The Elections of March: The Weirdest Democratic Primary

Insko

District 56, Orange County
Long-serving Democratic Representative Verla Insko (first elected in 1996) has no Republican opponent this year, but she does have a primary with a 28-year-old, Joe Parrish, who's apparently interesting enough to get his own YouTube interview on Triangle Talk, but he has no website or Facebook page nor discernible biography. He graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill in 2014, and in 2016, as a 24-year-old, he ran for the NC House in District 2 on the coast, got 14,775 votes against Republican Larry Yarborough's 22,760. He came out in 2016 branding himself "asexual." He recently published a less-than-enlightening essay, "Why I Am Running," light on detail but peppered with verbiage that suggests confused thinking. He wants "a bold agenda of progressive reform," yet in defining "progressive Democrat" he falls back on Franklin D. Roosevelt as his model. Elsewhere he says he was a Bernie Sanders voter.

Meanwhile, if you need a handy definition of progressive legislator, you need look no further than Verla Insko.

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.