The NC Congressional Races, 2022

 

We now have seven Democrats representing North Carolina in the US Congress, seven of 14, so we improved our numbers there and helped blunt Democratic losses in other states (like in Florida, where -- yikes! -- there is officially no intelligent life surviving).

Don Davis

CD1 -- Democrat Don Davis comfortably beat the bullying Trumpist Sandy Smith by 11,600 votes for the open seat once held by the venerable G.K. Butterfield.

CD2 -- Democrat Deborah Ross easily held on to her seat.

CD3 -- Republican incumbent Greg Murphy easily buried his Democratic opponent.

CD4 -- Democrat Valerie Foushee easily won David Price's open seat.

CD5 -- Republican Virginia Foxx ... don't get me started.

CD6 -- Democratic incumbent Kathy Manning won reelection with 53.75% of the vote.

CD7 -- Republican incumbent David Rouzer easily put away Democrat Charles Graham, who had one of the best introductory candidate videos, produced by Frank Eaton while Graham was planning to run against Dan Bishop in CD9, but new gerrymandering did him in there.

CD8 -- Republican Dan Bishop, a male Virginia Foxx, is now elected to be a jerk to infinity and beyond.

CD9 -- Republican incumbent Richard Hudson easily won reelection.

CD10 -- Republican incumbent Patrick McHenry took 72% of the vote.

CD11 -- Republican Chuck Edwards is now permanently (probably) a D.C. fixture, beating Jasmine Beach-Ferara. It wasn't even close.

Wiley Nickel

CD12 -- Democratic incumbent Alma Adams easily beat Madison Cawthorn clone Tyler Lee, who apparently believes he's on a mission from God.

CD13 -- For Ted Budd's old House seat, Democrat Wiley Nickel beat the other Madison Cawthorn clone, Bo Hines, by over 7,000 votes. Hines and his patron Donald Trump were counting on that red wave, which didn't arrive for him. Maybe Hines can now go seek an actual job.

CD14 -- For the brand new 14th, state Sen. Jeff Jackson easily rolled over his Republican challenger. Can't help thinking he would maybe have won that Senate seat this year.

Un-Trumping North Carolina: Two Easy-Peasy US House Seats for Democrats To Flip

Deborah Ross

Not to get too cocky about it, but the 2nd and the 6th Congressional district seats should be easy pick-ups for Democrats this year. After all, they were redrawn last year to favor Democrats by a Republican General Assembly eager to get the Federal courts off their backs. Democrats Deborah Ross (in the 2nd) and Kathy Manning (in the 6th) are by now well known, well funded, and certainly favored to win. Ross previously served in the NC House for a decade, rose in the leadership, but left for work in the private sector before returning to politics in 2016 to run unsuccessfully against Richard Burr for the US Senate. Kathy Manning made a splash in 2018 running for the US House in CD 13 against incumbent Republican Ted Budd. She earned a respectable 45.54% of the vote. She's back this year in a new district that combines urban Greensboro and urban Winston-Salem.

Just for giggles, I took a look at their Republican opponents, neither of whom have prior experience as public officials or even as candidates. In the right light, and if you squint a little, they look a little like sacrificial lambs, and I normally have a good deal of sympathy for sacrificial lambs, as there are also plenty of those on the Democratic side of the ballot in North Carolina.

Republican Alan Swain in the 2nd CD is a 26-year retired (and he says "disabled") Army veteran. He doesn't have a website that I could find and is limiting himself to a Facebook page. But he answered the Ballotpedia questionnaire sincerely, and though he says he's "personally passionate" about a number of proven conservative bullet-points (pro-2nd Amendment, pro-Right to Life, pro-Voter ID, against sanctuary cities for "illegals"), he does not mention the name Donald Trump anywhere and does not look so terribly ideological. He lists "optimize healthcare" as his number one campaign issue, and he does not appear to include "repeal Obamacare" in that optimization (though what he does include is not entirely specified).

Swain lists a number of founding fathers among those he looks up to, along with Army generals George C. Marshall, George S. Patton, and Dwight W. Eisenhower. The book that best explains his political philosophy -- The Science of Muddling Through, not exactly a Bible for ideologues. The fictional character he'd like to be ... Captain America (and if that doesn't melt your heart a little, you're just too frigidly cynical for your own good!).

Kathy Manning

Republican Lee Haywood is Kathy Manning's opponent in the new 6th CD, and he's forthcoming in the Ballotpedia questionnaire as the species of Tea Party reactionary we might expect in the Age of Trump. Wanna know his political philosophy? Read Atlas Shrugged (yikes). Wanna do something about healthcare in America? Make it entirely market-based (because Big Pharma made plenty off the opioid crisis and could do so again?). "Finish the Wall on our Southern border!" "Eliminate the U.S. Dept. of Education." "Limit the out of control judiciary." "The Constitution is not a living document." You get the drift. The fictional character he'd like to be -- Ironman.

Neither Alan Swain nor Lee Haywood are serious candidates for office, but I had to make sure.

The Most Interesting Congressional Race in North Carolina

Following Tuesday's primary in North Carolina, two Democratic women in CD 2 and 6 look poised to take seats in the US House that have been held by Republicans. Deborah Ross in CD2 absolutely buried her Democratic primary contenders, taking right at 70% of the total vote against three rivals. In CD6, Democrat Kathy Manning took over 48% of the vote against four rivals, beating her nearest competitor,  Rhonda Foxx, by 33,361 votes. The Cook Partisan Index rates both districts as "Likely Democratic" for 2020.

But I'm looking also to CD11 for my 2020 excitement, even though Cook still considers it "Solid Republican" even with all of Asheville restored to the district after being previously gerrymandered out. I'm looking that way because of the Democrat who won Tuesday's primary against four rival candidates, Moe Davis, who doubled the votes of his nearest second-place contender.

I've been following Davis since he burst out into the public soon after his (admittedly late) filing for the office. Morris "Moe" Davis retired from the US Air Force at the rank of colonel and already had a high pre-candidacy national profile. He served two years as Chief Prosecutor of the Military Commissions at Guantanamo Bay and resigned in protest because his superiors in the Air Force Judiciary and the General Counsel of the Department of Defense overruled his decision to disallow evidence obtained via CIA torture. In resigning his position, Davis declared that he wasn't going to take orders from people who think "waterboarding is A-Okay."

In other words, he's a commendable hard-nose. He's got a clear pattern of courting controversy, or at least not skirting around it when it blocks his path of moral certitude (he said the Supreme Court was "meddling" when it chose to review the Military Commissions Act). He's not afraid to defy authority when he thinks he's right, and you've got to admire his fortitude. He's been on all the broadcast and cable news programs as a recognized expert in national security, especially security from terrorists who he thinks should be prosecuted the fair way and not via the CIA torture wheel, but he's also defended Guantanamo as a "humane" detention center (which makes him suspicious to some liberals).

He's a "risk" candidate at a time when too many Democrats want "safe." He endorses universal health care ("whether it is called Medicare For All or any other name"), access to abortion, legalizing marijuana, and confronting income equality. His website is no-nonsense and straight to the kisser, sort of like his military career. He says this:

He stood up to the Bush Administration on torture. He stood up to the Obama Administration to defend the right to free speech. Moe Davis risked his career to do the right thing for our country. That’s the kind of character he will bring to Washington as Congressman in North Carolina’s 11th District.

He was born and grew up in Shelby, NC, studied criminal justice at AppState, graduated in 1980 and earned his Juris Doctor from NC Central in 1983. He immediately joined the Air Force as a JAG officer where he served with distinction.

(Full disclosure. I contributed a little to Davis during the primary and will likely do so again.)


The Republican Moe Davis Will Be Running Against

Madison Cawthorn

There will be a hot run-off on May 12th between front-running (and Mark Meadows endorsed) Lynda Bennett and the very young Madison Cawthorn (born in 1995). There were a dozen Republicans running in the primary (listed and described here), and most of them are mightily pissed off at how Meadows kept his decision not to run for reelection a secret until the day before the filing period ended and then advantaged his wife's best friend Lynda Bennett for the seat.

On Tuesday, Bennett took 22.72% of the vote to Cawthorn's 20.40%, and Cawthorn has already called for the run-off, drawing endorsements from several other trailing candidates. Cawthorn was quoted in the press:

There’s no doubt in my mind the people of Western North Carolina are sick and tired of watching the politicians [Mark Meadows] trying to force their will upon us and every single vote that was cast against Lynda Bennett was a vote against what Mark Meadows has done. Republicans in the race were furious that Meadows endorsed Bennett, a close friend of him and his wife, after telling other candidates he would not endorse anyone in the primary.

The odds are rarely on the side of second-place finishers in run-offs, but in this case the odds are hard to figure because of anger in the district at Meadows' trying to manipulate the outcome.

Congressional Redistricting Claims a Democratic Casualty

The remapping of North Carolina's 2nd Congressional District threw incumbent Republican Congressman George Holding under the bus. Now it's also claimed the candidacy of a promising Democratic up-and-comer, Scott Cooper.

Retired Marine fighter pilot Cooper announced back in June that he would challenge George Holding in 2020 in what was then the 2nd CD. When the district was remapped to be contained within Wake County alone, and after former Senatorial candidate Deborah Ross announced that she would run, we speculated that maybe Cooper would choose to run in the 8th District rather than challenge Ross for the nomination and thus sap the strength of both candidates (which would be a crying shame).

Cooper announced this morning that he's suspending his campaign and won't be running in any CD in 2020. We hate to see him go and hope to see him return as a candidate for some public office in 2022.

It's a sign of the Trump times, isn't it, that Democrats have so many good and promising contenders? And chivalrous gentlemen, to boot.

George Holding in the NC2 Opts for Retirement Because of Redistricting

US Congressman George Holding's District 2 became Wake County and Wake County alone (greater Raleigh) in the most recent round of court-ordered redistricting. Whereas Holding was initially elected and reelected via very Republican-heavy mapping, he's suddenly been thrown into one of the most blue-trending counties in the state, with strong Democratic contenders for that congressional seat already either announcing or already well underway. Who said, "Discretion is the better part of valor"? Was it a fat man in armor? George Holding announced a couple of days ago that he wouldn't run in another adjacent district if it already had a Republican rep. So today he opted out entirely, said he's retiring from Congress.

There's already a potentially invigorating Democratic scrimmage for the seat. On Tuesday, Deborah Ross, the former Democratic candidate for the US Senate (she ran against Dick Burr in 2016 and got over 45% of the vote statewide), announced that she would seek the seat. She'll be formidable. But retired Marine "top gun" aviator Scott Cooper also looks strong, and he's been building a campaign against Holding since last year.

Shame to watch Cooper and Ross duke it out, so it's relieving to hear this morning that Cooper might be reconsidering, might jump over to the new 8th District, which runs south of Wake through Harnett, Cumberland, and Lee counties, then due west through Moore, Montgomery, Stanly, and Cabarrus. On the face of it, the new 8th looks considerably less friendly to Democrats, though an ex-Marine fighter pilot like Scott Cooper might be the man to change that. (For the record, the rumor of Cooper's maybe switching his campaign to the 8th might be nothing more than rumor. Cooper's Twitter feed certainly doesn't indicate anything other than "full throttle up" for the 2nd.)

In the environment we're currently occupying, every weather-front creates more weather. Democrat Scott Huffman has been running an energetic campaign already for months in the 8th against incumbent Republican Richard Hudson, and the forecast that Scott Cooper might move his campaign south could seem like a bad cold front blowing in (and I've exhausted the weather metaphor).

Lots of ferment since the court approved the new NC congressional districts for 2020. Sometimes it's just going to come down to the better candidate prevailing.

And the Race Is On!

Much happened yesterday in the world of North Carolina politics. The big thing was the court approval of the redistricted maps for the 13 Congressional seats in our state. Which seems to have set off something of a land rush. Deborah Ross announced for the 2nd CD in Wake County (where there are already other strong candidates running). Kathy Manning announced for the 6th CD in Guilford (where there are and will be others competing). And there's a virtual pileup of Democratic candidates in the 11th, which now again includes all of Buncombe County.

We'll be sorting through all the candidate filings in the weeks (and months) ahead with special emphasis on the NC House and Senate districts that got remapped in a more competitive way for Democrats in 2020.

She Got Game!

Photo Chuck Burton

Deborah Ross has broken out in a big way, both in-state in her race to unseat Dick Burr in the U.S. Senate and nationally, where she's attracting enthusiastic write-ups, like this one.

Ross was the keynote speaker at the 2015 Watauga Democratic Party Fall Rally. She energized that large crowd with both her out-going and infectious personality and with her grasp of policy. Many attended that rally last year because there was speculation that Ross would make her announcement  in Boone for the U.S. Senate. Several other candidates were already announced (Ross would end up running against three men in last March's primary), but we couldn't quite talk her into making history while she was in Boone.

A couple of weeks later, she was in the Senate race. We like to think that Watauga Democrats helped build a push for her. Watauga certainly did its part in the March primary, giving Ross over 72% of the vote.

She's making tracks. She's pulled even with Sen. Burr. In at least one poll, she's ahead of him. So much will depend on the turn-out of the demographic groups that have been consistently targeted for voter suppression by our Republican overlords ... particularly young people. If they push back against the voter suppression and get themselves to early voting, Deborah Ross could be our new senator in Washington.

Look Who's Back on the Ballot in NC for U.S. Senate

Our favorite Libertarian, Sean Haugh:

[Sen. Dick] Burr and [Deborah] Ross will be joined on November’s ballot by a familiar face from the 2014 Senate race: Libertarian Sean Haugh, a pizza delivery driver from Durham who attracted national attention two years ago for his unusual candidacy.

Haugh said he’ll run a similar campaign this time: focusing on such Libertarian principles as ending wars and cutting spending, while getting the message out with low-cost tools like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube videos. Previous Haugh campaign videos featured him sipping craft beer while discussing issues at length.

“I can’t imagine anybody who is more different from me politically than Richard Burr,” Haugh said Thursday. “He’s going to make my job really easy.”

Mugstomp on the Neuse Goes Under Water

It has become surreal in Raleigh.

1. The General Assembly -- mainly the Republican Grandees in the NC Senate -- have redrawn congressional districts to maintain their 10-3 Republican dominance, while also conveniently punishing Democrat Alma Adams (by moving her 12th District completely out from under her) and delivering what looks like a career-ending blow to fellow Republican George Holding who is now double-bunked with Democratic Congressman David Price.

2. All this rush to redistrict what a three-judge panel said was unconstitutional gerrymandering may be rendered moot if Chief Justice John Roberts comes through with a Supreme Court stay of the three-judge panel's decision.

3. If Chief Justice Roberts issues a stay, then everything goes back to where we were last week: all primaries in all races on March 15. Otherwise, with no intercession from the Supremes, the Congressional primary will be yanked off the ballot for March 15 -- every other ballot item remaining in place -- and moved to June 7th.

4. No run-offs allowed. For the March 15 primary, and for all the races still on that ballot, top vote-getter wins even if he/she doesn't get to the magic 40 percent marker. (This could conceivably save Renee Ellmers' bacon. She's in a four-person primary race and will conceivably have some difficulty getting to 40 percent. The other likely beneficiary: Deborah Ross, who's in a four-way Democratic primary for U.S. Senate.)

5. Here's where it gets bizarre, according to what passed in the NC House late yesterday. Here I must quote directly from the N&O to get it straight:

In another twist, candidates who won a March 15 primary then could file to run for a congressional seat June 7. If they won in both primaries, they would have to withdraw from one, within a week after the June 7 results were certified.

That means, for example, a legislator who already had been renominated for a seat could run in a congressional primary, and continue to seek re-election as a legislator if he or she lost the latter vote.

I have questions. I hardly know where to start. I'm assuming that the word "candidates" in that first sentence refers to any candidates in any primary race. Certain moments from the early Byzantine Empire are flickering in my mind.

6. No. 5 creates another level of confusion and chaos unanticipated by any sane person outside the halls of the NC House. It potentially creates a campaign finance loophole through which you could drive a tank. Allowing candidates in other state primaries to also file to run for the U.S. Congress without foregoing their state races would open the door for using money raised for a state campaign in a Federal campaign, which is illegal. This will be litigated. It will not stand.

7. Any resemblance between the North Carolina General Assembly and The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight is not coincidental.

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/state-politics/article61166027.html#storylink=cpy

Deborah Ross Gets in the U.S. Senate Race

Raleigh Republicans Targeting Women

The Republicans in the new majority in the NC General Assembly are planning the elimination of strong women in the NC House. That is to say, Democratic strong women.

Laura Leslie has some preliminary analysis at WRAL, and there's a clear pattern. Among the women marked for extinction are Forsyth's Linda Garrou, Wake's Deborah Ross, Guilford's Pricey Harrison, Buncombe's Patsy Keever.

Minority Leader Joe Hackney has been drawn out of his District 54 and into the 56th with Democrat Verla Insko, another strong female legislator.

Meanwhile, Art Pope's yes-man Jonathan Jordan's 93rd House Dist. is left unchanged ... Watauga and Ashe.