Cage Match: NCGOP Establishment vs. Hard Right Activists

 

Michael Whatley

Back on May 30th, we wrote a piece called "Who'll Lead the NCGOP?" about the hard-right insurgency vying with the establishmentarian current chair, Michael Whatley, to lead the state party for the next two years. The insurgent candidate was "MAGA ideologue, John Kane, who comes from an election-denying gene pool of some prominence." Whatley beat the insurgency and won a new term as chair ... with what three convention delegates-for-Kane now allege in a Wake Superior Court was a flawed and/or illegal election process which allowed off-site electronic voting. The office of chair, therefore, must be vacated for a do-over election, the plaintiffs allege.

Unusual lawsuit, in that the three plaintiffs named only "the North Carolina Republican Party" as defendant. How often does the state organization of any major political party get sued?

The delegates' beef with the way Chair Whatley run the convention gets a thorough airing on The Daily Haymaker, which generously reprints much of the complaint. A lot of nit-picking, but then, a lot of nits to pick. The screwed up election -- if it was screwed up to the point of being actually illegal, which the lawsuit alleges -- may have all been accidents or incompetence -- faulty software, poor signal, failure to instruct the delegates -- but the implication behind this lawsuit is that the election was stolen (and Michael Whatley better give it back!).

Oh, Trump-era Republicans. If things don't go your way, it's always election fraud.