170,000 whereas LaPlagia raised $5,000 and only spent $1,700. Yet AJ got pummeled. Thoughts?
He just isn’t a likeable candidate? Too overbearing!
Most voters came to vote for president and were clueless on this race. One question I was asked when I was working early voting and a GOP voter was looking over a sample ballot was whether Daoud was an Arab. I wonder how many others may have thought that?
Let’s recognize some positive gains made in the primary.
Shame for not being able to elect Mark Villee in house d/36 however difficult to compete with the amount of money spent by Dollar and his supporting pacs of unions and medical proffesions.
Some are estimating a total of !/2 million dollars!!! all special interest money that buys corruption.
And another however is he was unable to spend those dollars on his liberal friends running for office so Chris Millis was able to have a major impact on the election results. We could see a far more responsive House in our next sessions.
Ron Margiotta
What do you think would happen to Dollar if conservatives qualified a conservative Unaffiliated candidate for the race in November? Ditto David Lewis?
we need an statewide organization that rates each of the candidates not just the incumbents but all of them much as the NRA does on a one issue question. this would need to be a broader list of issues. you can’t depend on the media to do it. they should but don’t.
Grassroots North Carolina does a better job and is more reliable on 2nd Amendment issues than NRA, but you are right that this needs to be done on other issues. It is something that this new PAC run by Chris Millis could and should do. There are too many candidates who call themselves conservative but are actually not if you look at a lot of their issue positions.