North Carolina

Nice outfits, ladiesDemocratic pollsters showed their Dan winning by a hair. Republican pollsters showed their Dan winning by a hair. And non-partisan pollsters showed the race as too close to call. I had no doggie in this race.

The governor of New Jersey is Phil Murphy, a Democrat. Both Houses of the state legislature are controlled by Democrats, the Senate 26-14 and the Assembly 54-26. There's just one New Jersey congressional district that elected a Republican in 2018. It would be easy as pie for New Jersey Democrats to gerrymander the map to make Chris Smith's 4th CD go from an R+8 district to a much more winnable R+1 or 2 or even an even district that a Democratic candidate could easily win.

Blue America's newest endorsee is Jason Butler, the progressive candidate taking on reactionary Trump enabler George Holding in a North Carolina red district (NC-02) that has started trending purple. Last cycle, Holding only eked out a bare 51.3% win-- in a district where Obama lost both times and where Trump beat Hillary by over 10 points!

Over the past two weeks I've talked to 7 new candidates running for Congress. One doesn't support Medicare-for-All, the Green New Deal, banning assault weapons or even raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour and I told her she was calling the wrong organization and to try the DCCC or EMILY's List. The others are being vetted. The easiest candidate to endorse though was Jason Butler, running in North Carolina’s 2nd district.

Yesterday, House Democrats-- without buy-in from any of the Democrats' conservative establishment leadership-- voted against Al Green's resolution to begin a formal investigation into impeaching Trump by sending his resolution to the Judiciary Committee to die. The Republicans and the Pelosi-faithful voted 332-95 against impeachment.

Thom Tillis is WAY too scared to ever criticize Trump againThere will be a huge focus on North Carolina next year. First of all it's a swing state that Obama won in 2008 and where Trump is underwater in polling now (-3 according to the June Morning Consult update). There's virtually no path to victory for Trump without North Carolina's 15 electoral votes.

Guess which party is havin' a meetin'After the North Carolina Republican Party got caught trying to steal the NC-09 House seat last November, the election of far right Trumpist sociopath, Mark Harris was invalidated and a special election called for September 10. Citizens of a district going from Charlotte to Fayetteville will have had no representation in Congress for nearly a year.

Same kind of authoritarian, anti-democratic mindset and instincts. Bustos, chair of the DCCC, is trying to prevent primaries of Blue Dogs and New Dems in Congress, while she recruits New Dem and Blue Dog-types to run against progressives.

Dan the crackpot Republican vs Dan the untrustworthy Blue DogNo one is forcing me to write this post but if there's one congressional race whose outcome I could care less about, it's the re-do for NC-09, a swingy district that borders South Carolina and shoots from Colonial Heights in Charlotte to Savoy Heights in Fayetteville.

As I mentioned in the post Sunday about the special election in PA-12, Democrats don't win in R+17 districts-- not ever. How about a district where the PVI is R+12? That's very unlikely, but not quite as impossible. The Democrats serving in Congress today in the reddest districts are: