Let Us Sit Upon the Ground and Tell Sad Stories of the Death of Kings

 

Politicians abhor a vacuum as much as nature does, and the sudden concession of NC Senate President Phil Berger late yesterday afternoon has created one of the biggest vacuums in North Carolina history. Berger had ultimate power over every bill that made it through to a vote, every appointment to every important post that the General Assembly controls, every ambition of every fellow Republican senator who wanted to rise. Berger was the undisputed king, and perhaps no one will celebrate his absence more than some of his own allies.

The resentment of putative allies got a surprise airing yesterday in the New York Times, when reporter Eduardo Medina outed Sen. Thom Tillis for secretly lobbying wealthy Republican donors against Berger. On a Zoom call last month, well before the primary, Thom Tillis was clear that Berger had to go because he's too power-hungry, too authoritarian, too dismissive of any idea not his own, and too already fat with campaign cash.

So I can only imagine the ambitions right now surging through the Berger troops still in the Senate, the ones who could not rise because Berger stood in the way. The rivalries will now show themselves in the Raleigh Thunderdome. And all the while the in-fighting goes on and consumes the Republican ecology, the date of the mid-term reckoning with voters advances apace. Who knows? Voters appear quite irritated with abusers of power, and perhaps all the GOP's corrupt gerrymandering may not be shield enough against the wrath to come.

Meanwhile, Sam Page can take his seat in January as a new back-bencher -- he may need two seats to accommodate that ridiculous chapeau. He'll soon learn that his vote has been pre-programmed by higher ups (and probably doesn't matter anyway, if the Republican super-majority holds. Ha!). What High Sheriff Sam Page doesn't know about being low-man in a new pecking order might possibly be a harsh and disappointing education.

 

Kings of Gambling Mean To Own North Carolina

 

 

The gambling industry has a two-prong strategy for taking North Carolina: First, the push stage-managed by the Phil Berger clan to put a physical gambling casino in Rockingham County (and ultimately in three other rural counties). The money trail in that mis-fire went back to The Cordish Company, a developer of "gaming destinations."

The second hustle is all about online gambling. The leading player looking for favors is the corporate entity known as DraftKings, a huge online gambling industry leader with a very eerie website that put me in mind of actually being inside a windowless but gleaming casino, slowly losing my wits. DraftKings' parent is DK Crown Holdings Inc., "a leading digital sports entertainment provider." They recently turned up in an investigative piece into a key race for the NC Senate, sticking their thumb on the scale to oust incumbent Republican Sen. Chris Measmer in NCS 34 and put in Republican Kevin Crutchfield (who was recently a one-term member of the NC House). Crutchfield won the primary even after news came out that DK Crown Holdings Inc. was behind big donations to super-PACS that opened a ridiculous frontal assault on the character of Chris Measmer (ridiculous because they attacked him as a RINO when he's in actuality pretty MAGAfied). (Measmer was already trailing heavy personal baggage, which I described back in February.)

Crutchfield

 

The anti-Measmer attack ads were funded by an entity called the American Conservative Fund. According to the excellent investigative reporting of Nora O'Neill, "the Federal Election Commission filings show American Conservative Fund is funded entirely by another political group called Win for America, which is entirely funded by DK Crown Holdings, Inc."

They wanted Chris Measmer to lose his seat bad, which means they wanted Kevin Crutchfield bad and are counting on him for ... what? That question alone ought to set Kevin Crutchfield up for knocking down in November by Democrat April Cook. I wrote about her back in February and was taken with her prospects. She's now been endorsed by Carolina Forward. She can beat Crutchfield, who's now dragging his own weary baggage.

Anyway, why such financial interest in little ole North Carolina by various fronts in the gambling biz? (And I do wonder what other General Assembly races featured big gambling money.) In the case of DraftKings, its very popular and I suspect amazingly lucrative SportsBook only very recently became legal (March of '24) after the passage of H 347, which legalized sports betting specifically but not "casino" action -- slots, roulette, and other live-dealer games, which according to DraftKings' website they're very into. Online casino betting -- still banned in North Carolina, but the General Assembly already opened that door a crack and invited DraftKings in.

 

Splitsville in the Democratic Party?

 

Wesley Knott

 

 

The dyspepsia in the Democratic Party is generational. I see the rising tide of younger, sharper, more confrontational candidates as the yeast producing the gas that makes the dough rise, and my sympathies are almost entirely with them. I was pretty yeasty myself in my youth and had Bobby Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy to inspire me (not that McCarthy was any spring chicken by then, but he didn't think like an old man).

So I'm fairly philosophical about the kerfuffle that's erupted in the Wake County Democratic Party over the party chair's open and public endorsement of the insurgent Nida Allam, the 32-year-old Durham County Commissioner, over the "safer" incumbent Congresswoman Valerie Foushee. Endorsements in party primaries are supposed to be off-limits for party officers, and some county parties adhere rigidly to that hands-off principle (like the Watauga County Democratic Party, sometimes to its actual detriment). What party officers are not supposed to indulge in, individual rank-and-file Democrats can. Any Democrat can advocate for whomever they favor, loudly and obnoxiously if necessary.

But here's the thing: that principle of non-interference by our party leaders is already in tatters. The Governor himself made very public endorsements in more than one primary for General Assembly seats (and his candidates all won), while the state party chair cut off campaign resources for several NC House members who had voted with Republicans on veto overrides (and all those candidates lost). So I'm almost amused to see a petition arise in Wake County to eject Wesley Knott from his position as party chair, because he endorsed Nida Allam over Valerie Foushee in the 4th Congressional District primary. When asked about his coloring outside the lines, Knott, a 29-year-old who just became party chair last year, articulated the generational judgment of Foushee, the 70-year-old political veteran with municipal, county, and General Assembly elected positions behind her and a history of taking AIPAC money (the Israeli lobby). Knott called Foushee “risk-averse,” a “carefully-calculated” friend of the status quo who has failed to inspire voters. 

"Risk aversion" cuts succinctly to the point. In the current situation of both the NC General Assembly and the US Congress, where Trump Republicans rule and in NC's case rule almost absolutely, some Democrats become hesitant to advance ideas or initiatives that they know can't win approval (because, math) and they become simultaneously resigned if not outright comfortable sitting on their small seats of advancement and doing nothing to raise hell for policies that make sense and that need public drum-beating. Wesley Knott is a drum-beater.

I wrote about the younger version of Wesley Knott in 2022 when he himself ran a primary against Democratic House incumbent Sarah Crawford in NC House Dist. 66 and came within 140 votes of actually beating her. I was impressed then by the way he put things:

"I’m a mixed-race progressive who grew up in the Deep South. Politics isn’t abstract to me. I didn’t need critical race theory to learn about racism, and I didn’t need a policy analysis to know the importance of Medicaid. So when I talk about policy, it’s from a place of shared experience. I know what’s on the line. That’s why I’m running."

 

To get rid of Wesley Knott, who by other accounts has been an effective ball of fire for the Wake County party, strikes me as a foolish cutting off of one's nose to spit one's face.

 

Keeping Up With the Slow Death of Titan

 

I always learn stuff from Bryan Anderson's reporting, like the basic statutory process for recounting votes in the Berger/Page upset election in NC Senate Dist. 26:

State law and historical precedent calls for a machine recount first. After that, the trailing candidate has 24 hours to request a partial hand recount for a random sample of about 3% of primary day precincts, early voting sites, or both. If the partial hand recount produces results that indicate a different outcome in the race, a full hand recount would be triggered.

 

Yesterday (Wednesday), Berger asked the State Board of Elections (SBOE -- majority Republican) to alter that schedule slightly, to also do a hand recount on any ballots that the machine recount identified as "undervotes" (where voters picked no candidate in the race) or "overvotes" (where voters picked both candidates). Those numbers are already known: 217 undervotes and 3 overvotes out of the 26,000 votes cast in Rockingham and Guilford counties. 

 

Berger wanted yesterday those 220 ballots examined during the machine recount. The SBOE declined Berger's request, perhaps because those three Republican SBOE members are quite aware that the whole state is watching them very closely in this particular instance, on high alert for any finagling. So SBOE Chair Francis DeLuca (as dependably and consistently partisan a conservative as any GOP wet-dream could conjure and put in control of North Carolina elections) sounded like a slightly shocked Aunt Polly about Berger's request: “We follow the law! If it’s in the statute, we follow it. But there was nothing in that request that went by statute.” 

Berger intends ultimately (and mysteriously) to "determine the voter's intent" behind those 220 undervotes and overvotes, and I reckon those assumed intentions end up being at least one of the arguments in the eventual law suit. Berger only needs to find 24 of those under-voters and get them to swear in an affidavit that their votes would have/should have gone to Berger. If I were one of those people, I would play it safe and claim that I was on prescription drugs that day and didn't mean to skip that race and would have voted enthusiastically for Mr. Berger had I not been in a not-unpleasing drug haze). 

 

The machine recount in Rockingham is happening right now at this hour. The machine recount in those precincts of Guilford that are in S 26 happened yesterday, resulted in minus-1 vote from both Berger and Page, so no change in the outcome. All eyes on Rockingham today.

Ain't No Simple Thing To Steal an Election

 

BREAKING NEWS from Laura Leslie: 

North Carolina Senate Leader Phil Berger (R-Rockingham) has called for a recount in his District 26 primary contest against Rockingham Sheriff Sam Page, who holds a narrow lead in official county totals.

According to the final canvasses in Rockingham and Guilford counties last week, with 26,249 votes cast in the race, Page has 23 more votes than Berger, a margin of 0.08%. That’s well within the 1% margin in state law for a losing candidate in a non-statewide race to request a recount....

Because the district covers more than one county, the State Board of Elections has jurisdiction over the recount process, but the actual recounts are still conducted at the county level. The state board sent detailed instructions to Guilford and Rockingham counties on March 14. 

 

I'm not normally (yip!) conspiracy-minded, but in an age when massive theft is on plain view and actually unashamed to be seen in its native garb, if there was a moment for election theft, it would be now rather than later. And don't you wonder what those "detailed instrux" said? 

It's a machine recount, but in both Rockingham and Guilford, there's a paper-trail. Voters fill in a paper ballot that they then feed into a tabulator (Rockingham County uses the DS200 Vote Tabulator). Could the innards of the DS200 be jiggered to flip the election? Dunno, but I bet it would be hard, but totally within the skill set of the people who run elections now and who owe their jobs to Phil Berger. Just sayin'.

But even then, any substantial change in vote totals from the machine recount would trigger a second hand-eye recount, and that's when those paper ballots would presumably furnish the truth. 

What Would Mark Twain Say about Donald Jethro Trump?

 

I've been reading and savoring Ron Chernow's new and massive biography of Mark Twain. The book's so fat and heavy it's made reading in bed, which I favor, almost impossible. Dropping the book on my face could be fatal, or at least disfiguring.

Mark Twain was a complex, sometimes infuriating, easily duped genius. He made many disastrous business alliances based on misplaced trust in men who were essentially conning him for his money, so it's tempting to think he might have been taken in by the orange bunco artist, but ... naw ... Mark Twain was too genetically alert to pompous windbaggery and loved deflating it. After all, it was Mark Twain who coined the defining term for the times -- "the Gilded Age" -- and attacked the robber barons savagely.

I found this passage in Chernow's book most enlightening for understanding Mark Twain's politics and for guessing how he would have viewed Jethro in the White House:

After campaigning for Rutherford B. Hayes in the 1876 and James Garfield in the 1880 presidential races, Mark Twain seemed, at least outwardly, to have become a stalwart of the Republican Party .... But, an iconoclast to the core, he was not cut out for strict party allegiance, telling a reporter between those two elections: "I am neither a Republican nor a Democrat -- for any length of time. Vacillation is my particular forte." He identified with the Liberal Republican wing of the party, which detested political bosses, favored civil service reform and free trade, and endorsed clean government. These Republicans stressed morality rather than ideology in political matters and clung to the belief that character was the foremost criterion for public office, not a candidate's partisan agenda. 

Needless to remind readers that both the Democratic and the Republican parties of the 1880s were very different animals than they are now. The Democratic Party was harbor for white supremacists who either excused slavery or actively defended it. The Republican Party was the party of Lincoln and on the whole the liberals of their day. 

Mark Twain was born essentially a Southerner in Missouri, in a family -- let alone a region -- where slavery was the practice, never seriously questioned after the Missouri Compromise of 1820. The future writer's own father owned at least one slave, but Mark Twain was bright enough to see the humanity in people of all stations and conditions. After all, he created the character Jim, the runaway slave that Huck Finn teams up with and who is the noblest character in that book. Huckleberry Finn was banned all over the South because of its dangerous liberalism (and then -- different story -- it got banned all over again in the North in recent years because of its dangerous use of the n-word, and thereby hangs the alluring and sweetly stuffed pinata of opinion about how most white men, even one as smart as Mark Twain, will never be completely shed of their racism). 

Mark Twain's transformation into a Yankee Republican did not kick into high gear until he married a rich Connecticut girl from an abolitionist family. He always wanted to please Olivia, and she ruled him (at least while he was at home). He even gave up his whiskey and 15-cigars-a-day habits when he and Olivia first set up housekeeping, but that abstemiousness didn't last. He once admitted to a friend that he couldn't write without a cigar in his hand to steady his concentration. So seems pretty obvious that his "liberal" attitude toward Blacks after the Civil War was maybe also strategically cosmetic, to please the wife he loved and doted on, and that he was always essentially just a rough country boy who used the n-word without thought or -- in fact -- ill will. 

I like complicated people.

 

The Interesting Political Climate of 2026

 

The closeness of the Phil Berger/Sam Page race is a reminder that, even in an era of nationalized politics, state legislative primaries can still turn on local dynamics. Relationships and local turnout patterns—what political scientist V.O. Key once called “friends and neighbors voting”—still matter, and occasionally they decide who holds power.

--Christopher Cooper, Old North State Politics

 

 

Sam Page, currently 23 votes ahead

 

 

The fact that Phil Berger couldn't win even with the Trump endorsement -- that he couldn't nationalize his importance to the voters of NC Senate Dist. 26 by tying himself to the Trump -- suggests to me that the MAGA base -- at least, portions of it, particularly in rural areas -- are actively trying to look away from Trump like you might drop your eyes or turn away your head when you see your friend embarrassing himself. Country people are always embarrassed for the swaggering braggarts in their own families. So a local candidate tied to what is in so many countless ways a walking ineptitude was of no particular help to Phil Berger on March 3rd. His obvious corruption in trying to force a gambling casino on the good Christians of Rockingham County brought him down. Trump couldn't save him because Trump is now a spectacle of badly staged policy swerves. War? Poorly calculated distractions featuring bad and un-capable people, even though the Noem woman is gone.

 

The lesson for Democrats might be: Find the local, fly the local flag, defend the local. Don't forget that the biggest local issue might, in fact, be the Republican incumbent's own character, his/her votes, his/her trumpian odor, his/her public corruption for the sake of power.

 

The Cowboy Calf-Ropes the Leader of the Pack

 

Sam Page, March 3, 2026. Photo Bryan Anderson

 

 

That sharp tack Jeffrey Billman, the best investigative reporter in the state IMO, has just published a deep primer on Phil Berger* and how the President Pro Tem of the NC Senate got himself into such career-ending trouble with the voters of Rockingham County, who have voted Berger out and replaced him with the county's high sheriff and drugstore cowboy Sam Page.

Billman recounts the entire career, the scandals we've read about and partially misremembered, the iron grip on policy-making in the NC Senate, that paint a portrait of a stunning level of political corruption. And some new factoids I had previously missed:

The Assembly reported in August that, months after Illinois-based RedSpeed deposited $220,000 into House and Senate Republican coffers, lawmakers passed a bill that could make the company millions. The News & Observer reported in October that lawmakers spent $15 million to help a Mooresville developer after his politically connected project manager donated $132,000 to key lawmakers, including more than $17,000 to Berger. 

When you control as much as the Berger family controls, you're never satisfied. And it's like Phil Berger foresaw a time when he'd need to control the vote-counting process itself:

After the 2024 election, Republicans tucked a provision into a disaster recovery bill that transferred control of the state elections board from the Democratic governor to the newly elected Republican state auditor. 

The auditor, Dave Boliek, appointed the local and state officials who would oversee a recount. Boliek also endorsed and campaigned for Berger, and his chief of staff and spokesperson previously worked for Berger in the General Assembly. 

Boliek, a turn-coat Democrat, has already refused Sam Page's demand that he recuse himself from any recount process.

 

* If you're not a subscriber to The Assembly, what in the world is the matter with you?