How Pizza, Porn & Public Executions Made Good Politics in North Carolina

Every Democrat who won a state-level race in North Carolina this week ought to be tossing  at least a fiver into a common hat.

Then that wad of bills should be plunked down at Greensboro’s greasiest pizza parlor, to have at several dozen steamy pies delivered to the front porch of Chez Mark Robinson, topped by an oversize “Thank You” card. On it will be a PS hinting broadly that Robinson should consider making a second run at the state house in 2028.

That’s a helluva lot of pepperoni, but the social media posts unearthed in the campaign indicate that Robinson could handle it, especially if he resumes his particularly spicy diversions to fill his impending surplus of free time.

Even that plenitude of pasta would be a paltry measure of Robinson’s historic contribution to the state Democratic effort. His only near rival would be Michele Morrow, who came much closer to winning the state Superintendent of public instruction office, and the chance to further erode the state’s school systems.

But rather than pizza, or flowers, Morrow should get a Thank You thumb drive packed with her more exotic video favorites, public executions from around the world. At least the body counts could be used in her homeschool arithmetic lessons.

These tributes are markers of a (dare it now be said?) weird political paradox, which somehow leaves Tarheel Democrats measurably better off than their cousins in the rest of the South, and the red states generally.  As the political debris continues to fall outside our borders, NC will face the new federal regime and its odious Project 2025 with (among others) an accomplished educator overseeing the schools, a new attorney general, an experienced governor — all Democrats — and a busted GOP legislative supermajority, in which Josh Stein’s vetoes have a chance to be sustained.

Behind them is an invigorated state party, led by a rising prodigy, Chair Anderson Clayton.  Clayton has spent two years working tirelessly to revive and invigorate the Democratic party’s presence and punch in the state, after 14 years of rightwing GOP battering. There was much talk in national media about the state going for Kamala Harris over Trump, who won here in 2016 and 2020.

The fact that didn’t happen overshadowed the real gains Clayton and the party did make. If she can keep up the morale and the frenetic pace, Clayton should have a bright future as a political operative.

Besides campaign enthusiasm, Clayton and the statewide slate had a huge stroke of good luck disguised as scandal in their opponents’ ranks, with a seemingly endless stream of lurid and gruesome revelations about two major GOP contenders, Mark Robinson and Michele Morrow.

Robinson was running to turn his upstart 2020 election as Lieutenant Governor into becoming retiring Governor Roy Cooper’s successor, and Morrow upset the incumbent state superintendent in another primary surprise.

Early on, Robinson had the 2024 equivalent of pure campaign gold: a public endorsement by Donald Trump, who called him “Martin Luther King times two,” among other fatuous encomiums. But then researchers dug up social media posts about his habitual visits to porn shops (with pizza on the side) his calling the Holocaust a “hoax,” naming himself as a “Black Nazi,” and frequent public sliming of LGBT people. His campaign abruptly imploded in September.

Morrow’s bid began to stumble when it was revealed that none of her several children had ever enrolled in a NC public school; all had been homeschooled. Then social media posts turned up, in which she called for public executions of several major Democrats, including presidents Obama and Biden. She also acknowledged that she had taken part in the January 6, 2021 assault on the U. S. Capitol.

Morrow has not been charged with any crime there. But the attempt to shrug it off as little more than a field trip (to study, er, insurrectionary civics?) plus her extreme political effusions and lack of any experience with public education became enlarging drags on her campaign.

Once the polls closed Tuesday and Trump’s advance unfolded, NC quickly faded from view. Only in the following days, as Democrats in most other states counted their losses and recriminations began, did the NC Democrats’ comparative success come more clearly into view.

Yes, the NC GOP maintained most of its hegemony. And most other red-dominated legislatures across the country stayed that way. But with Anderson Clayton’s organizing activism, plus the windfalls bequeathed by Robinson and Morrow, NC  Democrats emerged from the election positioned to carry more weight in the long uphill slog of resilience and resistance to the entrenched GOP autocracy. Though still outnumbered, and amid the widespread losses elsewhere, North Carolina Democrats ought to punch above their weight in the coming struggles.

They should have plenty of opportunities to test this new resilience, as Project 2025 comes back into view after January 20, even if Mark Robinson and Michele Morrow stick to their private entertainments.

My Secret Post-Election Plan: Celebration?? Or Consolation??

I’m still not making predictions about the election’s outcome. And I’m so over searching for the hidden meanings in polls.  My record of not answering the non-Hurricane flood of robocalls remains unbroken. Not least, I voted two weeks — seems like two months — ago.

So now there’s only one big question hanging over the official end of this endless campaign season, namely:

What am I gonna do when we have a winner?

I think I’ve found my answer. It’s in a compact box in the cupboard, that turned up at a nearby market: the key ingredient for a forbidden feast.

It’s something I’ve been waiting for a long time. So if the post- voting wrangling lasts til January 19, 2025, I think I can hold out that much longer. (After that, we’ll have to see.) Or if I get trapped in a hundred-hour traffic backup between Niagara Falls and the Canadian border, all bets are off.

But enough of such catastrophizing: time for a bit of untrammeled fantasy: Continue reading My Secret Post-Election Plan: Celebration?? Or Consolation??

Quote of the Month: “It’s the First Amendment, stupid”

Walker was named by Barack Obama in 2018.

[NOTE: the CNN Business report cited below deals with an abortion rights vote coming in Florida. But this blog post, while not discounting the importance of that issue, is focused on a judge in a related lawsuit. More specifically, on a ruling he issued last week. Even more, on a five-word summary of the basis for the decision, which echoes like a thunderclap. The rest is needful context, but the aphorism will, I believe, be what is remembered long after the details have receded into the mists.]

. . . “It’s the First Amendment, stupid.”

That’s what a federal judge wrote Thursday (October 17) as he sided with local TV stations in an extraordinary dispute over a pro-abortion rights television ad. Chief U.S. District Judge Mark E. Walker of the Northern District of Florida granted a temporary restraining order against Florida’s surgeon general after the state health department threatened to bring criminal charges against broadcasters airing the ad.[/caption]

Continue reading Quote of the Month: “It’s the First Amendment, stupid”

Campaign Notes Tuesday Oct. 22, 2024

 

Early Voting – NC -as of 10-22-2024

 

Boston Herald

Biden lays into Trump during New Hampshire stop

By MATTHEW MEDSGER mmedsger@nullbostonherald.com | Boston Herald
PUBLISHED: October 22, 2024

President Joe Biden was in New Hampshire on Tuesday to spread the word about his administration’s work to lower the price of prescription drugs, but he also used the visit as a chance to offer a stark warning about a potential second Trump White House.

Biden joined Vermont’s Independent U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders at NHTI Community College in Concord, for an invite-only afternoon event where the president laid out his thoughts on the choice that voters face this November.

Continue reading Campaign Notes Tuesday Oct. 22, 2024

Early Voting Tally- North Carolina – Monday Oct. 21, 2024

 

Figures below are through Sunday October 20th, from the NC State Board of Elections (NCSBE)

Esrly Vote NC-thru 10-20-2024

Late Monday, officials in Wake County, home of the capital city of Raleigh, the state’s second-largest,  told reporters that 

Continue reading Early Voting Tally- North Carolina – Monday Oct. 21, 2024