special elections

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.

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.

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:

Cheri-- burnin' down the House (but not in  a good way)And the winners are... not the candidates being recruited to run for congressional seats next year. These 5 were elected to positions that haven't been well-defined yet:

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.

Eric GiddensSaturday, Beto O'Rourke was in Black Hawk County, Iowa campaigning for Eric Giddens in Cedar Falls. Eric Giddens, a school board member who heads the University of Northern Iowa’s energy programs, is in a hot special election tomorrow for an open state senate seat (district 30). He doesn't know Beto-- and Beto is hardly the only nationally known Democrat campaigning for him.

Over the weekend, Natalie Allison reported for The Tennessean about the new effort by Republicans in the state legislature to outlaw same sex marriage... again. State Senator Mark Pody (Lebanon) and Rep.

This week, Erik Loomis' essay at Lawyers, Guns & Money, The Big Electoral Story of 2019 reminds us that "we don’t pay nearly enough attention to how power is actually built–through local and state races and organizing.

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.