The Key To A Democratic Senate Victory: Candidate Quality
United States Senate races are heavily determined by the national political environment. In a good year for Democrats, any nominee will have a solid chance of becoming the first member of the NC Donkey Party to win a U.S. Senate race since Kay Hagan in 2008. A good...
Senate update
North Carolina’s US Senate election in 2022 promises to be one of the most watched races in the country. A map I saw yesterday had the state as one of only two in the nation that is considered a toss-up, the other being Pennsylvania. Democrats need the state if they...
Two Visions of History, Two Visions of How To BE An American
The United States is the only country on Earth whose identity is bound up in documents. Since the Founding era, Americans have referred to the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and other seminal texts as lode stars for what it means to be a member of this...
Villains, not heroes
When I was in about third grade, I read the same three books over and over. One was a biography of Babe Ruth. One was a biography Jim Thorpe. And one was biography of Robert E. Lee. These books were not nuanced pictures of these men. They were designed to reach eight...
Thoughts on Politics, Hope, and the South
From the perspective of today, The Strange Career of Jim Crow is an odd book. C. Vann Woodward's slim volume was groundbreaking at the time, changing our understanding segregation's origins on a fundamental level. Its main thesis was that Jim Crow as not inevitable,...
Catherine Truitt Goes Full Trump
State Superintendent of Public Instruction Catherine Truitt's old boss Pat McCrory once admonished North Carolinians not to "put your stupid hat on." Opinions may differ as to whether Truitt sported that particular variant of chapeau in her Trumpist rant before Orange...
A tale of two recoveries
We’re about to learn a lot about economic recoveries. Back in 2009, Barack Obama, with a hefty Democratic majority in Congress, tried to pull us out of the Great Recession with a tepid relief program designed to attract Republican support. It led to a slow recovery,...
State of transitions
This weekend, a Republican asked why I believed pro-segregationist Democrats became Republicans in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement. Well, because it’s true. I’m not just a student of history, I’m a product of a rural North Carolina county that is half-Black and...
Are We Just Enjoying A Respite Before Trump Ends American Democracy?
Looking back on today from the vantage point of the future, Americans may see January 6 not as a culmination but as a preview. The Biden administration came as a profound relief for millions of Americans and indeed the world, but forces at work deep in the bowels of...
Will Pat McCrory Get Pawlenty’d?
It is hard now to remember how promising Pat McCrory's political career once appeared. The young mayor of Charlotte, McCrory entered statewide politics with freshness and verve, battling incumbent Lieutenant Governor Bev Perdue to a near tie in the 2008 governor's...
The NC GOP economic development strategy: Outdated and underperforming
We’ve now got a solid ten years of Republican rule in North Carolina and we can do some comparing. The GOP likes to portray North Carolina as a struggling state that had difficulty attracting industry and good paying jobs because of its lousy business climate. In...
Ignorant cancel culture
Up in Surry County, the local GOP leadership is making fools of itself. The county board of commissioners passed a ban on Coke machines on county property to show those bigwigs down in Atlanta that they weren’t taking lightly the company’s opposition to Georgia’s...
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