Two polls that came out yesterday are good news for Democrats. The most striking numbers are in the race for governor. The Monmouth University poll has Roy Cooper leading Pat McCrory by nine points, 52-43. Cooper leads 52-46 in the CNN/Ipsos poll. It’s significant that Cooper is over 50% in both polls and confirms earlier polls that show Cooper up by similar numbers.
In other races, Monmouth has Clinton leading Trump by two and CNN has her up by one. In the Senate race, Burr leads Ross by two in the Monmouth Poll and by three in the CNN poll. All of these polls show those races within the margin of error.
While it’s still early, McCrory is clearly in trouble. The Attorney General is almost certainly leading by five or more points. McCrory can come back but he’ll need something to change the dynamic of the race. Judging by his latest ad, he’s doubling down on HB2, trying to scare people into voting for him. That’s probably a losing strategy.
In the presidential race, Trump’s Breitbart handlers seem to have gotten him to shut up. The long slide of negative press has subsided for now. Hillary, for her part, can’t seem to escape the email scandal and now the Clinton Foundation is adding to her headaches. That she’s leading by only a point or two seems remarkable and reflects her high negatives. The race in North Carolina will most likely be tight, but given Trump’s unpredictability and Clinton’s inability to escape controversy, no telling what will happen down the stretch.
The Senate race is truly up for grabs. The last three polls have had the race within the margin of error. Burr has the advantage of incumbency but he could also be the victim of a Trump crash. Ross has put together a solid campaign and caught the attention of national Democrats set on taking back the Senate. Expect the two to be slugging hard over the next two months.
A lot of races in the state might come down to field operations. Democrats are organized and motivated. Clinton has field offices around the state. Her base is motivated by state issues like HB2 and the voter suppression laws. Trump has not put together an organization in the state. Republicans will try to motivate their base through scare tactics. Expect to hear a lot about sexual predators and ISIS terrorists between now and November.
Thomas Mills is the founder and publisher of PoliticsNC.com. Before beginning PoliticsNC, Thomas spent twenty years as a political and public affairs consultant. Learn more >
The scary ATTACK on medicare: Current medicare rules reward doctors & hospitals who prescribe/provide the most expensive drugs, even though there are equally effective drugs that are much cheaper. Medicare is trying in a few select areas of the country a change in the reimbursement rules that will more nearly equalize the reimbursement for expensive vs cheaper drugs, all in an effort to hold down the cost of medical care without affecting the result. The changes will not affect & will be invisible to consumers of medical care. So who is screaming foul–doctors & hospitals that routinely prescribe high-cost drugs!
In reality, the people Burr is trying to protect are once again his big medicine/pharma donors.
The real irony is that if this idea had come from anywhere but Obama’s administration, the Repubs would be falling all over themselves praising it!
In the last week or two I had read an article (perhaps on politicususa?) that Drumpf had been involved 20 years ago in the rape of a 13 year old. Does anyone know if this is true? It took a while but this kind of crap eventually took down The Puddin’ Man, long held up as an icon of family values, crap to those who knew him and his long history with drug abuse and rumored sexual indecencies with women.
Also, the Dems need to point out the sheer stupidity of the millionaires in the GA refusing to allow the free Medicaid money from the federal government which would logically improve or even save the lives of 500K or even a million or more at risk North Carolinians. The feds don’t care. They make it available, but they’re not going to beg. We continue to pay fed income tax into it, and they pay money that should come to NC to California, or where ever else at risk people need healthcare, which apparently is everywhere.
Also, ever busy with my nose to the grindstone, serving the citizens of NC and having to work the other two days trying to feed my family since the State paycheck is insufficient, I must have been somewhat lax in my reading because somehow I missed the story of OBAMA’s attack on Medicare which I keep hearing on my local tv stations every 3.5 minutes. Can someone explain this such that I might understand it?
It is true that a suit against Trump was filed in New York City about a month ago by the plaintiff who was 13 at the time of the alleged rape. She is seeking monetary damages. The story ran briefly without any follow-up. The incident was alleged to have occurred when Trump and another billionaire were partying with young girls. The other billionaire frequently sought out the company of under-age women and was convicted of child sexual abuse or child rape. The story quoted Trump saying nice things about the child molester.
The story has not been picked up by any news organization. Either the victim may have some credibility problems or there might be a timeliness problem, or the media has chosen to leave it alone for other reasons.
It seems strange that the news media would be hunting emails, tracking down contributions to legitimate charities and concocting evil scenarios about Mrs. Clinton, when there is this big, fat ugly child rape charge hanging over Trump.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/01/business/01epstein.html?_r=0
Trump’s alleged partner in sex crimes entered a plea and went to prison. He is a registered sex offender. Interesting that Epstein was defended by Kenneth Starr, the Clinton Special Prosecutor. Starr was not repulsed by the immorality of defending a sex criminal who used under-age girls.
4 decades., not 40.
I had read Berlin Diary, the Nightmare Years, & then of course to start it was The Rise & Fall of the Third Reich. Later there was Twentieth Century Journey, these books by the journalist historian.
From The Rise & Fall of the Third Reich you could postulate that having 7 close supportive advisors & heads of departments you might flip the goals to the good. Say do as much good as Hitler did bad as a goal.
20 years in a man’s life goes by in the blink of an eye, so the recent 40 decades are nothing but a few sentences on down the road.
The Beats knew one thing,: The atom bomb changed everything.
The fact that the NC lawmakers & their Gov. could pass laws that deny equal rights in employment disputes to a sexually identifying citizen, is worthy of a few lines in 100 years showing the continued C.S.A. power in the Old South. New South vigor is isolated & 25 percent of the population lives in “food insecurity” as much a euphemism for poverty as anyone might wish to utter.
Incredible that the Republicans are running on Democratic issues. The ads running lately claim Republican support for education and their efforts to achieve higher teacher salaries. Sen. Burr is running ads claiming that he is the savior of seniors’ Medicare benefits.
When did the Republican Party make the transition to becoming the Democratic Party? Republican leadership slashed education expenditures past the threshold of pain, reducing our teachers to paying for school supplies. The GOP stretched the school budgets even thinner by pushing charter schools. Yet, every Republican at every level of government is touting their accomplishments as supporters of North Carolina schools. This is Orwellian double-speak. The Republicans have been dismantling public schools and sending our teachers to other states. They are spending millions on ads lying to North Carolinians, McCrory’s ads are the most shameless in their mendacity.
Their lies about the Carolina Comeback, their support for education and their concern for the health of North Carolinians are disturbing because the ads amount to an admission that the Republicans know what North Carolinians want and need, and they know what North Carolinians expect them to do while in office, but they do otherwise and then lie about it.
Republicans know that North Carolinians want clean air and water, but they deliver coal ash. Republicans know that North Carolinians need excellent public schools, but they deliver lame excuses and lies. Republicans know that North Carolinians need decent health care, but they deny health care to hundreds of thousands of North Carolinians when it wouldn’t cost the state any more to accept it. Republicans know what North Carolinians need, but GOP must pander to the donors who oppose the interests of our citizens.
If there is a choice between a Republican running as a Democrat and a Democrat running as a Democrat, the voter should vote for the Democrat. The pretend Democrat is not real.
Kinda makes one wonder, doesn’t it? Democrats were right all along, so we’ll denigrate their positions at every turn and then use them to get votes. Bait and switch at it’s finest. Tailor-made for the audience you want to pander to.
But Jay, they are for North Carolina schools. They just don’t say which schools in North Carolina. Their private enterprise buddies, they love those schools. Public schools where everyone is welcome…not so much.
If people are healthy, they live longer. If they live longer, why…they’ll draw those entitlements longer that they’ve foolishly paid into and now want to draw out. The Republican party can’t allow that to happen. Which is odd since most of their supporters are over 60 and white. They want to cut off the very people that are supporting them and those same people still support them!
Somewhere in a septic tank is the purveyor of these fallacies and more. They’ve acclimated so much to the smell, they’re spewing it out as fact and position statement.
Maybe you missed the latest unemployment stats. Unemployment rate in NC is now 4.7 percent, below the national rate of 4.9 percent. This is obviously the result of a job growth rate well above the national average since 2013. Over 300,000 new jobs created here during that period with many more recently announced.
And data from DPI show many more school teachers from other states are being certified and hired to teach in NC public schools than certified teachers leaving NC to teach in other states.
What was the unemployment rate when Pat took office? He’s definitely got my vote!
Ginger, the liberals who post here can’t relate to actual data and numbers. It makes no difference to them how much the state’s unemployment rate has been reduced since the GOP took control of state government.
But notice how they react when presented with facts that don’t support their left wing ideology or that refute liberal conventional wisdom. Data and actual numbers are ignored in a flurry of emotional perjoritives, with invectives like “shysters,” “carpetbaggers,” modern slavery,” fat cats,” “profiteeriers,” etc.
This blog provides numerous definitive examples of the vacuity of the radical left today. Their prime mode of political opposition is to demonize their opponents with malicious invective and character assassination. The more success their political opponents achieve, the more hateful their vitriol. The comments on this thread are typical examples .
The unemployment rate has declined steadily since it peaked in 2010. The economic meltdown which began in the last year of the Bush presidency caused the jobless rate to rise from 5% in 2008 to nearly 11% in 2010. Every state, all 50, was in a recession at that time. There was been a gradual and steady reduction in the rate of unemployment in the United States and North Carolina since the peak. When McCrory took office in January 2013, North Carolina’s unemployment rate had fallen more than 3% to 7.5% as the economy nationwide and the state recovered from the Bush disaster. The employment conditions in this state and the nation have improved almost monthly since the peak in 2010. At this time, the rate of unemployment nationally is 4.9% and the rate of unemployment in North Carolina is 4.7%.
While the improvements in economic conditions in the nation have coincided with the election and reelection of Obama, no self-respecting Republican will give him credit for it. You will hear grousing about fake numbers and such, but the methodology for declaring the unemployment rate has been the same for decades. Some of the reduction in unemployment in North Carolina has coincided with the election of Gov. McCrory (about half,) but most Republicans want to credit him with all of the improvement including the improvements that occurred several years before he took office. McCrory is marketing his achievement as the “Carolina Comeback.”
The lower unemployment rate does not translate into an overall expansion of wealth. Many of those now working are working at lower-paying jobs than they had before the Bush meltdown. The average North Carolinian earns between $4,000 and $5,000 less than they did, in inflation-adjusted dollars. But it is better to have a job than not.
The general economy is only partly impacted by government policies. Government actions only affect economic statistics marginally. The U.S. economy is a capital-driven economy, not a government-driven economy. Government injections and taxation only have a limited impact on the total economy,
The Governor’s claim that his state budgets are solely responsible for every success in the larger economy is baloney, but if Republicans want to claim credit for the low unemployment rate in 2016, they should be applauding their president. He’s been bringing down unemployment rates for 6 years. The economic numbers for the state and the nation are much improved over the years when the Bush Administration tried to push the country over the brink.
D.g., here’s a news flash for you—the NC unemployment rate data are not generated by the Civitas Institute. They are from the Obama administration’s U.S. Department of Labor.
Since the GOP took complete control of state government, numerous national organizations and publicans have listed NC among the top ten states in a number of economic categories and generally ascribe our success to conservative economic policies put in place by our Republivan Governor and legislature. Those giving NC a high ranking include Forbes, Site Selection magazine, Chief Executive magazine, the Tax Foundation, Ernst and Young, Area Development magazine and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Since last March, several thousand new jobs in NC have been announced by a number of national and international businesses. These new expansions will have a positive,long-term economic impact that will dwarf any short-term loss of business from one basketball game that will impact the Charlotte area for only one weekend.
I was looking at that table on the BLS site and over half showed an increase in employment or no change. So that tells me that the economic policy of the Obama administration, is working to an extent. We are getting people back to work. Many aren’t making a living wage working, but it’s a step in the right direction.
Ginger would certainly like to give all of that credit to Paddy, but truth is, Paddy only deserves credit for being a shyster; something he’s found his niche at being good at.
I had this discussion with a friend some months ago D. He was of the opinion that “right to work” is a very beneficial and opportunistic policy and law. I however, was not so disposed. If, you like what you do, where you do it, and are good at it, why should you have no ability to negotiate with your employer to establish the parameters of how you do it? The only choice you have in the way things are now is to accept what is being offered or the terms of the employment or to walk. There is no negotiation. And for some reason, my friend thought that fair. He thought that the playing field was level; I see it in the same context as Mt. Everest being a slight elevation change in the landscape.
Truth is, North Carolina has never been ‘that’ labor friendly. More progressive perhaps than some of the other southern states, but certainly not a trend setter. In the push to be ‘business’ friendly, I see no reason why we can’t be ‘people’ friendly in the same context. I can’t fathom why one has to suffer at the hands of the other. The relationship should be mutual; one provides the task, the other accomplishes it, both prosper. But in this ‘things as they are world’, your last line tells the entire tale; greed.
Laws are drafted and passed that favor and provide advantage to those that have, not those that are trying to find a means to live. I can think of no greater disparity in our form of government today. And the irony is, people will make their choice of representation on the basis of anything but that most elemental foundational stone.
At this point the Presidential election is a wash. But how much of an anchor will Trump hurt down ballot GOP candidates, specifically US Senate and US House candidates, as well as NC House and NC Senate candidates?
NC has to sweep top positions – Governor, Lt.Governor, AG, Secretary of Labor, NC Supreme Court, etc… and certainly US. Senate. (Going to be tough.)
But for NC’s sake, Democrats have to gain some kind of beachhead in the Legislature by winning enough NC House spots to break the super-majority and thus prevent any governor overriding vetoes.
Be hopeful, but not complacent!