North Carolina

About a decade ago, mostly back in 2006 and 2008, we used to write a lot about a North Carolina multimillionaire congressman named Robin Hayes. The district he represented, NC-08, is now mostly NC-09, the one where a Trumpist candidate was caught rigging the ballots last year, causing the election to be voided. The district has no representative in Congress now and a new election is in the works.

Hogg likely to face Blue DogOn Friday, the Charlotte Observer reported that the vacant congressional seat for the 9th district, which starts in Charlotte's suburbs and works its way south and east, had just passed its filing deadline for the May 14th primary. As expected, just one Democrat is in the race, Blue Dog Dan McCready.

On Thursday, by a large bipartisan majority, the Senate approved HJ 46, the resolution of disapproval for Trump's phony state of emergency declaration. A dozen Republicans voted with every single Democrat against Trump.

Dowless mug shotA few days ago, Mark Harris, as expected, announced that he will not be running for Congress. Harris claimed ill-health, but it is likely that he made a deal to not run in return for not being prosecuted for for hiring a known election fraudster to steal the Republican primary and then the general election.

We left off Sunday night before the meeting of the North Carolina Board of Elections. All the background about the case, the candidates and the 9th district can be found there, as well as my predictions how just how horrible Democrat Blue Dog Dan McCready is likely to be and how progressives would be better off without him in Congress.

It's exceedingly rare that elections that are decided by vote theft get overturned. But the swingy southern-tier district of North Carolina, stretching from Elizabethtown and Fayetteville in the east, out through Lumberton, Laurinburg, Wadesboro and the southern Charlotte suburbs as far as the Central Piedmont Community College campus in the west, still doesn't have a representative in Congress.

Walter Jones was one of the few Republican members of Congress who I was able to get to talk with me for DWT. And he was always a serious and forthright guy. I liked him and was sorry to hear he had passed away today, on his 76th birthday.

North Carolina Republicans realize that vote thief Mark Harris is unelectable-- and there's a special election coming to fill the NC-09 seat he almost got away with stealing. The district is trending purple but it still leans pretty Republican. Trump beat Hillary there 54.4% to 42.8%. That's a lot of ground to make up. And Cook still gives the district a PVI of R+8.

Have you been wondering how much Mark Harris paid professional Republican Party vote thief Leslie McCrae Dowless to steal the 2018 election for him? It was over half a million dollars, probably a lot over half a million dollars. How slimy is Harris?

Liberty Revisited by Nancy OhanianLast month, North Carolina Democrats didn't come close to winning with chamber of the state legislature but they did accomplished something very important in both chambers-- they broke the Republican supermajority in each.