You Think That Rearranging Furniture at the SBOE Absolves It of Corruption? Dallas Woodhouse Still Works There!

 

NC Voices

 

The cover story Dave Boliek put out in September 2025 about hiring Dallas Woodhouse as some sort of State Board of Elections (SBOE) "liaison," whose role, we would soon discover -- to absolutely no one's surprise -- was actually to lord it over county boards of elections and inhibit college-age and Black voters wherever possible. At the time of Woodhouse's hiring, Boliek announced him to county election officials: "[I hired] him to assist in your efforts to ensure election integrity while encouraging maximum participation in our elections." Hahahahaha

The best reporting I've seen on the Woodhouse "reassignment" at the SBOE, the piece below, is thorough and complete. I don't know who wrote it, but thank you!

And if you're a partisan like me and tempted to celebrate the mere rearrangement of furniture at the SBOE -- window-dressing for a corrupt and exposed operation -- I would advise you not to. Dallas Woodhouse is still there at the SBOE, along with his embedded philosophy of might-makes-right, and trailing all that heavy baggage of cut-throat politics. You think the people who hired Woodhouse and who now obviously depend on him to be there have changed their spots? This isn't a victory, but it exposed their corruption. 

RALEIGH -- By WRAL News  A North Carolina Republican operative who was hired by the state auditor to help shape the state’s election boards and early voting plans has been reassigned, and his election liaison position has been discontinued. 

State and county elections officials are beginning to ramp up preparations for the 2026 midterm elections. Mail-in ballots will go out in September, early voting starts in October and election day is Nov. 3.

State Auditor Dave Boliek reassigned Dallas Woodhouse, a former executive director of the North Carolina Republican Party, NBC News reported Wednesday morning. Woodhouse had served in the role since September.

“Now that we are more than a year past appointments, and board chairs have settled into their roles having worked through a municipal election, primary election, and most of the local boards have passed early voting plans for the general election, the Auditor's Office has discontinued the elections liaison role,” a spokesman for the auditor’s office told WRAL in a statement Wednesday. “The elections liaison was established because the Auditor's Office gained new responsibilities. The position was not meant to be permanent.”

Woodhouse will work on strategic initiatives that relate to constituent services and communications, according to the spokesman.

Republican state lawmakers stripped responsibility for overseeing state and county election boards away from Democratic Gov. Josh Stein in 2024 and gave the power to Boliek, a Republican. Under Boliek and Woodhouse, the state board of elections and all 100 county election boards have switched to GOP majorities, and some have begun enacting longtime Republican priorities such as eliminating early voting options on Sundays — a popular day with Black voters and on college campuses. Black voters and students tend to vote Democratic.

According to reporting from WLOS and NC Local, Woodhouse and Boliek were involved in efforts to ensure the new Jackson County Board of Elections would shut down a polling place on campus at Western Carolina University. In the Triangle, the Wake County Board of Elections also recently voted to eliminate a longtime early voting site at N.C. State’s student union, and to move it to a remote part of campus, WRAL previously reported.

Woodhouse was reassigned on June 2, NBC News reported. Woodhouse earns $110,000, according to a database of state employee salaries.

In September, Boliek wrote to some county election officials that “to assist in your efforts to ensure election integrity while encouraging maximum participation in our elections, I have appointed Dallas Woodhouse as my liaison.”

Woodhouse referred a request for comment Wednesday to the auditor’s office.

 

Dallas Woodhouse Causes Embarrassment, But what Dallas Woodhouse Stood For Still Very Much the Philosophy at the State Board of Elections

Big news this afternoon: Dallas Woodhouse, who has a history of trying to knee-cap college students' voting and Sunday voting for African-Americans, has been "reassigned" in the State Board of Elections. Instead of his $110,000 per annum job of "advising" local county boards of elections -- principally, advising the Republican majorities to eliminate campus polling places where possible and stop Sunday voting in communities with large Black congregations, Woodhouse has been reassigned to a desk in another part of the SBOE.

But it's all window-dressing, and it means nothing. The attitude toward suppressing certain voters still reigns in Auditor's Dave Boliek's MAGA brain. Woodhouse had caused Mr. Boliek some very bad optics after he was revealed telling the chair of the Jackson County Board of Elections, "Don't let them have a vote," them being students at Western Carolina University who had become accumstomed to a student union early voting site. There's also evidence that he told the Pasquotank County Bd of Elections chair to eliminate Sunday voting.  Pasquotank County is 35% Black.

The leopards can white-wash their spots, but they're still going to be blood predators.

 

I Guess We're All Communists Now

 

Trump repeated the word Communist so many times yesterday -- with the four granite-faced Presidents above him, averting their eyes -- that you might have thought it was 1950. On February 9th of that fatal year, Sen. Joseph McCarthy held up some pieces of paper in front of the Republican Women's Club of Wheeling, West Virginia, and whined in that reedy, unpleasant voice of his, "I have here in my hand a list of 205 that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department." Women cringed. One of them fainted. There were dropped salad forks all over the room.

The witch hunt was on!

The suspicion of Communism crept through the American bloodstream, or rather raced like a fulminating virus, fanned into white-hot intensity by the John Birch Society. Birchers were all over the Panhandle of Texas. By the time I was in the 7th and 8th grades in the late '50s, popular fright-sayings about Communists and Communism, preached relentlessly by members of the Society, had reached my level of pre-social-media gossip. The Birchers were particularly good at ferreting out school textbooks with "Communist propaganda." What in particular was Communist propaganda? Any acknowledgement of a struggle for civil rights among America's Blacks.

I was a very religious kid to boot, so I could fall prey to a pamphlet that appeared in 1960 warning of a likely "Catholic takeover" if John F. Kennedy became President. The anti-Catholic thing was closely allied with the anti-Communist thing -- Baptists predominated, and there ain't no Baptists like Texas Baptists. There were plenty of Texans who didn't mind saying out loud, and loudly, as Texans sometimes speak when provoked, that Kennedy was an N-word-loving goddamn Communist. That's why Texans of a gentler nature so rued the terrible event in Dallas. Why did it have to be Texas! Poor dumb, damn Texas.

To the Communist-baiting Texans in the Panhandle, one of the worst things the Catholic President Kennedy did in his short presidency was the diplomatic breakthrough called "the Chamizal Conventions," a land-exchange between the U.S. and Mexico that Kennedy successfully negotiated. The Chamizal "situation" had been a sore point since 1864, when a particularly severe flood changed the course of the Rio Grande and stranded over 600 acres of Mexico on the north side of the river. This led to a history of incursions and takings and dyspeptic relations between countries. Kennedy resolved it quickly, agreeing to give back to Mexico some 366 acres of the original Chamizal tract and an additional 264 acres near the adjacent Cordova Island, while taking for the U.S. the other 193 acres of Cordova Island. That international boundary still stands today.

Kennedy negotiated the agreement, but it fell to President Johnson to carry it out in stages, and those stages included some Texans' getting mighty exercised that their land was being unfairly, unconstitutionally, and communistically taken from them. I remember reading up on the history at the time and writing a letter to the editor of the Plainview Herald supporting the Mexican position. I was being a very fair-minded little Christian and budding historian to reach that conclusion. I was told later by a classmate of mine who also worked as part-time receptionist for an insurance agent that her boss had a file folder labeled "Suspected Communists" and that he had instructed her to put my letter to the editor -- which he had patiently clipped from the Herald -- into that file. Apparently, I've been a Communist since I was 18.

We label what we fear, and so does Trump. He doesn't fear Communists. That's just the scare-word he remembers from his own childhood -- he and I are the same age, give or take. What Trump fears and chooses to label with an old insult is the surge of voting enthusiasm for the men and women who have been winning elections on the Democratic side and sometimes upending apple carts of more conservative members of their Party -- the brave and outspoken "progressives," the sometimes self-described "socialist Democrats." That's what he fears, being charged and tried by new politicians who have power because they have followings.

 

NC House Pumps the Brakes on NC Senate's Rush to Harsh Your Vibe

 

Today a bill, H 328, "Regulate Hemp-Derived Consumables," got fast-tracked and passed the same day in the NC Senate, with some 14 of the 20 Democrats in the Senate voting for it. The House's original H 328, which the Senate hijacked and wrote its own substitute, would have required public schools to adopt policies prohibiting hemp-derived consumable products in school buildings, on school grounds, and at school-sponsored events. Okay. We all can support limiting easy access to intoxicating hemp products for minors, but the North Carolina Healthy Alternatives Association (NCHAA) sez the new Senate rewrite is a bad bill for the future of the billion-dollar state hemp industry. 

The House adjourned without taking up the the Senate's substitute H 328, and Speaker Destin Hall appeared resistant to it: “It’s up to the [House] caucus, at the end of the day,” Hall said. “It was a complicated bill, and so folks are going to have probably a month to digest it and see if they approve of it,” he told reporters. The General Assembly plans to reconvene on July 27th.

"Complicated," Destin Hall said, which sounds like a warning to me.

The NCHAA thinks it will overnight send North Carolina's booming hemp industry into the crapper: 

• Cannabinoid Ban: HB 328 bans all cannabinoids except for Delta-9 THC, even non-psychoactive compounds like CBD. This is a direct contradiction of the federal definition of hemp and would eliminate many therapeutic products that consumers depend on.

• Potency Caps: The bill caps edibles at just 10mg of Delta-9 THC per serving. For comparison, most popular hemp-derived gummies on the national market range from 25 to 50mg per serving. These caps would force companies to reformulate or exit the North Carolina market entirely.

• Vape Restrictions: It also limits vape cartridges to 3ml total Delta-9 THC—an unrealistic threshold that, from a manufacturing standpoint, is virtually unworkable.

• Exorbitant Licensing Fees: HB 328 requires a $25,000 license fee for manufacturers and $500 per retail location with no cap. These costs are far beyond the reach of small operators and would create massive entry barriers that favor large out-of-state corporations.

• Criminal Penalties: The bill authorizes criminal charges—including Class H felonies—for unlicensed sales. It also imposes escalating fines and empowers the Alcohol Law Enforcement Division (ALE) to revoke licenses and issue penalties of up to $7,500 per violation.

NCHAA concludes: "These are not minor adjustments. These are measures designed to constrict the industry, cut out competition, and centralize the hemp market into the hands of a few."

 

How I Fell Upstairs and Found God

 

I got super-annoyed by C.G.I. at the movies -- computer-generated-images -- back around the time super heroes were pretty much it, everywhere. Super heroes and tiresome fantasy. Supernatural hoo haw. Pop culture became lousy with C.G.I. gimmicks, imitations, wild flights of illogic and cheap, cheap story-telling (even though C.G.I. is super-expensive to produce). So I turned up my nose at the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) when it was new and fresh. I wanted real human stories told about real, flawed human characters in adult situations. I'm no longer new and fresh myself, but I have Disney streaming anew, and no way was I not going to induce my second adolescence watching the MCU timeline unfold. Little did I know what I missed because of Pecksniffian snobbery.

I appreciate morally compromised characters, but I usually associate them with realistic interpretations of human life, not space-and-time epics. Don't we all actually prefer the self-involved to saints? I'm elated to find frequent divided minds among the super-heroes who gather under the rubric of "The Avengers." Bruce Banner is my living notion of ambiguity, always teetering between unchecked power and unchecked rage. Tony Stark can be a prancing egotist, but he also knows guilt intimately and unrelenting. Thor can't get over himself; he's as self-centered as Tony without the wit or god help us finesse. Captain America, Steve Rogers, is the most saint-like of the Avengers but sparks a civil war when he refuses to subordinate his power to the state by signing the Sokovia Accords. He's standing up for what he believes as a principled person, that big government has no business holding a super-hero's leash. We have to applaud that righteous puritan.

The best example of moral complication is the great MCU villain Thanos, played by Josh Brolin through a trio of films culminating in Avengers: Endgame. Brolin, despite the heavy masking required to make Thanos appear other-worldly, plays a towering, powerful villain and a character full of regret on how the world is destroying itself with runaway consumption. He's kind of a soured environmentalist. Thanos believes as sincerely in his own moral mission as Captain America believes in his. Both are prepared to sacrifice life to be true to themselves. Thanos quite righteously sacrifices his adopted daughter Gamora on the desolate planet Vormir, because to obtain the Soul Stone he's instructed to sacrifice someone he loves. Gamora is handy. In The Infinity War, Thanos snaps out the lives of half of all living creatures -- not just humans, but animals too (visually the filmmakers make people turn to blowing dust before our eyes. The disappearance of Peter Parker who's cradled wounded in Iron Man's lap is truly one of those scenes that'll sneak up on you at the movies and make your eyes water). Thanos becomes a mass murderer not out of hatred, not for conquest, but because he wants the blessed world to be sustainable. He sees overpopulation and greed as the only defining features of this world, and those greedy traits offend him deeply. Thanos dies believing in his own heroism. His death is melancholy for that very reason. We hate to see any soul, even a misguided one, face his own colossal failure.

The writers of the MCU universe explore all sorts of topics, like the wholly arbitrary and spiteful nature of divinity, particularly the god Odin who brooks no stubbornness. (Any resemblance to the angry God Jehovah of Christian nationalists would appear to be purely coincidental.) Thor is my least favorite Avenger, except when he gets dissolute. In the long run getting banished to Earth improved his character. Natasha Romanoff, the Black Widow (played by the sparkling but-seriously-don't-mess-with-her Scarlett Johansson) is my favorite, and her self-sacrifice (again on that awful planet Vormir) to save Clint Barton (Hawkeye) is another moment of terrible moral consequences derived from doing what's right.

Heroes are necessary bearers of culture -- every culture, every sub-culture, living now and in every time. Heroes transmit principles, sometimes the local gospel, often the illustrated moral decisions that keep societies and civilizations cohering. We need them. I fall back on something my friend Dalton George wrote on Substack:

"I'm of the mind that we have a biological inclination towards heroes. Our longest-surviving stories, art, and songs detail heroes. An individual is up against something much great than themselves, someone using their agency to benefit the community, country, and place. There's a reason Marvel movies are the cash cow they are. Brighter minds than mine have observed that our society is largely starved for heroes." 

I relish the idea that heroes arose from our very evolution through danger. We have to have heroes, and we'll create one on the spot if need be. But the Sokovia Accords were all about keeping unchecked power under scrutiny. Because otherwise giant ballrooms arise where once there was the law and duty and honesty and the good of the body politic. Heroes are not self-centered pricks.

 

Alaska, Knocking and Rising

 

Mary Peltola

 

 

Amazing Number: 70,000. The total number of registered Democrats in all of Alaska -- which represents just 12% of the 574,000 total registered voters. About 65% of Alaskans are registered Independent, but the state as a whole has been solidly red. 

Which is why Mary Peltola, the first Alaska Native elected to Congress who is now the Democratic candidate for one of Alaska's Senate seats, has discovered a new (well, no, "new to her") secret weapon for winning an otherwise improbable campaign: Door-knocking with a new purpose (and not just knocking up the Democrats but going strong after the Republican-leaning-but-persuadable Independents, the vast majority). Rather than repeating by rote a "Vote for Mary" message, the "Ground Truth technique" is called "deep listening." (This kind of canvassing, based on good data, is old-hat in my neighborhood of Southern political organizing. But I understand why any brand of door-knocking in Alaska, where there's sometimes -- often? -- great distances between residences and pootie weather to boot, has probably never been pursued as a standard political activity by party organizers.)

Peltola has engaged Swing Left to implement the Ground Truth canvassing program, which is a great move, so long as two other things are true:

1. That Peltola has sufficient volunteers to mount that kind of painstaking and time-consuming voter outreach.

2. That those volunteers are thoroughly trained in listening techniques and can operate a phone to record data.

The Senate seat is currently occupied by carpet-bagger Republican Dan Sullivan, an ex-Marine who moved up from Ohio as an adult and who wouldn't dare deviate from MAGA. Pundits heavily favor Sullivan to hold onto his seat. The Cook Political Report has rated the race "Solid Republican," but more recently Sabato's Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia moved it to "Toss-Up." Peltola has to overcome the loser label: she only served one term in the House before losing reelection in 2024. True, she had beaten Sarah Palin in 2022, but that was politically "in the Long Ago." Peltola has been "moderate," which in her case means practical and rarely ideological, with the interests of Alaska uppermost. She's been one of the most independent Democrats, and she might just ride the wave into the Senate, especially if she can get a sizable chunk of the independent electorate engaged by simply listening at their doors.

I'm for Requiring the King James Version in Schools. No Other Translation Will Do

 

I just love Texans for their eternally stubborn naivety. Members of the Texas state board of education just decided that five million Texas school kids, from first grade to seniors in high school, will be required to read selected Bible stories in school. Last year, the same board decided to put the Ten Commandments in every classroom. Naive and bossy. The 15-member board are all elected to staggered terms from distinct geographical districts. Currently, the board consists of 10 Republicans and five Democrats. 

I got a.i. to assemble the approved list of required readings:

Old Testament

• Genesis
  • Noah's Ark
  • Tower of Babel
• 1 Samuel
  • David and Goliath
• Book of Jonah
• Psalms (including Psalm 23)
• Ecclesiastes (Chapter 3, "To everything there is a season")
• Job
• Lamentations

New Testament

• Gospel of Luke
  • The Parable of the Prodigal Son
  • Luke 14:7–11 (the teaching on humility)
• Gospel of Matthew
  • The Beatitudes (Matthew 5:1–12)
  • Matthew 6:25–34 ("Do Not Be Anxious")
• Acts of the Apostles
  • The Road to Damascus (conversion of Paul the Apostle)
• First Epistle to the Corinthians
  • Chapter 13 ("Love is patient, love is kind")

 

I have no problem pushing the early 17th-century prose of the King James Bible on every student as one important ingredient of being truly educated. I'm not so sure about modern translations. The much simplified New International Reader's Version that Texas prescribes for the youngest kids takes away all the magic language of the King James, and so what's the point? The simplified language means you're no longer teaching language arts; you're teaching bullets of cultural mandates and signaling virtue. For me and for the sake of the children, it has to be the King James or nothing. I consider that translation's Book of Isaiah a towering masterpiece of elite philosophy. I go to the Book of Amos for bug-eyed intensity. I can certainly settle down for an hour or two with Psalms, and I recently reread the Four Gospels to see if I could detect any traits in Jesus that would attract the likes of Samuel Alito. 

What we now refer to as the Holy Bible was the literature of a specific monotheistic religion and the culture of a place that arose along the Jordan River. That literature became dogma all over Europe and spread from there all over the world, including to America. How the book has evolved most recently in the hands of political preachers and grifting presidents should and does ignite an opposition to the Texas Bible requirements. The selections favor an evangelical Protestant approach to the biblical text rather than a broadly ecumenical or academic one.

The devil in me wants to make fun of the Texas school board for its attempt to bring all the children to obedience through the Book of Job, but I won't. I think I'd like to be one of those Texas teachers that got to build a lesson plan around what happened to Job and why. There's no Isaiah on the reading list, nor Amos, but yes the Book of Job. Glad to see First Corinthians, but no Revelations? Who would miss that druggie trip!

I was in the 5th Grade in a small, rural Texas public school in the mid-'50s when all the classrooms got wired up for a new P.A. system, and we began to hear from the principal at the start of every day, followed by Bible readings and little sentence prayers, the last two offered by students selected for their good behavior. I was never asked. But, then, I already knew the Bible better than most of my classmates, because of my Pentecostal background. We read the Bible. The King James Bible.

The language gets in your head, becomes a muscle for the way you see the world, see yourself in the world and how you order the universe. Yes, it's culturally specific especially for Anglo Texans, and I air one of those. Which makes me actually sympathetic to the sweet idiocy of the Texas School Board.

 

Swain County Agonistes

 

Lottie Barker

 

 

I've come to expect the Smoky Mountain Times (SMN) to produce the best local reporting in all of Western North Carolina. I've long followed the excellent work of reporter Cory Vaillancourt, and now it's reporter Lily Levin who's gotten my attention. She covers county government in Swain which means CoCommish meetings. 

Citizens in Swain County crowded the commission's boardroom on March 31st to warn of what was coming if a data center or crypto-mining facility were to put their fat thumb on the jurisdiction, suck up the water, drain the grid, and make a bunch of unnecessary noise. All five county commissioners voted for a year-long moratorium on "high-impact land uses" in April. 

Something happened at the May 5th meeting of the commish that County Manager Lottie Barker didn't want seen by the public. According to a county tech person, Barker requested a section be removed. The resulting gap is pretty lame-ass and therefore hilarious: Swain County’s official YouTube recording of May 5th begins mid-sentence in a resident's public comment. Then, what the resident said that was edited out was strong enough to get referred to repeatedly later in the meeting by both commissioners and audience members.

On May 20th, SMN filed a FOIA request with the county for the unedited tape.

June 4: SMN sends followup email wondering when compliance with FOIA might happen.

June 11: SMN sends another email to county government. It's already dawned on people that a pristine original tape maybe no longer exists.

June 11: SMN expands its documents probe to the Department of Social Services, requesting all correspondence regarding "the disposal of DSS records and hazardous materials at the stump dump." You couldn't make that sentence up if you were on drugs.

Lottie Barker's manager contract was up back in February, but the county extended it to allow a landing strip for a new manager. She's been accused of frequent absences from public meetings. A group of citizens, joined by a single commissioner, have alleged secret cover-ups and general malfeasance and put Lottie Barker at the center of it.

 

Veto Overrides Never Tasted Sweeter

 

Purges are commonplace in politics. So is revenge.

Back in March, two Democratic NC House members, Carla Cunningham and Shelly Willingham, were primaried for being problems for the Party. Their local parties turned against them. The state Democratic Party punished them. The governor especially wanted Carla Cunningham gone and publicly endorsed her opponent. Thus were both Cunningham and Willingham (and two others) purged in the March primaries. Both Cunningham and Willingham quickly changed their registrations from Democrat to Unaffiliated, and they've begun to take blood.

They still had a whole legislative session yet to serve, and about the first thing put to the House was veto overrides of two more bills that had originated in Phil Berger's Senate:

Two combined  bills: S 227 bans efforts at diversity, equity, and inclusion in the public school system. S 558 bans efforts at diversity, equity, and inclusion in the university system.

S 153 requires that everybody, from local law enforcement to public school employees, must be nice to ICE, must participate in assisting the deportation of people that ICE picks, and any entities deemed not in compliance would lose their governmental immunity, allowing private citizens to sue them.

In the veto overrides yesterday in Raleigh, Cunningham and Willingham helped the Republican majority just by being absent. WRAL reported that although the two House members had been present for morning committee meetings, they were not present in the House chamber when the override votes happened, thus decreasing total attendance from 120 to 118. For the override, they need a three-fifths (60%) majority of those present and voting. Yesterday, the vote on each override was 71-47.  If everybody's there, they'd need 72 votes. Absence made the heart grow fonder.

Revenge tastes good hot or cold, but I wonder about the after-taste in this particular instance. Those laws belong to the 1950s, and I don't think either Cunningham or Willingham want to go back there. In this case, sweet revenge required it.

A Case of Nerves?

 

Dave Boliek

 

 

A week and a day ago, June 16th, Republicans in the NC House introduced H 958, "Election Law Changes," 37 pages of monkeying around with the way things have been. Under this bill, any resident of a county may challenge any other resident's ballot until five days after an election (oh, yes, there'll be mischief on this one!), and State Auditor Dave Boliek will get yet a new sweeping power -- "mandatory post-election audits" in counties of Dave Boliek's choosing (maybe particularly the ones that turn blue?). Dave Boliek used to be a registered Democrat. He became a Republican, won his election, and has proven himself extra loyal to the GOP. (Witness how he bullied Republicans on the Jackson County Board of Elections to reject early voting on the Western Carolina University campus.) H 958 would also make more State Board of Elections staff into political (partisan) appointees, and curiously the law would ban any members of county boards of elections from "encouraging" citizens to vote. Why? Because human flesh is frail? 

The backlash to this bill, which was being fast-tracked, turned pretty fierce fast and overwhelming -- there's still a portal available for public comment -- so the bill is stalled, stuck in the Rules Committee (where many a problematic piece of legislation has died of slow suffocation). Revisions to H 958 may be underway, but does it matter? The GOP has cemented its identity -- the burning need to keep as many people from voting as possible.

The fact that the House leadership flinched in the face of public uproar -- former Speaker Tim Moore would never have flinched -- may tell us something about the case of nerves right now in the Republican majority. Do they need a lot of negative attention right now over the right to vote?

 

Satisfaction

 

I began working in politics in 1968, canvassing for registered Democrats in Salt Lake City who would promise to attend their precinct meetings and help elect delegates to the state convention who supported the anti-war Eugene McCarthy for the presidential nomination. I was very much of draft age. And I was very unsuccessful. All 20 precincts I was assigned to organize went for Hubert Humphrey. It was my first taste of insurgent politics, with its sweet aftertaste of defeated idealism.

I did not go back to political organizing until 1990, when we helped carry our rural Western North Carolina county for Harvey Gantt, the former mayor of Charlotte who was running to unseat Jesse Helms. I was a true believer for Gantt, and I had convinced myself that he would -- could -- win the whole state. Belief is a kind of drug. Gantt lost by 107,000 votes, a sobering number. 

You got to believe to do politics, but you also have to level up on reality. If you thrive on the hunt, you also know starvation. But when the big game is plentiful, fat, and slovenly, you're allowed a certain expectation that this time a big feast will follow.

If I were a young man again, I'd be knee-deep right now in some wholly improbable attempt to topple a Republican monument. The paint is peeling off the Republican Party, and the most improbable Democratic candidate could, in such a toxic watery environment, bring down the buffalo. I expect pleasant surprises.

Anything less will leave me unsatisfied.

W T [EVERLASTING ] F

 

The Wake County Board of Elections just voted unanimously to approve an early voting plan for November that cuts out the Talley Student Union on the North Carolina State University campus, where some 47,000 students, faculty, and staff go every day. The final vote was 5-0, with both Democratic reps voting with the Republicans. This final decision followed what appeared to be a gallant Democratic attempt to save Talley as an early voting site. The two Democrats made a motion to keep Talley in the early voting plan, which pleased the overflow crowd who attended yesterday to watch the action, many of them NCSU affiliated. The Democratic motion was defeated along partisan lines 3-2. Naturally.

The next step would have depended on the Democrats sticking to their high-minded guns. They should have voted against the final version -- the Dallas Woodhouse-branded solution for discouraging the youth vote by whatever means. (In Jackson County, where Republican members of the local BOE were highminded enough to recommend a campus early voting site for Western Carolina, they got threatened by higher ups. One of the Republicans resigned in protest.) Voting against the Republican majority on the board forces by law a punt to the State Board of Elections, where, yes, another negative outcome is assured. The three Republican majority on the SBOE are in on the fix. But Democrats who don't keep fighting, even in the face of insurmountable odds -- it's not a good look.

I would like this not to be the Democratic brand in North Carolina: Caving, like DeeCee Dems. Make motions and argue to keep a voting site for young people, like you truly believe in what you're saying, like a hero for the people, and then turn around and vote with the opposition so that there cannot be a test of the decision at the State Board of Elections.

I would love to hear the reasoning behind that final unanimous vote.

No, never mind. In fact, just STFU.

 

Propects As High As an Elephant's Eye

 

Introductory campaign videos from the wave of Democratic candidates who could make Iowa a hot news topic.

Josh Turek, running for U.S. Senate:

  

 

 

Rod Sand, running for Governor:

 

 

 

Lindsay James, running for Congress, Iowa 02:

 

 

 

Christina Bohannan, running for Congress, Iowa 01:

 

 

Sarah Garriott, running for Congress, Iowa 03:

 

 

 

Jackson Co. Board of Elections Member Blows the Whistle on Republican Collusion To Squelch the Youth Vote

 

Dave Boliek

 

 

We've known since the bosses in the General Assembly put Republican Auditor Dave Boliek in charge of the State Board of Elections that the GOP had drawn a cross-hatch on the youth vote. That became crystal clear when Boliek appointed Republican operative Dallas Woodhouse to "coordinate" voting plans with county parties. What Woodhouse apparently did was issue "kill" orders for university early voting sites in several county BOEs, one of which was Jackson County, home to Western Carolina University. WCU had enjoyed an early voting site on its campus since 2016. 

We don't know how Woodhouse may have delivered the message about squelching the youth vote, but the Republican majority in Jackson Co. got the message for the primary. The board voted 3-2 along partisan lines to deny WCU its usual site, and because the vote was not unanimous -- as required by state law -- the primary early voting plan had to go to the State Board of Elections with its 3-2 Republican majority. The Republicans on the SBOE naturally found it quite easy to sanction the closing of the site at WCU.

That was the primary. Now early voting plans for the General Elections are once again issues for county BOEs. Two of the three Republican members in Jackson let it be known that they supported returning early voting to the WCU campus for this fall. Those two members were promptly summoned to a secret dressing-down by the Jackson County Republican Executive Committee, which according to the member who blew the whistle, threatened the two men with expulsion from the board:

“When we made it clear what we were going to vote, we were asked to come before the Executive Committee of the Republican Party” to justify it, the whistleblower told an open meeting of the Jackson BOE Monday. “And we presented them evidence, we presented them numbers, we presented them everything,” the whistle-blower said. “And all I heard was, ‘Well, we just don’t want it on campus. We just don’t want it on campus.’ ”

One of those two renegade Republican members promptly resigned from the board in April, leaving a 2-2 split of voting members. Only one remaining Republican, the Chair of the Board, voted against the WCU site for the Fall elections. The whistle-blower and the two Democrats voted for the WCU site. The board chair was apologetic and somewhat chagrined. According to reporting by NCNewsline, he admitted during Monday's meeting that he had been pressured "from above" and that he was sorry to be the one vote that kept the plan from being unanimous. The final decision will now fall again to the SBOE, and we've seen this movie before. 

What they're doing to suppress the youth vote in the upcoming election is as plain as the large partisan nose on Dave Boliek's fat face.

Censorship in Real Time

 

Watch Clayton High School senior and valedictorian of the class of 2026 get the microphone snatched from her when she began to say what she really felt about the treatment of Palestinians in Gaza and the treatment of immigrants by ICE in our own country. Leen Hijaz had just said the following, veering away from the text that was approved by school officials beforehand:

“Whether it’s the millions suffering in Palestine, Sudan, Congo, Afghanistan and so many other countries around the world, or the families being torn apart by ICE,” Hijaz said over the cheers of her classmates. “These are not distant issues, they are happening as I speak.”

Here's the video of that moment:

 

Not only did the school principal snatch away her free speech rights along with the microphone but then followed up the wrong by denying Hijaz her own diploma. Did I mention that Leen is valedictorian of her class?

Adding insult to the injury, the school put out this lie: “School administrators intervened in order to maintain the integrity and focus of the program in real time. This action was not about limiting a student’s voice, but about ensuring that a school-sponsored event remained consistent with its intended purpose.”

"Not about limiting a student's voice"? It's all about limiting any voice that goes against whatever MAGA is told to think on any given day. 

Proud of the courage of Gen Z! Such bravery may be the only thing that can repair the freedoms in our Constitution.

 

Will I Get Arrested When I Dance on His Grave?

 

Enver Hoxha

 

 

Revenge. That's been his game, but it can be ours, too.

Gestures are not meaningless. After the death of Albania's iron-fisted dictator Enver Hoxha in 1985, so many people showed up to stomp, dance, and cheer on the grave that the government had to move his body to a private cemetery. The death of Margaret Thatcher in 2013 led to impromptu "grave-dancing" street parties in working-class cities like Glasgow and Brixton. Everyone feared Stalin and hated him for it. When his body got moved from the Red Square Mausoleum in 1961 to a modest gravesite beside the Kremlin wall, rumor had it that several high-ranking party officials who had survived his various purges held a kind of Russian kegger at the new dig: "They drank, cheered, and physically stamped on the dirt above him." 

Poet Diane Wakoski wrote "Dancing on the Grave of a Son of a Bitch" in 1972 because there was a sonovabitch, the "Motorcycle Betrayer" Wakoski called him, who needed exorcism from her life. The poem is a kind of ritual chant, the sort you might intone to ward off evil.

Dancing, even on a grave, is not just about revenge. It's about joy, too. Relief. The only time I ever went outside a watering hole to dance smack-dab in the middle of the street was on a late night when my candidate at the time won the White House. (Ring those bells while you can, because by tomorrow you'll hate everyone. Dreams always decay.) 

So let's have a party when it happens. Let's dance and whirl and cavort. We'll invite those five Indiana state senators who got defeated in their primaries after they were targeted as disloyal because they didn't want to redistrict Indiana. We'll invite Thomas Massie of Kentucky. I hear he's a smart fellow and doesn't pull his punches. Maybe we should make Brad Raffensperger, who didn't get to be governor of Georgia because of 11,780 votes, our toastmaster for the evening. And certainly Bill Cassidy and John Cornyn ought to want to be there. We'll certainly invite them. E. Jean Carroll too. And a host of others. Maybe the new occupants of the White House would let us rent the ballroom.

 

NCGOP -- Whittling Away While They Can

 

The inevitable news this morning (we've been waiting for this move), and there's probably more voter suppression to come. It's their brand.

 

RALEIGH, N.C. May 27, 2026 -- Republican lawmakers in North Carolina are pushing proposals that would shorten the state’s early, in-person voting period and eliminate a Sunday voting day statewide. 

Two bills moving through the General Assembly, Senate Bill 1084 and House Bill 66, would reduce the number of early voting days before elections.

The Senate proposal would cut early in-person voting from 17 days to 10 in all 100 counties and eliminate one Sunday of voting statewide. The House version would shorten the period from 17 days to 13, also removing a Sunday voting day.

Early voting is the most popular method of casting a ballot. Most North Carolinians vote early rather than on Election Day.... [WRAL]

Public School Teachers With the Most Experience Are the Most Underpaid

 

Depend on The Daily Tar Heel to do some first-rate reporting on the "smoke and mirrors" that the Republican leadership in the General Assembly hopes will pacify the state's public school teachers in lieu of serious salary adjustment:

William Brady, a physical education and health teacher at Smith Middle School in the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools district, like many other teachers, needs a second job to make ends meet. Kelly Allen, a science teacher at East Chapel Hill High School, said as the price of food and gas has gone up this year, she’s seen her savings decrease.

Both have been teaching for over 20 years, and said their salaries have not kept up with inflation. Last Tuesday, North Carolina legislators negotiating the state budget announced that they had agreed on an 8 percent average pay raise for the state’s teachers next school year – but for veteran educators, like Brady and Allen, the raise will not be significant.

“It's nonsense,” Allen said. “I think my pay, with the current proposal, will go up by about $300 per month — of course that's pre-tax. What a slap in the face! I've given 27 years of my life to educating North Carolina’s children. That will probably give me a few extra tanks of gas each month.” ...

House Speaker Destin Hall (R-Caldwell, Watauga) said the proposed raises would be the largest average teacher pay increase since 2006. However, the North Carolina Association of Educators, a teacher advocacy group, said the proposal was “smoke and mirrors” and criticized the raises as being far below what’s needed to bring the state’s teacher pay in line with the rest of the country.

“Eight percent may sound like a raise — until you pay Duke Energy's skyrocketing electric bill, Aetna's ballooning insurance premium, and more at the gas pump,” Tamika Walker Kelly, president of NCAE, wrote in her statement. “Meanwhile, teachers are still spending more than $1,000 of their own money just to stock their classrooms.”

According to Kelly, the 8 percent raise is an average, meaning every teacher does not get the same amount. Teachers with less than 15 years of experience will see upwards to 17 percent increase in their base pay. Those educators with more than 16 years of experience will see significantly lower raises, at 5 percent or less.... 

Revenge: The Undermining of Public Education in NC Continues Apace for Pure Spite

 

Cunningham and Majeed

 

 

Sure enough (and of course!) two of the (former) members of the NC House Democratic Caucus, Carla Cunningham and Nasif Majeed, joined all the Republicans in overriding Governor Stein's veto of a bill that will commit North Carolina to participating in the federal school voucher program authorized by President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill. Reps. Cunningham and Majeed had changed their registrations to Unaffiliated after they lost their primaries in March to fellow Democrats who had promised to be more loyal to Democratic Party values. Cunningham and Majeed had participated already with the Republicans in veto overrides prior to today, and had suffered as a result their estrangement from the NC Democratic Party, which cut off data and other resources. 

Majeed had originally voted against the measure that he decided today was just fine with him.

A third Democratic House member targeted for his previous footsy with the Republicans, Shelly Willingham, was also defeated in his March primary but did not change his party affiliation. He took the more cowardly route today of simply missing the veto-override session. 

 

When Contemplating the US Senate, Drugs Help

 

Connie Schultz

 

 

I wish I could see into the future. I wish I were a prophet, divinely guided. I would see Ken Paxton winning the Republican runoff for US Senate in Texas next week -- because of the last-minute Trump endorsement. Then I see James Talerico taking the Senate seat in November.

I see Andy Barr, the Kentucky 6th Dist. congressman and all-in trumpist who beat the Mitch McConnell machine last night in the Republican primary for McConnell's seat, easily win in November, join the Senate in January 2027, and become a regular source for jokes about corruption and meanness. 

I see Michael Whatley going into real estate sales.

I see Sherrod Brown returning to the Senate from Ohio. I get to meet his wife, whom I'm in love with. 

I see Graham Platner winning the Senate seat in Maine and then getting into a fistfight with Andy Barr, which sends Barr to Walter Reed.

I see independent Dan Osborn, "The Guy From the Shop Floor," defeating the billionaire Pete Richetts in Nebraska with Democratic Party support. Osborn immediately irritates the Party and often teams up with Maine Senator Graham Platner to demand radical economic reform. 

I see a free-for-all break out over the replacing of Chuck Schumer as Senate Majority Leader in 2027. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland takes it by a hair, proves uncompromisingly tough. 

I see so much shock and surprise in North Carolina following November 3rd, with the veto-proof Republican legislative steamroller gone in both state Senate and House and no Boss Berger in the joint to organize the flabbergasted troops. House Speaker Destin Hall becomes the most powerful member of the General Assembly, but he plays nice(r) with Gov. Josh Stein. They sit down for a beer together and change things.

Ye Fates of Water and Floodtide, thank you for your attention to this matter.

 

The NCGOP Absolutely Luvvs Amending the Constitution!

 

Democratic candidates for governor of North Carolina have beaten the Republican nominees three times in a row, and ever since Roy Cooper's reelection victory in 2020, Phil Berger and Tim Moore (at the time) took revenge by seizing power from the governor (and in many cases giving it directly to themselves), like taking the state Board of Elections and giving it to a wholly new guy because he was handy and loyal. The Republican bosses in the General Assembly also took appointments to the Board of Governors of the University of North Carolina for themselves. They had some dull axes to grind into bright, gleaming steel. Now they're after Josh Stein. Bryan Anderson alerts us that there's a measure moving in the NC House, H 144, that would put a Constitutional amendment on the ballot to "strip Gov. Josh Stein of his ability to appoint 11 members onto the State Board of Education. In lieu of gubernatorial appointments, the state’s Republican-controlled legislature would draw 14 districts for voters to elect state education board members to four-year terms. The state’s lieutenant governor and treasurer would also continue on the education board. The state superintendent of public instruction would also serve as chair of the board." Why? Apparently, General Election ballots are not long enough already. 

Other proposed amendments to NC's constitution that are coming down the track:

H 1089 proposes to send it to the voters to put a limit (undefined) on county property tax rates, a measure that is bound to be popular and is absolutely a ticking time bomb that will cripple the finances and public services of some counties.

S 1080: Another one that's cotton candy for conservatives, a measure lowering the ceiling on personal income tax to 3.5%. Anderson: "In 2018, voters overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment capping personal income taxes at 7%. But this time around, Democratic leaders and some prominent Republicans worry the bill could hamstring future legislators. Stein has said he worries the tax cap would put the state 'in a financial straight jacket.' Republican former House Speaker Pro Tem Skip Stam said the ballot measure 'needs a lot of work' and 'makes no more sense than a liberal version that required a minimum level of income taxation'.”

S 1081: The Right to Farm amendment. There's already a "right to farm" law on the books. Is this a potential future wedge against local zoning?

S 1082: An anti-union "right to work" amendment, even though NC workers already have the right not to join no effing worker orgs.

 

A Graduation Speech for Both This Age and The Ages

 

That was a hell of a graduation speech that singer/songwriter Eric Church gave at Chapel Hill. The man's a good writer, and he delivered that thing as though he was speaking off-the-cuff. I don't know how he could have memorized it, it's so long and so intricately constructed. Eric Church seems like a righteous, smart dude, and we share the Southern Baptist upbringing. UNC-Chapel Hill thought enough of the speech to make the entire thing easily available for viewing (above).

In 2018, leading up to Trump's first mid-term election, Church made this comment to Rolling Stone about the president his wife voted for in 2016 -- Church himself didn't vote: “I’m conflicted. I like that he’s thrown a monkey wrench into things. I think that chaos is good. I enjoyed the North Korea thing. Why haven’t we talked to that guy? Tariffs, I don’t know yet. I don’t want a trade war, but I’ll walk with him down that road a little farther. At the same time, I have a ton of problems with him. I don’t like the racial overtones. I hate the tweeting. It seems insecure, petty, not presidential.”

In a graduation speech that never mentioned Trump or the current national mood, Church nevertheless managed to telegraph an mistakable update to the preceding opinion.

Why I'm Not Writing More

 

I'm actually writing a lot. Just not about current politics. None of it ever likely to see the light. So I've neglected WataugaWatch, even though I spend every morning trying to get a hold on the political world and find something to write about. My looking inevitably turns into doom-scrolling, and I end up retreating to the garden to pull weeds. Red Hornet asks when I'm coming back from the beach.

I'm not good company right now. Hasn't Trump 2.0 exhausted you? Even when it's all hilarious. Especially when it's all hilarious. Like Trump's staying up all night to throw turd balls at his grudges on Truth Social and then falling asleep in the Oval in front of guests and dignitaries pleading their cases. Trump even stages those White House events deliberately, and in the strangest (most hilarious) way: Trump arrays himself in front, seated, with only his drooping head and about half of his chest showing, with the experts and his loyal supporters arrayed behind him who are orating on various topics supposedly of great interest to Trump, while Trump closes eyes, loses consciousness. You can't miss it, because Trump puts himself in the forefront.

Why is that not the common laughing-stock of the country? 

I took a vow back in his first term that I wasn't going to focus on him, and I've kept myself mainly aloof from the chaos because there are plenty of commentators memorializing and analyzing every aspect of Trump's lack of ethics or morals. Not only am I and my written opinions not needed, they would be wholly irrelevant anyway. What does it even matter to share a strong opinion at this peculiar moment? We are in the hands of a Fate that will play out in waves -- convulsions might be the better word -- starting in just six months and ending God knows when or how.

I'm too exhausted to do anything much more than wait.  

BTW what does he dream about, that man? Does he relive his greatest moments of grandiosity? The roar of his crowd? Hear again the great and famous stroking his ego? Does he dream of planting a new Trump property in a place he can corrupt and bully?

 

Pity the People Left on the Beach

 

I see a lot of ink today amazed at yesterday's Indiana Republican primaries for General Assembly seats. Trump endorsed seven of his dogs against seven stubborn state senate Republican incumbents, and the incumbents got chewed the hell up. Fox News was thrilled to report that Trump Is Still Lord. Others couldn't help but notice the Mafia vibes in the sudden death of politicians who had refused to kiss the ring (re-jigger the state's congressional maps). Many reporters noticed the severed horsehead in the bed. Don't cross boss Trump.

I say "good!" to those Republican primaries. I'm counting on the cult's keeping its politicians firmly in the trumpy mold, under the trumpy thumb, because it will be an ever more convenient target for the Blue Wave, as the opposition to Trump picks up more independents and disgusted lifelong Republicans. There are actually very good conservatives who don't like mob bosses and wide-open corruption. To have a clear and unitary enemy with a brand name and a history is a pure-dee gift for the goddamned Democratic Party.

Otherwise reasonable, logical men and women who hold office as elected Republicans have weighed their choices, and they've consciously chosen to throw in with whatever Trump says or demands or does, because that's the way politics works, at least politics in a democracy that demands votes. We join parties, and even when we can plainly see our party's alienating the majority, or that our leader is fucking wrong, we stick with our party. 'Tis better to die together than hang separately. 'Tis actually better to die for someone's stupidity than never to have taken a side at all and declared our values. (We would have made excellent soldiers in Pickett's frontal attack at Gettysburg, and would probably have considered it both right and fitting pro patria mori.)

Lord knows how many masts I've lashed myself to over the last 60 years of political advocacy and community organizing, only to see the whole ship go down and me with it. I get the psychology of staying with the sinking ship. It's considered noble -- in a fashion that Falstaff would have mocked as folly, but still. What's the alternative to embracing defeat when it's inevitable? Disengagement? And the blissful aloofness of independents who always piously claim, "I vote for the man, not the party"? That kind of cynical detachment is unthinkable for the likes of us, the eternally engaged and outraged. We are known for the fiber of our spines because we have experienced political death and have returned, often transformed by death, not quite like the phoenix but maybe more like stinkweeds that develop rhizomes.

So I applaud the wholly owned Trump Party, once known as the GOP. Keep the faith, babies, but don't park your beach chairs on the sand. 

 

Sam Page Braves the Rampaging Public School Teachers

 

Look who came to the teachers protest march on Friday in Raleigh:

Rockingham County Sheriff and NC "Senator Elect" Sam Page seemed only too happy to associate himself with the protesting teachers in Raleigh last Friday. He was there to shake hands, give interviews, and ingratiate himself with a voting bloc not any other Republican General Assembly member would associate with. But Sam Page was there to share the message: Damnit, there's no state budget, and teacher pay has sunk to 46th lowest in the nation. Page was overheard telling Christina Cole, president-elect of the NC Assoc. of Educators (NCAE), and others that "teacher pay needs to be raised to highest in the Southeast." Cardinal and Pine had video of him saying forthrightly that raising teacher pay was his top priority, that and public safety. Several pics of him posing with individual NCAE members appeared on social media. He created something of a stir.

Of course he was wearing one of his cowboy hats, a sensible straw. The hat's a sigil -- "NOTICE ME" --and the name "Sheriff Sam Page" is already well known to people who follow North Carolina politics, which would include a sizable number of public school teachers. Especially the ones who know he beat Senate President Phil Berger who was no friend to teachers. As far as anyone has testified, Page was the only Republican politician to show his face on Friday. Cool move, partly because it is causing agita among fierce MAGAs, who go rigid when reminded that May Day protests were once a vehicle for the International Communist Party.

I'd like to think that Sam Page showed up -- if even for a little while (I doubt he marched) -- because he's a good guy on the need to pay our public school teachers a living wage. He didn't have to do that for votes. It's quite certain that he will beat the Democrat running against him in November. It's an R+9 district. He doesn't need the teachers' votes but he's embracing a message that will cause the gnashing of teeth for the man who Page beat and who has been the chief block against treating teachers right. 

 

"Far Right Fielder"

 

Have not seen an attack on Congresswoman Virginia Foxx before that's quite as hard as this one

 

This popped up on Facebook -- no indication of who produced it. It has the earmarks of an independent expenditure, but it might also be a purely homegrown expression of contempt for Virginia Foxx. Doubt it. The level of professional  polish here suggests money. First time I've seen this. If it's showing up in other venues, with or without a "Paid for by" declaration, I'd like to hear about it. Anybody?

The attack does not even mention Democrat Chuck Hubbard, nor does it say anything about an election. The display is meant to lower Foxx's favorables, not explicitly boost Hubbard's.

Is the attack effective? It's all about her age, which is fair, and tying her to Trump policies, which notoriously can cut both ways in the 5th District. She's done what she can to make sure there's no air between her arms and Donald Jethro Trump, and this attack supports that. Many people in the 5th like her precisely for that. The strangest call-out: "She was 26 years old when Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon." A strange slap again at her advanced age, but baroquely obscure compared to the visual trainwreck of the photograph.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Is Zach Wahls the Next Iowa Senator?

 

Greeted this a.m. with news that Sen. Elizabeth Warren would be making campaign appearances on behalf of Zach Wahls in the Iowa Democratic senatorial primary coming up on June 2nd. That Iowa Senate primary is another hot Democratic contest of left insurgency vs. establishmentarian moderation, by which I mean Chuck Schumer's preferred (safe) candidate -- Josh Turek, a 46-year-old Gold Medalist in wheelchair basketball -- is clearly losing to a younger (dangerous) Wahls, who is polling well ahead of Turek. Wahls also wins hypothetical matchups with the Republican candidate he'll face in the fall. It's an open seat because Joni Ernst had had enough.

So I needed to refresh my memory about Zach Wahls: Way back in 2011, as the 19-year-old straight man and former Eagle Scout raised by married lesbians, Wahls stood up during public comment in an Iowa House hearing about a bill to ban gay marriage in the state's constitution and delivered a clear and impassioned defense of his own family. That speech went viral online, quickly garnering a half-million views on YouTube which eventually climbed into the millions. Here is it again, if you have a hankering for persuasion and the language arts:  

 

 

Wahls was a new student at the University of Iowa, studying engineering, when he made that 3-minute speech. He became instantly famous, an unapologetically heterosexual young man who was raised (very well, as it turns out) by two lesbians. No one could speak more powerfully for gay rights. He dropped out of the engineering program to write a book that was published in 2012, My Two Moms: Lessons of Love, Strength, and What Makes a Family. He became a public speaker willing to challenge orthodoxy. A Catholic college felt compelled to cancel not one but two scheduled appearances by Wahls, sponsored by the Gay-Straight Alliance and the College Democrats, after his book came out. That September of 2012 Wahls was given a speaking slot at the Democratic National Convention in which he thanked President Obama for the courage to support same-sex marriage.

Wahls went back to the University of Iowa and got his degree but kept active in Democratic Party politics. He became a Hillary Clinton delegate to the National Convention in 2016, the same year he earned his degree. In 2018 he ran for a safe Democratic state Senate seat, and in 2021 he was voted Senate Minority Leader by his colleagues.

Wahls's rise has been steady and deliberate. But the articulation of difficult topics by a surprisingly mature 19-year-old in 2011 has matured (hardened in a sense) into accomplished politician-speak. He's so prepared and so damn articulate that he can begin to sound rote. He and Graham Platner may end up being sworn into the same Senate, and would be political allies (we assume), but in manner they are very different. Graham Platner's economic populism smacks of lived experience which doesn't do weak nibbling around the edges. Platner's populism is plain-spoken and tough minded. Wahls's seems more rehearsed. He talks in paragraphs. His attachment to the Democratic establishment message about "affordability" doesn't have the smell of sweat about it. Here is Wahls recently on Morning Joe: 

 

The Rain in Maine

 

BREAKING NEWS: Governor Janet Mills drops out of the Maine Democratic senatorial primary. She had once been considered a front-runner to take on Sen. Susan Collins this November. 

Something of a political bombshell. Mills had been "aggressively recuited" to run by Chuck Schumer. She was supported by Emily's List and other prominent liberal groups. As governor she was well known in Maine, had a life in politics behind her (attorney general and member of the Maine House) which came with all the money connections she'd ever need (we thought). Plus she was famous for one bit of video. She had been the lone woman who stood up to Trump at the White House when she defied him about trans rights. But what was super cool about a female governor willing to say to Trump's face on that occasion, "see you in court!" curiously did not translate into any groundswell of support, and she said forthrightly today that she was ending her campaign because she was out of money and had poor prospects for raising more.

Renegade Democratic candidate Graham Platner was polling well ahead of her -- by over a whopping 30 points. Platner has been running away with the primary as someone so authentic and so obviously logical that all the mainstream branding as "left-wing radical," compounded by liberals' clutching their hearts over three very old Reddit posts, had not blunted his rise as a progressive hero. Platner incidentally and willingly owns the hotheaded stupidity of those posts, admitting that he had been an angry young man, back from his 4th combat deployment in Afghanistan, alone, and isolated. Those words do not represent who he was deep down even then and certainly not who he is now. Listening to him talk sense, clearly enunciating a philosophy based on a deep historical understanding of how best to wield power for equity and fairness, I see a winner.

I recommend the interview with Platner that John Stewart did for his podcast (YouTube). Stewart prods Platner a little on why someone with his populist and sometimes libertarian instincts, coming out of the Marine Corps with its hyper-masculine warrior culture, why he wasn't attracted to or "captured" by the Alt Right. Platner's response is humbling: "I read a lot of history books." If he's something of a roughneck, he's an intellectual roughneck who has the right understanding that the failures of the Democratic Party are failures of courage and nerve. 

  

Platner was recruited by a group of labor activists looking for other working people to run in key races. They came to Platner -- who was prominent as a Bernie Sanders fan and a local official on the Eastern Shore of Maine as well as a working oyster farmer who knew the lives and needs of working people -- and they offered him an immediate three things to jump-start a senate campaign: a professionally produced "launch" video, access to small-dollar fundraising, and exposure in the press. The launch video alone in August 2025 got over 2 million views in 24 hours (one of those viewers was me), raised a million dollars, and incited almost 3,000 volunteers willing to hit the streets and the phones for Graham Platner. I immediately wrote enthusiastically about what I was seeing.

"The enemy is the oligarchy!" Graham Platner's launch video: 

 

 

Graham Platner scares at least one of the NC Democratic strategists that I listen to, whose opinion I respect, who is more moderate than I in his enthusiasms, and who has already predicted that Platner can't ultimately beat Collins because his "radical" grassroots intellectualism will end up doing him in. That analysis is based on past history of liberal forces getting way out over their skies and ending up massively disappointed. I'm actually more worried, especially after watching the Jon Stewart podcast, about what establishment grinding Graham Platner will undergo as a senator in Mugstomp-on-the-Potomac. I'm a little shy about unpolished surfaces ever since John Fetterman made an unconventional pitch for support and promptly got coopted.

On the other hand, perhaps when Platner gets to the Senate he can lead Fetterman gently back to the light. Platner has that kind of serious pastor aura about him, signaling that he would always try to rescue the perishing and care for the dying. He's got true Marine purpose.