Next month, the state executive committee of the North Carolina Democratic Party will vote on a new chair for the state party. The only announced candidate for the job right now is Bobbie Richardson, who is currently 1st vice chair and a former member of the NC House. She was appointed to the Dist. 7 House seat in 2013, won reelection in 2014 and 2016 but lost her seat (by a large margin) in the elections of 2018, after redistricting dissolved her old constituency and replaced it with a much whiter, more Republican electorate.
(The old Dist. 7 had been considered one of the most racially gerrymandered in the state. While redistricting generally across NC in 2018 made Democratic gains in the General Assembly possible, that redistricting hurt a handful of Democratic incumbents, and Richardson was one of those.)
Could Richardson be our Stacey Abrams? Would she have the vision and the juice to mount aggressive voter registration and outreach to find and motivate the people who haven't been participating in our civic contract? While Black voter turnout in North Carolina increased 4.1 points last fall over 2016, it wasn’t enough for Democrats to flip the state for Biden or to flip at least one chamber in the General Assembly. Some 68.4% of North Carolina’s Black voters cast a ballot in the 2020 elections, compared to 78.8% of white voters. That's the winning margin right there, all those votes left untapped.
Richardson spent 35 years teaching in North Carolina schools, with a wealth of preparation behind her including a doctorate in education leadership from UNC-Chapel Hill. She's been a stand-out leader in her community (which is clear from reading her bio), but can she bring a Stacey Abrams level of organizing and reform to the North Carolina Democratic Party?
A 50-50 split in the US Senate, with Vice President Kamala Harris the tie-breaker, and Mitch McConnell no longer the 500-pound tortoise sitting on every progressive initiative. This morning may be the first time I've really felt hopeful in months.
The apparent wins of Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff are particular triumphs of the amazing Stacey Abrams, who after she lost the Georgia governor race in 2018 against Brian Kemp, what did she do? She started Fair Fight and began the voter registration and get-out-the-vote drives that first turned Georgia blue for Joe Biden and then made it possible for him to get his cabinet confirmed and his appointments of federal judges approved.
I'm hearing Abrams may run for Georgia governor again in 2022.
On January 5th, the voters in Georgia will need to go back to the polls for a crucial run-off election. There's some thought out there that it'll be another referendum on Trump (I add to that thought below against my will because I want so much to be done with him). Those voters in Georgia also done with Trump will need to come out on January 5th with greater force than they mustered last Tuesday, which was a lot, because control of the US Senate is on the line. My peeps in Georgia need either to vote early (early voting will go on for 3 weeks and will start just a month from now -- yikes!), or request an absentee-by-mail ballot, or plan to show up appropriately dressed at a local poll on January 5th -- to select not one but two US Senators. Both Republican Kelly Loeffler's seat (she was just appointed this year and has to run in her own right by state law) and Republican David Perdue's seat (he's finishing his 1st term) are on the line. They're forced into runoffs because neither received 50% + 1 of the vote last Tuesday. Loeffler got 25.9% in the three-way special election, trailing Democrat Raphael Warnock by over 341,000 votes, while Perdue is currently leading Democrat Jon Ossoff with 49.8% of the vote, not 50% + 1. Currently, because the count is still going on in Georgia. Perdue leads Ossoff by 90,274 votes.
My main political ops contact down there told me this:
Yes, there is a chance [Democrats could win those seats].
However, Blacks are historically iffy on participation in runoffs. That it’s in January is a problem, too.
Warnock proved to be a great surprise and would have won outright if only Lieberman’s kid and those other bozos dropped their vanity campaigns [7 other Dems were on the ballot with Warnock including former Senator Joe Lieberman's son]. Still the key to victory for either or both will be GOTV.
The other factor is the sheer power of the Republicans to galvanize quickly around bozos and, in the case of Loeffler, bozettes. Clearly, she can be beaten because she's still pretty easily baited. Perdue just hides. I doubt he’ll do a real interview or open town hall type thing through the process. Point is, it will be tough, but I think it can be done.
I personally know three people in Watauga and Caldwell counties who plan to go down and volunteer their time and shoe leather to Stacey Abrams' Fair Fight org, which has been a major mover of the Black vote and which can be totally credited if Joe Biden ends up carrying Georgia (which seems likely). Currently, Biden leads Trump in Georgia by 10,196 votes.
There'll be hundreds, if not thousands, of Democratic activists heading from all over the nation to Georgia, from now through Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's. Guest-housing is going to be at a premium. And money's gonna gush on both sides. You know McConnell will turn on the hose and so should Democratic money-bags. If you (not that you're a money-bag) want to donate to Fair Fight, go here.
Will the Runoff Be a Referendum on Trump?
You betcha.
From the looks of it, Trumpists are prepared to deny reality going into the next millennium. Trump has every intention of fanning those flames. Will their resentments and lust for revenge drive even more Trumpists to the polls on January 5th? Or will they get over it by then? Doubtful the latter, reasonably to be expected the former (although maybe by January 5th they'll still be hungover from the combo of bust-head and fantasy scenarios of mass extermination). Isn't it likely that Trump, still in performance mode as King Lear, will bestow his blessing on both Loeffler and Perdue to keep his legacy alive in the Senate?
Because if both Loeffler and Perdue lose, the US Senate goes to a 50-50 split with Kamala Harris empowered by the Constitution to break ties. Now that's a prospect -- unlikely as it may be -- to galvanize volunteers and electrify a voting population historically accustomed to losing but now transformed by Stacey Abrams' amazing energy. The new majority will be looking to nail some pelts to the old smokehouse door.
About the 50% + 1 Rule in Georgia
In most other states -- the vast majority not below the Mason Dixon Line -- a plurality of votes in a primary wins even if 50% + 1 didn't choose the winner. The 50% rule is popular in the South because ... well, think about it. Loeffler has a runoff with a Black candidate:
Georgia’s runoff law was created in the 1960s as a way to preserve white political power in a majority-white state and diminish the influence of Black politicians who could more easily win in a multicandidate race with a plurality of the vote, according to an Interior Department report.
Since the 1990s, Democrats have won only one of seven statewide runoffs in general or special elections, according to Inside Elections, the nonpartisan political newsletter. [Luke Broadwater]
The Two Democrats
I've written about Ossoff multiple times, but this is probably the money shot. No, this is the money shot, courtesy of YouTube -- the moment in Ossoff's one debate with Perdue when Ossoff called him a crook to his face and Perdue had no defense nor denial. This is the moment when many woke up to the possibility that Ossoff is a Democratic bad-ass and therefore worthy as a standard-bearer. Perdue canceled a follow-up debate.
The Election Systems and Software (ESandS) balloting machinery that Damon Circosta declared last Friday is safe enough for him, and then voted to certify for use in North Carolina counties in 2020 -- those machines are also known in the industry as BMDs, "ballot-marking devices." After a voter touches his choices on a display screen, the machine produces a piece of paper with barcodes representing those choices along with a printed list of what those barcodes purport to mean -- the names of candidates.
The problem is that there's no way to verify that indeed the barcode actually matches the printed list.
In the Age of Trump, verification is all.
Chair of the SBOE Damon Circosta knows why he voted the way he voted. I don't. Apparently, he had ulterior motives that I don't fully understand -- something to do with what might happen in the General Assembly if certain vendors are denied their business interests in North Carolina. Maybe that's a legitimate concern. I don't know. But I've never thought it a compelling argument to worry about what other people might do if I do the right thing.
Here's where North Carolina is today following those votes last Friday: We're now in the same bad place as Georgia. On August 15, U.S. District Court Judge Amy Totenberg banned Georgia’s current untrustworthy touchscreen voting machines. You may recall the huge uproar following the close 2018 election for Georgia governor between Ga. Sec'ty of St. Brian Kemp and Democrat Stacey Abrams. In Georgia, the Secretary of State runs the election machinery, maintains the voter rolls, and tallies the vote. Brian Kemp held onto that power until the day after last November's election, when he resigned the office. The voting in Georgia was done on very hackable touchscreen machines, the ones Judge Tottenberg ruled out on August 15, not that anyone has proven that hacking took place in the 2018 Georgia governor race. What did take place and was ultimately worse perhaps was the disenfranchisement of black voters: "3,000 people were wrongly flagged by the state as being ineligible to vote, and 53,000 voter registrations were delayed by Kemp's office without adequately notifying the applicants" (Wikipedia).
(The General Assembly of North Carolina had already passed legislation banning touchscreen machines that produce no paper record, making their use impossible in 2020. The ESandS BMD's, with their printed barcodes, are now certified as legit replacements.)
And guess what -- Judge Tottenberg's ruling came in Georgia coincidentally on the heels of the new Republican Secretary of State's announced intent to purchase BMDs for use in Georgia in 2020 (some or most from ESandS?). That decision is causing a very similar outcry down there among balloting watchdogs and experts. For example, Richard DeMillo (the Charlotte B. and Roger C. Warren Professor of Computing, former dean of the College of Computing and Director of the Center for Information Security Research at Georgia Tech and previously Chief Technology Officer at Hewlett-Packard) warned yesterday in the Atlanta Constitution:
History is poised to repeat itself. There is a growing consensus among experts that the BMDs slated to replace the current system have all the cyber vulnerabilities of the old system plus some appalling new wrinkles like forcing voters to cast bar-coded ballots that are unreadable by human beings. The lone cybersecurity expert on the governor’s own election security task force strongly urged the legislature to reject BMDs. Experts from the U.S. National Academy of Science (NAS), Verified Voting Foundation, the National Election Defense Coalition, Freedom Works, Common Cause, and many others, agreed and wrote letters urging rejection of BMDs. Conservative Republicans like national security expert Tony Shaffer joined Libertarians, Democrats, and Independents in condemning the use of BMDs.
Those same objections to BMDs were voiced quite clearly last Friday in North Carolina too, and Damon Circosta supposedly heard them quite clearly before he voted to ignore the warnings. He knows best why all that testimony meant exactly zero to him, and so far he has failed to tell us why.
This is worth watching in its entirety because rarely has a public figure spoken with more clarity and passion about the facts of Republican voter suppression in just one state of the Old South.
Brian Kemp is tainted, his regime as governor of Georgia eternally stained by his scheming to get there.
Hope to see much more of Stacey Abrams in the future, and as she promises, I believe "Fair Fight Georgia" will be heard from. Strongly.
Many people in Georgia -- Republicans and old-line Democrats (which are in many cases the same thing) -- don't think Stacey Abrams can ever, not in a million years, become governor of Georgia. She would not only be the first woman and the first black to win the governorship, she'd be the first black woman elected governor of any state. (She turned our head on WataugaWatch back in May.)
She was the Minority Leader in the Georgia House for six years, so naturally she made some enemies on her own side of the aisle because she was willing to negotiate with the majority. But don't underestimate her.
Ms. Abrams was elected to the General Assembly in 2006, two years after Republicans had taken control of the Georgia House for the first time in more than a century. She was young, but not green. She had served as student president at Spelman College, Atlanta’s storied African-American women’s college, and kept her life ambitions, eventually including the goal of becoming president, listed in a spreadsheet. “The sheer boldness of my ambitions gnawed at me,” she recalled in her 2018 autobiography, “Minority Leader: How to Lead from the Outside and Make Real Change.”
Style-wise, she was more of a listener than a glad-hander, more policy wonk than enforcer. She was a careful, prepared speaker with a bookish quality, a wry sense of humor and a tendency toward efficiency.
“She engendered a sense of loyalty in a lot of people that way,” said Brian Thomas, who was a member of the House Democratic leadership at the time. “A lot of people just respected the fact that she was just a lot smarter than some of us, and able to use that intellect in ways that were really effective.” ...
Her debut on the political scene had effectively come in 1992, when she emerged as a leading voice among black students. Atlanta, like other American cities, was racked by protests and riots after police officers in Los Angeles were acquitted in the beating of Rodney King. Eventually she found herself at a televised town-hall meeting with Maynard Jackson, the city’s first black mayor. As the cameras rolled, Ms. Abrams recalled in her book, she “excoriated his record and scoffed at his leadership.”
Mr. Jackson later co-opted his eloquent critic, giving her a job in the city’s office of youth services. She went on to earn a law degree and a master’s in public policy, and at the age of 29, to serve as deputy city attorney....
She made her bid for minority leader in November 2010. The Democrats had just lost more House seats in the Tea Party wave election, and were watching bitterly as a number of their white lawmakers jumped ship to the Republicans.
The caucus, which had become majority black and held fewer than 70 of the 180 seats in the House, turned to a young backbencher. “I took the lead of a broken party,” Ms. Abrams wrote, “knowing that we would wander in the political wilderness for at least a decade.”
She had already established herself as one of the smartest members of the Legislature. Her background in tax law helped her analyze the deep structure of complex bills, landing her on the powerful Ways and Means Committee as a freshman. Even Republicans saw her talent: In 2011, State Representative Allen Peake called her “brilliant.”
“People who underestimate her risk complete embarrassment,” he told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution at the time.
Georgia
Stacey Abrams is the Democratic candidate for governor of Georgia following yesterday's primary. That's just short of astounding for the Peach State, and for any other state in or out of the traditional South, because she won her primary over a white woman with over 70% of the vote.
Abrams is 44 years old, a graduate of Yale Law School, and a leader of the minority Democrats in the Georgia legislature. She's also the successful writer of novels, which she produces under the non de plume Selena Montgomery. (Who's the last Georgia politician who also wrote novels? Yes, you're right: Newt Gingrich.)
“We are writing the next chapter of Georgia’s history, where no one is unseen, no one is unheard and no one is uninspired,” she said at her victory party last night in Atlanta. And she quoted the book of Esther: “We were born for such a time as this.”
Indeed.
Kentucky
Amy McGrath, the first Marine woman to fly an F-18 fighter jet and a candidate I've been very excited about, upset the odds and beat the DCCC's pick in Kentucky's 6th Congressional District. Lexington's two-term mayor Jim Gray had been the anointed-by-Washington candidate to take the district, and he was soundly defeated. McGrath goes on now to face a weak Republican incumbent, and she's already leading him in the polls.
J.W. Williamson was the founding editor in 1972 of the Appalachian Journal: A Regional Studies Review, which he edited until July of 2000. He has taught college classes in Appalachian history, cultural politics, and literature, and he has lectured widely on the pop-culture history of "Appalachia" in the American consciousness. His books include Interviewing Appalachia, Southern Mountaineers in Silent Films, and Hillbillyland: What the Mountains Did to the Movies and What the Movies Did to the Mountains. He has won the Thomas Wolfe Award given by the Western North Carolina Historical Society, the Laurel Leaves Award given by the Appalachian Consortium, a special Weatherford Award given by Berea College, and the Cratis Williams-James Brown Award given by the Appalachian Studies Association.
The views expressed on WataugaWatch are solely those of J.W. Williamson or individual contributors and are not necessarily shared nor endorsed by the Watauga County Democratic Party nor by any other adults of sound mind in this or any other universe.
