NC-11

  When I sat down on Monday morning to write this post, YouGov had just released 3 new polls for battleground states, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania-- collectively 46 electoral votes that Trump can't afford to lose.

 Babies in Cages by Nancy Ohanian Friday morning, Tim Murtaugh, the official spokesman for the Trump campaign, was on CNN’s New Day talking about the hundreds of children of migrants who were kidnapped and "lost" by the Trump Regime.

North Carolina’s 11th district on the western edge of the state includes the stunning Blue Ridge Mountains, Great Smoky Mountains National Park and some of the most beautiful forests, waterfalls and vistas in the country. It also includes Asheville, a small, artsy, craft beer-loving liberal city that anchors this district … but hardly defines it. Asheville and some of Buncombe County are a bright blue dot in a sea of deep red conservative voters.

A month ago we took a quick look at a GOP super-star in the making, Madison Cawthorn, the 25 year old right-wing, certifiably insane person who beat Trump's candidate for the deep red seat Mark Meadows gave up to become Trump's 20th Chief of Staff.

Ballots are still being counted almost everywhere. Kentucky has already announced that there will be no final vote count until June 30-- which is when the state's two biggest counties, Jefferson (Louisville) and Fayette (Lexington) plan to release their results.

Buzz on Capitol Hill is that Mark Meadows may give up his safe House seat for a year-- if he lasts a year-- as Trump's chief of staff.

Jenny Marshall is the progressive activist and public school teacher in North Carolina running for the seat occupied by GOP crackpot Virginia Foxx.

I don't watch Morning Joe but Bernie tweeted some of this rant Friday and it really is awesome.

The CBO sums up their report on the new version of TrumpCare with one sentence: "CBO and JCT estimate that enacting the American Health Care Act would reduce federal deficits by $119 billion over the coming decade and increase the number of people who are uninsured by 23 million in 2026 relative to current law." The original version would have kicked 24 million off their health insurance but it would have reduced the deficit by $150 billion.

Matt Coffay, a farmer who founded the Asheville chapter of Our Revolution, is running for Congress... and he's about as good a candidate as the Democratic Party is going to find-- not just in North Carolina, but anywhere in the country. His district, though, is a tough one. The Republicans in the North Carolina legislature carefully cut most of Asheville out of the 11th congressional district to create what they thought would be a "safe" Republican seat. It was won in 2012 by right-wing extremist Mark Meadows, one of the founding members of the Freedom Caucus, which he now chairs.