Which Major Party Needs To Change the Most?

 

North Carolina political analyst and writer Alexander H. Jones (no, the good Alex Jones) explored some important history of both the North Carolina Democratic Party and what has now become the MAGA Party. He points out that especially the old Democratic Party before Harvey Gantt and Barack Obama -- was a one-party oligarchy with an iron hand that ruled from 1876 (until fairly recently really). Writes Jones, "Democratic hegemony [was] secured by the disenfranchisement of Black voters" (2 Jan. 2025). Any political domination without a principled and effective opposition has every opportunity to turn corrupt, or mean, or both. The old slave-holding, landed class that lost the Civil War became the Democratic Party machine post-Reconstruction as it reasserted property over civil rights and white over Black. Jesse Helms, after all, began his politics as a Jim Crow Democrat. 

It took a long damn time for an effective Republican opposition to arise in North Carolina. Jones reminds us of an astounding fact: "In 1976, only one — one — Republican sat in the North Carolina Senate." Though no Republican Party machine yet threatened Democratic hegemony, the hearts and minds of white rural voters were already roiling in cultural ferment because of the Civil Rights Act of 1965 (followed closely by the Voting Rights Act of 1966). If you were not part of a rural community back then -- as I most certainly was in those years in the Panhandle of Texas -- you perhaps do not realize the terror and fury that Lyndon Johnson unleashed on white minds of an otherwise comfortable cultural tradition. Minds changing unfavorably and hardening self-destructively were not a good sign for the political party of President Lyndon Johnson. Many rural Democrats would stay registered "D" even while casting protest votes for very right-wing Republican alternatives, like Barry Goldwater in 1964 ("In Your Heart You Know He's Wacky"). In NC Goldwater took almost 44% of the presidential vote against Lyndon in 1964, and probably 10% of that total were registered Democrats. I'm guessing, of course. In 1964, Republicans weren't even 33% of registrated voters in the state.

Bottomline: Through the ineffable influence of Jesse Helms and Richard Nixon's "Southern strategy," the Old Republican Party of business and banking became increasingly what the Old Democratic Party had been, a political movement that depended ultimately on racial resentment. "Republicans built momentum decade by decade" on the strength of it. They learned how to gerrymander Black voters and contain Black power.

What's noticeable, Jones says, is the split personality that's become pronounced in the contemporary NCGOP. Republican primary voters keep running extremist nuts for governor and other statewide offices while also buying into a more moderate line of mannikins for U.S. Senate:

Savvy political strategists like Karl Rove and North Carolina’s Paul Shumaker saw the state was becoming more moderate and suburban. In response to John Edwards’ victory in 1998, Rove recruited Elizabeth Dole to run for Helms’ old Senate seat, and she won suburban Wake County by 10 points .... Richard Burr and Thom Tillis were also in her mold.

Following another crushing loss last November of a far out Republican for Governor, the NCGOP is perhaps caught in its own vice. The segregationist base of the new Republican Party likes hard-edged extremists like Mark Robinson, while the general voting public does not cotton to extreme:

The GOP — more accurately MAGA — has a base heavy on evangelicals, know-nothings and not a few racists clustered in very conservative counties who only want to support candidates like Robinson, who just lost by 15 points.

The voting bloc that once held back the old Democratic Party can now hold back the new Republicans. And good riddance. 

 

Josh Stein Turns First to Hurricane-Ravaged Western NC

 

Thursday, on his first full day in the office of governor, Josh Stein came to downtown Asheville and signed five executive orders to shore up, expand, and facilitate more aid to citizens wiped out or badly damaged by that notorious Lady of the Night Helene.

His Executive Order # 1 wiped away red tape for the immediate purchase of up to 1,000 "transportable temporary housing units" by the Department of Public Safety for deployment in the disaster counties.

Stein also gave power to the Division of Emergency Management to contract with certified vendors to repair private residential structures and roads, one of the greatest needs in the mountains.

Additional orders created the Governor’s Recovery Office for Western North Carolina (GROW NC), a dedicated recovery office, and established a Division of Community Revitalization within the Department of Commerce to address housing needs and "community resilience."

Unwelcome News On a Friday

 

Susan Bankston, a.k.a. Juanita Jean

Juanita Jean, a.k.a. Susan DuQuesnay Bankston, owner of "Juanita Jean's -- The World’s Most Dangerous Beauty Salon, Inc.," a mandatory blog stop every day for those of us who appreciate smart-alecks and their snark and especially for us displaced Texans who have known other Tough Mamas of the Plains and appreciated their no-sacred-cows shit detectors. "Juanita Jean's" dishes the buffalo dust of Texas politics, especially the piles left by both the corrupt and the inept in the Texas Republican Party. Susan Bankston has been a regular contributor to the famous Texas Observer and to other leftwing rags, but "Juanita Jean's" was special in its own way, described by Robert LeLeux at the Observer as "sort of like what King of the Hill would have been, if it had been written by Molly Ivins." "Firebrand" often shows up in the same descriptive sentence with Bankston's name.

Bankston lives in Richmond, Texas, in Fort Bend County, southwest of Houston, a little beyond Sugarland, made famous in Steven Spielberg's prison-escape movie, The Sugarland Express (1974). Fort Bend is one of the reddest counties in Texas, and nurtured "the hammer" in the U.S. Congress, one Tom DeLay who was rising to power in the early 1980s at the same time that Susan Bankston and her husband were relocating to Fort Bend from Houston. DeLay belongs to history now. He was part of the whole '80s surge of Ronald Reagan Republicanism, the conservative tide that eventually produced Newt Gingrich and his Contract on America.

Bankston made Tom Delay her pet project: She told LeLeux,

“When my family first moved to [the Fort Bend town of] Richmond from Houston in 1983, it was like paradise. The schools were racially diverse. There were no fast-food restaurants. You could see the stars at night. But then, you did have to put up with Tom DeLay .... He had no table manners. He picked his nose in public. He stayed drunk all the time. Of course, there are those who would argue he was a much more likable person then.” 

Bankston nicknamed him "Hot Tub Tom" for his rumored behavior at al fresco get-togethers. She nicknamed him in the Fort Bend Star, and the name stuck. Won't go into the whole Tom DeLay history, and how it ended, ignobly, except to say that Susan Bankston's project of exposing him helped.

She announced yesterday that she's closing "Juanita Jean's" for good. She'd actually mainly disappeared as a frontline contributor to it much earlier. She had gone through the trauma of losing her lifelong partner and husband, whom she called "Bubba" on the blog. "I was 25 years old when I married him and 50 years later, I lost him." Bankston had in the meantime turned "Juanita Jean's" over to three new dominant writers/voices, none of them as talented as Bankston. The loss of Bankston as a regular contributor was bad enough, but the loss of the whole blog is just tragic. Bankston has been publishing it for some 14 years.

Bankston's parting advice for progressives: Pay attention to Gen Z.

I could be wrong. I have been wrong before and it didn’t kill me, so here goes. I think we need to be listening to young people. I think we shouldn’t even give a big bear’s butt about who is the new leader of the DNC because screw ‘em, they are not viable any longer. They spent 1.5 Billion dollars and lost. They lost to Trump twice. I guess they’re waiting for three’s the charm but, frankly, I don’t have that kind of time.

I’m making an effort to pay attention to young people about politics. For example, I listen to David Pakman https://davidpakman.com/ because he’s young, progressive, and while he takes his reporting very seriously, he doesn’t take himself too seriously. I also subscribed to You Tube to hear what the young progressives are thinking.

 

Anderson Clayton Will Continue

 

The best NCDemParty Chair we've seen in maybe decades, AppState grad Anderson Clayton, who took the reins of the NCDP two years ago, has just announced that she's running for another term.

She has a website up, from which I borrow:

Anderson Clayton is an organizer by trade, a proud rural North Carolinian, and the current Chair of the North Carolina Democratic Party. After winning election (and becoming the youngest state party chair in the country) in 2023, she has spent the last two years working to build a better, more responsive NC Democratic Party.

Under Anderson’s tenure, the NCDP has invested in year-round, local organizing; recruiting and supporting candidates who understand that good politicians are good public servants first; and building the infrastructure to win back Democratic power in NC within the next decade.

Anderson has been unstoppable -- quite literally, in motion all the time, visiting all the far-flung county parties had have struggled to redefine themselves in this new dark age, duplicating the Howard Dean model of carrying the banner of the Democratic Party to every red corner. After she took the reins, Clayton immediately became a media presence whose power for communicating far exceeds anything we're remotely used to or could have imagined. She's quick-witted, always prepared, with a common touch and a country accent that puts me in mind of Nashville at its most honest. This line in her announcement letter also caught my attention and represents the heaviest lifting a state party chair has to do:

North Carolina Democrats believe in ceding no ground to the Republican Party, and I promise that we will continue to aggressively recruit candidates to contest every single race.

No one can touch her. No one will run against her. We've got another two super-charged years ahead of us with Anderson at the helm.

What's Going On With the NC Supreme Court Race?

 

Why is this man smiling?

Incumbent Democratic Associate Justice Allison Riggs beat Republican challenger Jefferson Griffin for her seat on the NC Supreme Ct by 734 votes-- Riggs's winning margin after two recounts. Republican Griffin wouldn't and won't concede, has exhausted his appeals to the NC State Board of Elections, and is now petitioning the Paul Newby Supreme Court (on which Justice Riggs still sits but who immediately recused herself from the Griffin suit) to stay the election on the grounds that some 60,000 voters had cast illegal votes. Griffin alleges that those 60,000 registrations are illegal because the registration forms are missing important data.

The idea of using incomplete voter registration as an excuse for throwing out votes seems to have been hatched in a secret group chat in July of 2024 involving the highest echelons of election denialism in North Carolina. So said ProPublica, which somehow or other obtained a recording of that phone call (or Zoom meetup or whatever it was) and spilled the beans just before Christmas that this is what happened back in...

July 2024 -- The call involving the so-called Election Integrity Network, including presumably the notorious Cleta Mitchell who can spot fraud in her oatmeal -- this bunch of MAGA activists tossed around potential tactics that might need to be employed to win the election. One particular idea won approval, that they individually or as a group "try to get the courts or state election board to throw out hundreds of thousands of ballots cast by voters whose registrations are missing a driver’s license number and the last four digits of a Social Security number." That argument depended on the Federal HAVA Act (Help America Vote) which now requires both driver's license and SS#. Older state registration forms did not.

It's important to underline the most significant revelation in ProPublica's disclosure of the July call: 

The idea of using clerical messiness as an excuse to disenfranchise voters, according to what ProPublica heard on their tape, "was resisted by two activists on the call," "including the leader of the North Carolina chapter of the Election Integrity Network" [Jim Womack?]. The data was missing not because voters had done something wrong but largely as a result of an administrative error by the state. The leader [Womack?] said the idea was “voter suppression” and “100%” certain to fail in the courts" (ProPublica). If that was Jim Womack raising the objection, then Jim Womack is a straight shooter.

August 2024 --  The Republican National Committee and the state Republican Party put into action the plan from July. They sued the State Board of Elections (SBOE), seeking to disenfrachise some 225,000 registered voters, relying on the legal theory of the Cleta Mitchell election-deniars. The suit went to Federal Judge Richard E. Myers II, a Trump appointee.

October 14th -- Moving quickly, Judge Myers hears the NCGOP petition to disenfranchise over 200K voters.

October 17th -- Judge Myers rules: dismisses a big part of the GOP petition -- disenfranchising those 200K -- but sends a subsidiary constitutional issue back to state Superior Court (where I guess it still percolates, if slowly)

That background from last October helps explain where Jefferson Griffin has been coming from in his far-out refusal to admit defeat, Because the whole Griffin argument for throwing out 60,000 actual votes -- not just voter registrations -- is the same "missing info" argument that Judge Myers heard back in October. (Though ... WARNING! Myers dismissed the GOP suit from August on the technicality of "standing," so he didn't have to deal with some of the harder legal stuff. Griffin would appear to have standing in this present case, no?)

Here's my timeline for more recent developments:

December 11th -- The NC State Board of Elections denies Griffin's request to simply throw out the votes of 60,000 people.

December 18th -- Griffin files what's known as a "writ of prohibition," asking the state's high court to block certification of the election, and to invalidate some 60,000 challenged ballots because of missing driver's license numbers or the last four digits of SS #s, etc. Griffin's petition included the plea, in ALL CAPS: "Immediate action requested BEFORE Monday, 23 December."

December 19th -- State Board of Elections gets the Griffin case removed to Federal court. Judge Richard E. Myers II of Wilmington assigned to hear it.

December 20th -- Judge Myers bats down the Griffin team's next move, which is to petition for a temporary restraining order to be slapped on the SBOE to block it from certifying the election. Judge Myers says no dice.

December 27th -- Judge Myers receives petition from Griffin's side to move this case back to the NC Supreme Court, and he significantly orders the SBOE to explain why he should keep a case involving a dispute over the recent state Supreme Court election. The judge ordered the elections board to "show cause" by Jan. 1 why the case should not return to the North Carolina Supreme Court.

January 1, 2025 -- The "immediate judicial action" requested of the Paul Newby Supreme Court on Dec. 18th (above) has, of course, not happened, because Federal Judge Myers still has control of the case, although he showed some willingness (Dec. 27th) to let it go back to a more partisanly compliant Supreme Court,

New Year's With Thomas Mills, Year of Our Lord 2025

 

"For better or worse, campaigns are no longer restricted to the year of the election and they aren’t made in the context of a media environment. They are about creating the media environment itself."

--Thomas Mills, "The two party mess"

Thomas Mills

PoliticsNC founder Thomas Mills has deep institutional knowledge of the workings of both the national and the North Carolina Democratic parties. Plus he's a wise head, a strategist with foxhole experience, so I tend to pay attention to his misgivings and his proposed remedies.

"Our two party system is struggling. We may have outgrown it as a country, but changing it is more difficult than reforming it. Democrats are operating under control of a political elite that knows how government and governing work, but excludes or alienates too many people from the process. Republicans have become a party of people who either want to plunder the system or burn it down. Their elites have surrendered power to the mob. One of the parties needs to fix itself."

Ouch. If "knowing how government and governing work" equals "educated"-- in that the very fact of education itself puts you in a higher class of society that knows stuff -- and if your experience with "educated elites" has revealed any level of social snobbery, then, yes, Democratic political elites are to blame and maybe the whole Democratic enterprise is doomed. Unless we can visit again our Christian humility.

Without any hesitation or doubt, I can accept that I'm not only a "political elite" but also an educated political elite, and I certainly admit that our local demographic of high educational attainment makes a huge difference in how we run campaigns. Also agreed -- that highly educated people sometimes don't know how to talk to other people, that we've lost touch with roots, that we're grown way too addicted to the same money that corrupts everyone eventually -- dependence on the big-rollers. Going gussied up in the circles where elites go to ingratiate themselves is not a good look for a party that claims allegiance to "the people." It's a behavioral problem. And it's a fact. 

Mills wants Democrats to relearn honesty (which also implies authenticity):

"Democrats should have surrogates going on Joe Rogan’s show to talk about the H-1B visa dispute, making sure people understand the contempt that Trump’s billionaire buddies have for working Americans. They should recruit people from outside politics to deliver the messages on social media and podcasts. And they need to deploy Pete Buttigieg. Hell, give him his own podcast. The legacy media is no longer reaching enough Americans to shape elections and Democrats should quit relying on it to inform the public.

I'm too old and worn-out now to be in that vanguard. Intelligence and education are two separate and different things. Some of the smartest I've known have been relatively un- or under-educated, and some of the dumbest people on the planet are "academics." I'd recommend that educated progressives stop making fun of grammatical flubs, stop defining and denigrating their supposed enemies as yahoos, stop acting like snobs and know-it-alls and try to reclaim the humility we learned about in Sunday School.

Mills's Substack column, PoliticsNC, is well worth subscribing to.