Representative Brendan Jones, the GOP Majority Leader, is a hateful man. He’s the type of person who should never get power and yet has it today. Republicans in the legislature have offered up the Chapel Hill Carrboro City Schools as a punching bag for Jones and a bunch of his intellectually challenged colleagues. I guess they need to keep them busy and out of other mischief.

Jones has been dragging CHCC Superintendent Rodney Trice in front of his committee to yell at him for any number of things, but especially about books in the libraries. The legislator from Columbus County cites the Parents Bill of Rights as a reason to ban books from Chapel Hill schools. It’s a performative act for the angry ignorant mob that makes up his base. Jones hopes he can make them mad enough to go to the polls in November. Hate’s a big motivator.

He should really watch what just happened in Virginia. Republicans here and in Texas and Missouri heeded Donald Trump’s call for mid-decade redistricting to squeeze out a few more GOP Congressional districts. At the time, Republicans were excited about the prospect, believing they were offsetting gains Democrats would make in the midterm election. Instead, it looks like Democrats will gain about four seats because of a miscalculation.

As a resident of Carrboro, I can think of few things that will motivate Democrats to go to the polls more than bigoted legislators from far-off counties banning books in the public schools that attract people to live here. That increase in voters might not threaten Jones and his Neanderthals, but Michael Whatley will almost certainly pay a price and the broader GOP will, too, if history is any indication.

North Carolina today is a macrocosm of Mecklenburg County and RTP in the 1990s. Back then, new residents were moving into the area at a rapid pace, many from northern states with high taxes and strict regulations. They arrived voting Republican because they blamed Democrats in the states they left for what they considered burdensome taxes and restrictions. Throughout the 1990s, Raleigh and Charlotte were dominated by Republican leaders who benefited from the newcomers.

It didn’t last long. While those coming here might have wanted a little more freedom, they had little in common with the Republicans who would impose their version of morality and embraced thinly veiled racist attitudes. Within a decade, Republicans had lost control of the fastest growing regions of the state. They blew their advantage by embracing reactionary populists with a mean streak. Today, Republicans have almost no representation in the counties that drive most of North Carolina’s growth and income.

Brendan Jones and his compatriots are having a similar effect on the state as a whole. North Carolina is one of the fastest growing states in the nation. Those newcomers today are landing in exurban counties that have been reliably Republican. Like those who arrived in RTP and Mecklenburg in the 1990s, many are fleeing states they consider heavy-handed. Within a few years, they realize how little they have in common with book-banners and bigots. The effects are already clear in counties like Johnston and Cabarrus where Republican margins shrink visibly every election cycle.

Democrats should make Brendan Jones a poster boy. He’s already got the looks of a stereotypical good ol’ boy — porcine and with the rare ability to make an expensive suit look cheap. Stick one of his asinine quotes under his photo and let everybody in suburban and exurban North Carolina know that he’s what Republicans consider a leader of the state. Not many will follow.

Mean, dumb, and ethically challenged may play well in the poorest parts of the state, but it doesn’t work with the people who are shaping it now. Democrats should make Jones and his colleagues the wedge issue. Not many people with any level of education or common sense want to be led by people who ban books and spout bigotry.

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Virginia passed a constitutional amendment yesterday to allow the legislature to gerrymander the state to give Democrats a likely 10-1 Congressional delegation. Nothing is giving me more pleasure than watching Republicans cry about it being unfair. I’ve been listening to them defend egregious gerrymanders since 2011. Payback is hell.

The response from Republicans is what happens when you spend years lying to yourself and denying accountability. To hear them tell it, Democrats have made an unprecedented move to take control of the U.S. House of Representatives with an egregious gerrymander. It’s like nothing came before it.

Donald Trump started the Gerrymander Wars of 2026 when he demanded more GOP seats in states like Texas and North Carolina. Republicans got shocked and offended when Democrats retaliated. Nobody but the GOP thought mid-decade redistricting was a good idea. So cry more, MAGA.

I don’t like extreme gerrymandering, but I also don’t believe Democrats should unilaterally disarm. If Republicans are going to end competition and rig every district in states where they have the power to do so, Democrats should too. Last night, the GOP got a taste of its own medicine — and possibly more pain to come.

For almost two decades, progressives pushed a project to try to rectify gerrymandering with nonpartisan redistricting efforts. Several states, including some Republican-leaning ones, bought in, but the idea never caught on. Republicans countered with an initiative of their own — Project REDMAP, a push for extreme gerrymandering in states the GOP won in 2010.

Instead of moving toward more competition, Republicans’ success in redistricting has sharply reduced the number of competitive Congressional districts. In 2006, there were about 60 competitive races across the country. This year, at the same point in the redistricting cycle, there are fewer than 35. That’s not very democratic.

North Carolina has been at the center of the storm. Republicans made the case that partisan gerrymandering was fine when former Representative David Lewis infamously said, “I propose that we draw the maps to give a partisan advantage to 10 Republicans and three Democrats because I do not believe it’s possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and two Democrats.” Republicans sued to keep their rigged maps and won at the Supreme Court. That ruling resulted in partisans rushing to press their advantage. Last night, we saw the result.

I suspect Democrats are going to win back the House regardless of whether the Virginia maps hold or not, but I’m just glad to see Democrats fighting back. Trump and the Republicans have launched a concerted and sustained assault on institutions that protect democracy. They’ve changed rules to do it and Democrats need to play by those rules until they can overhaul the game instead of trying to play by rules that are now obsolete.

Again, cry more. It makes me happy.

Thomas’s rule: In a Democratic wave election, don’t nominate candidates who make waves.

Late primaries in Maine and Michigan might determine whether Democrats control the US Senate or not. In Michigan, a three-way primary is shaping up to be a barnburner between a traditional pro-labor Democrat, a young progressive state senator, and an activist Muslim doctor with the support of Bernie Sanders. In Maine, Democrats are almost certainly going to nominate a first-time populist candidate with a long history of controversial actions and statements.

Democrats need to hold all of their Senate seats, including the one in Michigan, and flip four GOP states to win control. North Carolina is at the center of the battle where the Cook Political Report just shifted the race to “leans D,” favoring former Governor Roy Cooper over Trump stooge Michael Whatley. Other potential flips include Ohio, Alaska, Iowa, and Nebraska, where an independent candidate is giving the incumbent Republican a run for his money. Texas and Florida are even on the radar screen, but Maine should be the race where Democrats have the best chance.

The Maine primary is between Graham Platner and Governor Janet Mills. It’s a disappointing choice. Mills is a relatively unpopular governor who would be 78 years old when sworn in. It won’t matter, though, because Platner is leading her by massive margins. Maine had better choices but has left itself with two extremes — extremely old or extremely left-wing.

For his part, Platner seems to be a guy who likes applause and will say whatever is necessary to get it. He’s been all over the map, making outrageous, often offensive statements on the internet for the past fifteen years. He’s apologized for his rhetoric and the Nazi death’s head tattoo on his chest. I wouldn’t let a Republican get away with it, so I can’t really forgive Platner, either.

Platner has blamed women for sexual assault, saying they should not get drunk and sleep with people they don’t like. He’s called rural people racist and stupid. He said all police officers were bastards. And in 2021 he called himself a full-blown Communist. All of this baggage will come up in the general election when low-information voters who haven’t heard it yet will determine the outcome.

He’s staked himself out on the left side of the political spectrum in a state that is notoriously independent and moderate. While Platner will face Republican Senator Susan Collins, the state’s other senator is independent Angus King. Maine has a lot of traditionally conservative voters and no history of progressive governance, at least in the modern sense. We’ll see if they’ve been hiding.

Collins seems to go into every election cycle in trouble and yet comes out on top. She’s positioned herself as a moderate even though she reliably votes with Trump. Mainers might not like her, but I’m skeptical they will trade out a senator who sounds like a moderate for one who sounds like Bernie Sanders. Sanders lost the Democratic primary in 2020 to Joe Biden. We’ll find out if there’s really a silent progressive majority out there.

In Michigan, Congresswoman Haley Stevens started the race as the front-runner with the support of the state’s political establishment. State Senator Mallory McMorrow made a name for herself in the state Senate with a viral speech in 2022 that pushed back hard against Republicans accusing Democrats of standing with sex abusers. She’s built a strong campaign, wooing younger voters and progressive women. A public health doctor named Abdul El-Sayed has embraced the most progressive agenda and made opposition to Israel a centerpiece of his campaign, or at least that’s the way it looks from here.

If El-Sayed wins the nomination, I think Democrats will lose the state. Michigan still has a lot of blue-collar workers and rural voters who don’t trust the party. They’ve voted for Trump in two of the last three elections. El-Sayed may be able to win the nomination with thirty-something percent of Democratic primary voters but his ceiling will be very low.

Both Stevens and McMorrow would come across as more traditional Democrats in a general election, benefiting from the favorable political environment. Neither has intentionally courted controversy like El-Sayed, who has campaigned with Hasan Piker, the left-wing podcaster who said America deserved 9/11 and has said that he prefers Hamas to Israel. In states like Michigan, swing voters still matter and they generally aren’t very ideological.

I’m more bullish on Ohio and Alaska. Former Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown is a real left-leaning populist with a solid track record. He’s outperforming his Republican opponent, incumbent John Husted. Brown has double the cash on hand that Husted has and outraised him by more than 3-1 in the first quarter. Ohio has taken a beating under Trump.

In Alaska, former Congresswoman Mary Peltola is also putting together a strong campaign against Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan. She raised more than four times as much as Sullivan in her March report. She’s already won a statewide race for Alaska’s single Congressional seat and this time she’s got a favorable political environment to help her.

If Platner loses while Cooper, Brown, and Peltola win, Democrats will need to find a seat in considerably tougher states. Texas, Iowa, Florida, and Nebraska are next on the list. If Democrats lose Michigan, they will need to pick up two of those states, making a majority look very difficult.

Texas state Representative James Talarico seems to be a unique talent and if he faces ethically challenged Attorney General Ken Paxton, the race will certainly be on the national radar. Still, Texas hasn’t elected a Democrat in decades and Paxton won his current position despite a corruption trial with salacious allegations. It’s still a pretty red state. Iowa, Florida, and Nebraska are really tough.

The situation reminds me of Republicans in 2010. Despite the huge GOP wave, Democrats held the Senate. Republicans nominated a series of unelectable candidates in states they should have won. Remember Congressman Todd Akin who said women couldn’t get pregnant in a “legitimate rape?” Or Christine O’Donnell who ran an ad declaring “I’m not a witch?” Good times.

Waves only go so far and candidates matter. Swing voters matter in states where elections are determined by less than five percent. They will matter more in a wave election where low-information voters are prepared to vote against the White House in large numbers unless they are distracted by controversial candidates who make them think otherwise. I fear that Platner and El-Sayed are those types of candidates.

Here’s my bias about elections and the electorate. Not that much changes. Midterms are a referendum on whoever is in the White House. Six or seven months out from a campaign, voters will say a lot of things that will change. As the general election gets closer, they will come home. Progressives and liberals will vote for the Democrat. Conservatives will vote for the Republicans. Moderates and swing voters will choose the least risky candidate because they don’t really trust change, no matter how much they might want it.

So in Maine, they know more about Susan Collins than Graham Platner. They’ve been frustrated with her for years and, at this point in the election cycle, really want something different. By October, they might not like her any more than they do now, but they know who she is. They will just be starting to learn about Platner and his careening record. Whether they believe it all or not, Collins in comparison is the safer choice — the devil they know.

In Michigan, it’s simpler. McMorrow and Stevens threaten to split the traditional liberal vote while El-Sayed is trying to consolidate the most progressive voters. His ceiling is low and he will likely not survive a general election. McMorrow or Stevens would probably win on the strength of the wave, not a controversial campaign.

See my rule at the top.

I was barely aware of the Eric Swalwell scandal before he was gone. That’s how Democrats deal with abusers. It’s not how Republicans deal with them. The parties are not the same.

I never liked Eric Swalwell. He seemed like an internet creation looking for clicks more than a serious political leader. In other words, he looked like a Republican. Now we know he behaved like one, too.

Republicans are trying to claim that Swalwell’s behavior was an open secret in Washington. If that’s true, why didn’t they do something about it? They’ve got a whole army of conspiracy theorists and fake news reporters making unfounded allegations every day. Why didn’t they know about Swalwell? Were they too busy making up stuff to pay attention to the open secret? Or are they just too incompetent to chase real scandals instead of imaginary ones? Or maybe it wasn’t as open as they’re now claiming. I’m going with number three.

But give Swalwell a little credit. He brought down one Republican Congressman that the GOP has been protecting for months. Rep. Tony Gonzales admitted to an affair with an aide who committed suicide. Before her death, he demanded she send him nude photos of herself. Republicans were willing to put their House majority before any sense of morality. Not until Swalwell resigned, when they added to their majority by a seat, did they force Gonzales out. Shameful.

Of course, they’re still protecting Florida Congressman Cory Mills (no relation, but if he were, I wouldn’t coddle him like Republicans are). Mills has been accused of assaulting one girlfriend and threatening to release nude photos of another after she dumped him. I’m not sure what his wife says about all this, but Republicans in Congress seem fine with it. They don’t even mind that Mills seems to have been profiting off of federal contracts.

Really, none of this should be any surprise. The GOP has rallied around a con man and reality TV star who is plundering the government, selling pardons, and who has a long history of dubious sexual relations, including credible accusations of abuse. The party has abandoned any pretense of morality and they’ve largely taken the evangelical community with them.

The Republican Party is now made up of the people who lie to their supporters, the ones who lie to themselves, and the aggressively ignorant. Winning is their only core value and they’ve set up an alternative reality that allows them to live with themselves. Personal responsibility and public accountability have been casualties of their electoral success.

The liars are people like Thom Tillis and most of the Republican establishment. They know what’s right and do what’s wrong. Erick Erickson, for instance, often goes on Twitter or his podcast and speaks the truth, but stops short of any accountability. Tillis and Erickson will put what’s good for the Republican Party ahead of what’s good for the country every single time.

The people who lie to themselves are basically in denial. I saw a Republican Congressman say he didn’t hold Donald Trump responsible for his actions because he believes the accusations against the president are false. Trump has been found liable for sexual assault and spent much of the 1980s and 1990s making outrageous claims that would have prevented most other politicians from getting elected to anything. He bragged about illicit affairs, said that no age was too young for sex, palled around with Jeffrey Epstein, and paid off a porn star to prevent her from talking about their tryst. People who don’t believe the evidence in front of them, much of it in Trump’s own words, are in deep denial. They are both pathetic and dangerous.

Closely related to the people in denial are the aggressively ignorant. They are mostly rank-and-file MAGA. They lack critical thinking skills and are easily manipulated by the right-wing media ecosystem. They seek out confirmation bias and are not open to opinions or facts that contradict their reality. They are willingly manipulated by the liars and the deniers to vote against their self-interest or for things they supposedly oppose.

These people make up about 35%-40% of the population, far too much for a healthy society. They’ve allowed people devoid of morals to proliferate in government because winning is the central unifying principle of the party. My hope for open dialogue and debate is essentially gone because one side so routinely says one thing and does another that the trust necessary for a healthy democracy has been destroyed — and Republicans destroyed it.

North Carolina has an independent candidate for state House. April Montgomery of Sanford was qualified by the state board of elections after securing the required number of signatures to get on the ballot in November. House District 51 includes all of Lee County and part of Moore.

Montgomery needed the signatures of 2,243 registered voters in the district and collected more than 3,300. The boards of elections verified 2,826. She spent months talking to real voters across the district, not the partisan warriors who determine primaries in both parties.

Montgomery is a small business owner who has built and sold companies. She has a strong background in the commercial side of renewable energy and currently serves as the Chief Development Officer of an energy storage company. She and her husband, David, also have a company that renovates historic commercial properties. Montgomery understands the pressures and challenges of small businesses.

She’s lived in Lee County for more than twenty years and has raised her family there. She’s been deeply involved in the community, serving on numerous boards and commissions, including executive board chair for the Sanford Area Growth Alliance and chair of the Lee County Environmental Advisory Board. She has also been heavily involved in public schools where her sons were educated.

In short, Montgomery more than passes the bar to serve as a state House member. More importantly, though, she’s the type of leader we need to see in the legislature. She’s earned her place through her commitment to the community and her success in business. She’s been an unaffiliated voter since she arrived in Lee County. She didn’t come up through the party ranks and is not beholden to any agenda.

If we’re going to get past the hyper-partisanship that defines our current politics, April Montgomery is the type of candidate we need. She’s pro-community, pro-business, and pro-education, much like the centrists who once dominated both parties in North Carolina.

For years, I used to hear people say, “I vote for the person, not the party.” My response was, “You may vote for the person, but the person votes for the party once they’re elected.” Partisan politicians will vote overwhelmingly with their party’s caucus in the legislature.

For people who really want to vote for the person, not the party, Montgomery is their opportunity. She’s not beholden to anybody but the voters. She doesn’t owe her candidacy to anybody but the wide array of registered voters who signed her petitions. Candidates like Montgomery are only beholden to the people in the district, not a party apparatus.

Montgomery faces a Republican who owes his nomination to deep-pocketed Republicans and GOP special interests who helped him through a primary. In the legislature, you can be sure where his loyalty will lie. The Democrat who initially filed has withdrawn her candidacy.

Montgomery’s candidacy is also the best way to combat gerrymandering. There’s no chance that a Democrat could win the district unless the opponent is Mark Robinson. Roy Cooper got closer than anyone in 2020 and he only garnered 43%. Most Democrats get about 40%.

Montgomery has different math to win. There are more registered unaffiliated voters than Republicans or Democrats. With no Democrat in the race, she will likely win the vast majority of Democrats because they won’t support a Republican. Then, she needs to win a solid majority of her fellow unaffiliated voters. She gives them an option they haven’t had before. If she picks up any Republicans, that’s gravy. It’s a tough race, but it’s certainly a possible one, especially in a year like this one where the party in the White House is deeply unpopular. She just needs the resources to run a competitive race.

We need more independent candidates. They could both shift the politics of the legislature to the center and throw a wrench in gerrymandering schemes. Montgomery is a great candidate to lead the way. She fits the district. She has the practical experience. And she’s more pragmatic than ideological, just like most voters.

This is the way.

Full disclosure: I am helping April Montgomery with her independent campaign for state house.

This is pretty funny. The School of Civic Life and Learning, SCiLL as it’s called, started because conservatives complained that they didn’t have enough of a voice at UNC-CH. Dave Boliek, the current State Auditor who was chair of the Board of Trustees at the time, said that the school started to encourage “freedom of expression and ideas and the exchange of ideas.” He implied that conservatives were hiding their points of view out of fear of something.

Now, the free speech warriors are trying to hide a $1.2 million report on possible misconduct at the school that taxpayers paid for. Freedom of expression apparently only goes so far.

Conservatives have long complained that they don’t have enough influence over academia. A few years ago, a study showed conservative students withheld their views because they were concerned that their peers might think less of them. However, the study found that students did not believe professors or teachers pushed ideological views.

No matter, though. That was enough for Republican victimization. Instead of looking for ways to boost conservative students’ confidence or focus on liberal students’ acceptance, they spent millions of taxpayer dollars imposing a new school on the university. They created a safe place for conservatives. I wonder if they have trigger warnings for music or art.

Anyhow, the school is barely off the ground and already a mess. Conservative professors who advocated its creation now complain that it’s imposing its views on students and faculty. They complain that there are litmus tests for hiring. One of its first hires called the school “affirmative action” for conservatives. That’s about right.

The school claims that it’s doing well and that it’s growing. They claim to have attracted new students and increased enrollment from 84 in 2024 to 487 this year, according to a New York Times report. Of course, they are paying students to sign up, offering $12,000 scholarships for students who minor in the program.

In another dust-up, a former provost of the university sued the school claiming the Board of Trustees violated open meetings and public records laws. The suit was settled last week, but now the Board of Trustees is denying access to public records. Where there’s smoke there’s fire.

It’s all predictable. There was never a groundswell of support for a school for conservative snowflakes in the first place. No students or faculty demanded it. They already had a fraternity and sorority system and campus faith organizations where students could find plenty of like-minded peers. Conservative students didn’t say they felt uncomfortable on campus.

The school was imposed on the university by the geniuses in the legislature and on the Board of Trustees who’ve embraced the conservative movement’s victim mentality. Then, they took the least conservative approach to addressing the problem and used Big Government to address something that’s really not there. It would be pretty funny if it weren’t so pathetic.

The legislature and Board of Trustees have ignored the fundamental culture of public universities and put Lee Roberts, a graduate of Duke and Georgetown, at the helm of the state’s flagship university. He had no experience in academia before taking over. They hired another guy from Duke to head up SCiLL. The idea that they can impose values on an institution as old and large as UNC with people who fundamentally don’t understand the culture is fatally flawed.

The whole thing is just folly. The School of Civic Life and Leadership will limp along for another decade or so, propped up by conservative benefactors with more money than sense and Republican legislators sure they can use state law to change people’s world view. Eventually, it will get absorbed into other programs or departments until it’s basically gone. Anybody who’s watched universities for any length of time has seen this show before.

I’ve been watching UNC-CH my whole life. I am the third generation of my family to live in the shadow of the university. It’s always been a bit of a messy place because it’s a bastion of new ideas, not conservative ones. It’s where students and faculty push the boundaries of conventionality so that we make discoveries in science, art, literature, and more. It’s about developing the next generation of leaders, not the last generation of leaders. That’s inherently progressive.

They aren’t going to fill universities with conservatives. Conservatives don’t go into academia because they go into business. They value private enterprise and money more than big ideas. They get their jollies from profits more than from discovery.

Finally, the modern conservative movement has become an anti-intellectual movement. They’ve embraced the anti-vaccine movement, denied climate change, and chosen fundamentalist Christianity over science. Until they can reconcile those contradictions, they won’t find much respect among the researchers in the academy.

I've watched UNC my whole life and I've never seen an idea take hold there because somebody in the legislature demanded it. Ideas spread because they're compelling. That's not something you can legislate, and it's not something SCiLL is going to change.

Not too long ago, conservatives were so concerned about their free speech being squashed at UNC-Chapel Hill that they established the School for Civic Life and Leadership to give themselves a safe space to express their views. Now, they’re trying to suppress the speech of the campus newspaper. What a bunch of hypocrites.

On April Fool’s Day, the Daily Tar Heel ran a series of satirical articles with titles like “Satire: Trump orders ALE in Chapel Hill to be replaced with ICE agents” and “Satire: UNC brings back DEI — for whites.” I couldn’t find the articles because they’ve been censored, but what’s offensive is that a school as powerful as the University of North Carolina would pressure the newspaper to pull them.

They also put up a video mocking white students who live on North Campus for having little contact with students on South Campus where the population is darker. I watched that video. I didn’t find it very funny, but I didn’t find it offensive, either. They were trying and they were exposing an issue that’s got more than a grain of truth to it.

The University issued a statement condemning the satirical edition, calling it “racist and insensitive.” I read it and it was neither. In a world where the so-called Secretary of Defense is demoting African American and women officers because of their race and gender, hand-wringing over the sensibilities of white students is ridiculous. The Harvard Lampoon would never make it on today’s campus.

I wish the Daily Tar Heel had stood its ground. The editor issued an apology and pulled the edition. I don’t fault her. She was under pressure from a behemoth. She shouldn’t have been put in that position.

The whole episode makes me want to go ridicule the administration. I suspect the real problem was the DEI article. It’s pretty close to true. Their School of Civic Life and Leadership is little more than confirmation bias for conservative, mostly white, students and faculty.

The conservative establishment is bringing its victim mentality to the Ivory Tower. They’ve captured the university system and now they are going to shut down anybody who’s mean to them.

I blame Chancellor Lee Roberts. He should learn to turn down jobs he doesn’t understand. He’s the preppy gopher the reactionaries running the GOP. He might be able to balance the books, but he has no familiarity with university culture. He’s doing the bidding of his conservative masters on the Board of Trustees and the General Assembly when he should be leading the next generation of North Carolina leaders, including those at the paper.

Back in September 2024, Roberts wrote an op-ed supposedly championing free speech. He wrote:

“[N]o one person’s freedom of expression is more important than another person’s right to teach, learn, discover, work or speak free from harassment and discrimination. No one has the right to disrupt campus operations, threaten or intimidate others or vandalize public property. Policies must and will be consistently applied to everyone, regardless of content or viewpoint, so that Carolina remains a steadfast supporter of free expression while fulfilling our mission of teaching, research and service to the state and society.”

As far as I can tell, the Daily Tar Heel didn’t “disrupt campus operations, threaten or intimidate others or vandalize public property.” They just put words on paper — or pixels, as it may be. They didn’t offend me. If they offended Roberts, then the articles are the epitome of the free expression he claims to support. I hope I’m offending him now.

Roberts should be standing up for the students. Instead, he seems to see his job as protecting the delicate feelings of the snowflakes paying his salary. He should do something useful like firing Bill Belichick or his girlfriend.

I appreciate the new Thom Tillis. His principled stand of blocking any replacement for Attorney General Pam Bondi who doesn’t condemn January 6 is welcome. Of course, it should be a no-brainer, but in today’s Republican Party, Tillis is the exception.

I wish I could say that Tillis was courageous, but he’s not. He’s really a coward. A courageous man would have stood up for principles when he had something to lose. Tillis waited until the stakes were almost nil. He voted for all of the miscreants who make up Trump’s dysfunctional and dangerous cabinet. Voting against them would have been brave — or at least principled.

If Tillis wanted to show courage now, he would hold Donald Trump to the same standard that he holds the nominee for attorney general. He doesn’t. His criticism of Trump has been veiled or tepid at best. He says that he wants the president to succeed without really defining what that means. He takes shots at Trump by criticizing those around him.

A principled man would have voted to impeach Donald Trump in the wake of January 6. Tillis voted to acquit. In those days in early 2021 when Trump was already planning his return to power, a leader would have rejected the would-be dictator. Tillis was silent.

As I have regularly described him, Tillis is a guy who knows what’s right and does what’s wrong. He’s not alone, though. As one journalist overheard in the Capitol last year, the Senate is full of people who want to be John McCain but are really just Thom Tillis. In short, they lack the courage of their convictions.

I’ve spent the last two months re-reading blog posts I wrote thirteen years ago. The exercise has sent me down rabbit holes of old newspaper and magazine articles from the pre-Trump era. The GOP was a fundamentally different party than it is today — or at least they claimed to be. I’m not sure what to believe now.

Some of the conservative writers and thought leaders stuck to their principles and have largely left the Republican Party, even if they find themselves politically homeless. Most of the Republican politicians and operatives chucked the values they openly espoused to become MAGA. Pragmatism, accountability, and compromise lost.

Congressman Tim Moore was the pragmatic successor to Tillis in the NC House, initially avoiding culture wars and defending North Carolina’s “brand” before he embraced Trumpism. Dan Bishop was always a staunch conservative, but social media exposed a bullying streak and tolerance for bigotry that he wore on his sleeve. And Phil Berger probably knew better than to endorse a moral midget like Mark Robinson, but by the end of the decade, that’s who excited Republicans.

The pundits who have stayed with the GOP are even worse. All of their writings are documented. It’s hard to know whether they never had core values or if they are just shills. Erick Erickson is probably the worst. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a commentator less consistent in his views. Like Tillis, he knows what’s right and does what’s wrong. It’s hard to understand why he’s still taken seriously other than that he’s a smart guy.

Today, they all overlook atrocious behavior that they never would have tolerated in 2010. Or maybe they would have — that’s what I don’t know. Were they lying about their commitment to personal accountability and the rule of law or did they always believe it didn’t apply to them?

Republicans’ main defense is whataboutism. They claim Democrats did it first, but that’s just not true. In North Carolina and in Washington, Democrats have held their own accountable. In the first decade of the 21st century, North Carolina Democrats resigned and even went to prison for crimes that seem quaint compared to what Trump is doing. Al Franken was forced out of the U.S. Senate by his fellow Democrats, not Republicans.

No, Republicans have given up on closely held principles. They have allowed themselves to be led by a con man and grifter who plays to the ugliest instincts of a reactionary populism animated by grievance and resentment. Like Tillis, too many know what’s right and do what’s wrong.

I doubt I will ever trust what Republicans tell me they believe again. Right now, though, I’m just struggling to find the grace to either pity or respect them. After reading what I’ve read, it’s hard.

They aren’t today who they were back then. Or maybe they were.

The Supreme Court threw out the Leandro ruling. The case has been in the courts since the 1990s, when the court ruled that children in poor rural counties were denied a sound, basic education as guaranteed by the constitution. The ruling ordered the legislature to adequately fund schools in those areas and set up mechanisms to determine the amount needed.

The decision is another blow to public education in North Carolina. Republicans came into office in 2011 screaming that our public schools were broken despite plenty of evidence to the contrary and proceeded to break them. Ending this case will hurt children in rural counties.

Since then, they lifted the cap on charter schools, removed the accountability required of public schools, and created a for-profit charter enterprise in North Carolina. They enacted a voucher program with the promise that the goal was to offer poor families the economic means to escape failing public schools and then lifted the income cap on vouchers so that most of them now go to wealthy families. Finally, they’ve cut per pupil spending to among the lowest in the nation.

In essence, they dismantled a functioning and improving public school system to create a new one that rejects the notion of shared responsibility. In rural counties, we run the risk of bringing back the separate-but-unequal schools of the Jim Crow South. Children from more affluent families will travel to wherever the best school is located while children from disadvantaged families will go to where the bus takes them. Expect to see white flight from schools in rural counties — or maybe green flight, the people with money leaving public schools to the people without.

The ruling should offer Democrats an opportunity to build relationships in rural counties. Republicans are taking money from poor public schools and giving it to rich private ones. They are giving tax breaks to wealthy families to keep their children out of public schools. That’s not an exaggeration. That’s a fact.

Leandro may have been an imperfect ruling but it was made because the legislature was not providing the resources necessary to offer children their constitutional right. Without some sort of enforcement mechanism, a ruling to that effect would mean nothing. Now, the words in the state constitution are largely worthless.

Gallup released numbers this week showing that the percentage of Americans identifying themselves as Republican or Republican-leaning independents is lower than at any time since 2015. The number identifying as Democrat or Democrat-leaning is higher than it’s been since 2020, right after Biden won. Democrats hold a ten-point advantage, 49% to 39%.

That almost 40% of the country could still identify with the party of Trump is disturbing, but I’ll take the advantage. We still have a ways to go before the election and we don’t know where the Republican floor is yet. It’s already low enough to scare a lot of incumbent Republicans out of running again, though.

Democrats shouldn’t get too confident about their advantage. They still make up less than half the country and with the electoral college and Senate maps, they have a long way to go before they can be confident of anything. None of those 39% who are still Republican and the 12% or so who don’t know who they support are clamoring for any sort of transformational programs. They just want to be able to live relatively comfortably with a little job security and a future for their kids or grandkids.

That said, the situation is probably not going to get better for Trump. His war in Iran is going to cause gas prices to rise and they could be far higher than when he was elected. His affordability agenda is in the toilet. His no-more-wars promise was clearly just a lie. His deportation program alienated most of the country. The only thing he’s gotten right is closing the border and nobody’s talking about that too much anymore.

I worry that Democrats will promise either what they can’t deliver or deliver what will turn Americans against them. I was dismayed to see U.S. Senators Cory Booker and Chris Van Hollen introducing tax breaks for middle class families. Why in the world are they playing on Republican turf?

The idea that somehow we can tax billionaires into oblivion while giving huge tax breaks to the middle class is just folly. It’s bad economics that will end up bankrupting the safety net programs that we need for a healthy middle class. We don’t need to be figuring out how to pay for a better health care system and help families that need day care.

Republicans are the party that offers tax cuts they can’t pay for and then claims they need to cut worthwhile government programs to pay for them. Just look at North Carolina schools. They cut revenue and then watched teacher pay and per pupil spending sink to the bottom of the national barrel.

I’m struggling with Democratic proposals that seem to think money grows on trees. The Democratic Socialist wing of the party seems to have little understanding of how the countries they admire work. The middle class pays far more in taxes in Scandinavian countries than we do here. They get great services and have a high quality of life but it’s not cheap and it’s certainly not paid for by billionaires.

If Democrats want to build on their growing popularity, they need to get back to basics and make government work again. They have an opportunity. Take advantage of Republicans’ embrace of the carnival barker in the White House and make them pay a price. Then build on their support by notching small, tangible wins. Making promises they can’t keep or that will end up hurting the people they’re trying to help won’t work out very well.

A poll released on Friday shows Roy Cooper with a commanding lead over Michael Whatley, 50-32. I wish it were true, but it’s not. The Carolina Journal poll released a few days earlier is probably more accurate. That poll has Cooper leading by eight, 49-41.

Outliers always exist in polling and the one released by Healthier United showing Cooper with an 18-point lead is one of those. It’s just a hazard of polling. Besides, what a poll says today has little relevance to what will happen next fall. Polls are just a snapshot in time.

That said, a look across polls shows Cooper and Democrats in general in a strong position right now. A Public Policy Polling survey released in mid-March showed Cooper up by three, but indicated that most other Democrats were in good shape. The only Democrat trailing in the PPP poll is Court of Appeals Judge Toby Hampson and he’s within the margin of error.

Cooper and Governor Josh Stein both have positive favorability ratings while Whatley breaks even. People still don’t know much about Whatley, giving Democrats an opportunity to define him negatively. It’s a tough place to start a race.

The Carolina Journal poll shows the political environment favoring Democrats slightly. On the generic ballot for legislature, Democrats hold a two-point advantage and for Congress they hold a four-point lead. Both numbers are within the margin of error.

The Healthier United poll shows Democrats with a substantial lead. For state legislature, that survey says voters prefer a Democrat by eleven points. Again, that’s probably not realistic, but it follows the general trend that the political environment is tough for Republicans right now.

All three polls show Donald Trump underwater in North Carolina. That’s a bad sign for the GOP. The election will most likely be a referendum on the party in the White House. Trump could drag Republicans down in November if he doesn’t right the ship.

One factor that doesn’t get enough discussion is that Cooper is the first Democrat running in a midterm with a Republican president in the White House since 2002. I’m not sure how much that’s worth, but I’ve got to think it’s at least a point or two. Cooper’s position is remarkably strong. He’s better known with a higher favorability rating. Whatley has not proven himself as a candidate yet. Whatley is still largely undefined in the minds of voters. Trump is unpopular. The year is trending to be a good one for Democrats.

I’d put my money on Cooper.

With Phil Berger and Thom Tillis both exiting the stage at the same time, they and their supporters are trying to define their legacies. Berger fans were all over Twitter praising him for what he did for North Carolina. Tillis told PBS about what amazing things the two of them did when Republicans took over the legislature.

To hear them tell it, North Carolina was a liberal bastion, swimming in high taxes and struggling to get by. It’s all a myth. They certainly changed the state, but most of it was around dismantling our public education and university system while shifting the tax burden from the wealthy to the middle class.

Republicans took power in the midst of the worst recession since the Great Depression. North Carolina got hit especially hard because of its reliance on manufacturing. Instead of offering much stimulus, Republicans cut taxes. Our recovery was slower than that of our neighbors.

For years, Democrats warned that if the GOP got control of the state, they would cut funding to public education. Republicans screamed that we were using scare tactics. Then, when they won the legislature and governor’s office, they did just that.

Once they were in control in Raleigh, they started a Big Lie. “Public schools are broken!” they cried. Then they went about the business of breaking them. They slashed per pupil spending and cut teacher pay. Where North Carolina traditionally sat near the middle of the country in those rankings, today we’re at the bottom of the barrel. When Republicans cry that our public schools are broken today, you can thank 15 years of GOP budgets for that.

They did the same thing to the university system. When they took power, they cut per pupil spending on university students by almost half. The people who were hit hardest were those least able to afford it.

Those weren’t scare tactics. They were warnings and today they’ve come true.

Of course, to fix the schools they broke, they’re continuing to shift tax dollars out of public schools to subsidize private ones. When they first implemented their voucher scheme, Republicans swore they were trying to give poor kids the resources to escape failing public schools. Within just a few years, though, they lifted the income cap and much if not most of that money flows to families who were already affluent enough to afford private education.

The voucher program was really just a scheme to keep cutting taxes for the wealthiest and shifting the tax burden to the poorest North Carolinians. After Republicans flattened the income tax and expanded the sales tax, the state is essentially upside down. The top 1% pay only about 6% of their income in taxes while the lowest 20% pay about 10.5%. Republicans call that a fair tax.

Revenue in the state has grown at a relatively healthy 2.6% since the Great Recession but it grew by an average of 8% a year in the 35 years prior to Republican rule. I’ll grant them that the 1990s were especially generous boom years and the recession changed the equation, but they haven’t done anything spectacular — other than reducing the tax burden for rich people.

Republicans like to crow about their economic success, but they haven’t done anything amazing. The state is essentially on the same trajectory it was on when Democrats ran the state, just without the support of public education. Since the tax restructuring, GDP in the state has grown at about the same pace as it did during the years immediately preceding the Great Recession — about 2.5%-3%. Those are solid numbers, but there’s no evidence that North Carolina was struggling economically under its previous progressive tax system.

Income in North Carolina increased nominally but not exceptionally. We basically tracked the national average and trailed our neighbors. That’s nothing to brag about.

What Republicans did really well was cause division in the state. For decades, the state navigated sticky social and cultural divides better than most of our neighbors. Thom Tillis and Phil Berger decided to exploit them. They put Amendment One on the ballot. They passed HB2. They added strict abortion limits. They used modern tools to gerrymander the state more than any other in the nation, long before the redistricting wars playing out today.

They exploited the rural-urban divide with a steady stream of bald-faced lies that gave them political power at the expense of a unified state. They told people that our schools were broken when they weren’t. They claimed there was rampant voter fraud when it was almost nonexistent. They swore Democrats were coming for their guns when nobody was doing that. They did little to disabuse their base of the lie that COVID was a hoax and the vaccine was dangerous. They callously watched infection and death rates among Republicans dwarf those of Democratic areas because they didn’t want to contradict the lies coming out of the White House and they opposed mask mandates.

The lying all came to a head during Hurricane Helene. Instead of coming together to help people in dire straits, they allowed disinformation to proliferate, damaging the recovery effort and fomenting distrust of the government agencies that were there to help.

Republicans didn’t improve our state economically. It was already one of the fastest growing in the nation and routinely rated one of the best states for business. They didn’t significantly increase incomes. In fact, the people who support them in rural communities have watched theirs fall. They didn’t improve our standing in the country. They sullied our reputation with culture wars and anti-democratic policies.

Their single biggest accomplishment was unleashing an ugly populism that moderate policies had kept at bay since the end of the Civil Rights Movement. They made bigotry great again in the name of free speech. They blamed immigrants for taking jobs and costing taxpayer money when in reality they are a net benefit to our economy and often the only thing propping up rural communities. They brought clowns into a Subway in Raleigh, brandishing guns and dressed in militia gear.

That’s their legacy. It took more than sixty years to beat the populists back from about the turn of the 20th century until the Civil Rights Era. It may take that long again. This time, the North Carolina populists were the vanguard of the national movement that became MAGA. You can thank Thom Tillis and Phil Berger.

It’s over. Phil Berger conceded to Sam Page after a random hand recount of 3% of the districts didn’t indicate the results would change. Sam Page will likely represent Rockingham and parts of Guilford County in the state Senate next year.

I appreciate that Berger conceded graciously and without drawing out the process. Involving the courts in every close election to disqualify voters is unseemly and undermines faith in our system. Senator Berger went through the process and is now stepping away.

I’ve had a grudging respect for Berger since he first became President Pro-Tem. As leader, he ran a tight ship. Over his fifteen years, the body has been plagued with very few scandals or improprieties. There was also very little grumbling or leaking coming from his caucus. That’s saying something and he gets credit.

I’m sure people will remind me that he’s got a bunch of former staffers who are leveraging their connections to him and his office. They are getting rich and their clients are getting access. Unfortunately, that’s how the system works. Nobody’s doing anything illegal, even if the business of governing is often unseemly.

I’ve been disappointed in Berger’s embrace of the right-wing populism that’s infected the Republican Party. It’s very hard to maintain respect for somebody who endorsed Mark Robinson knowing what he knew. It’s also disappointing to watch his embrace of Trump knowing what he knows about him, too. Of course, that applies to all of the Republicans who know better but have sold their pitiful souls to worship false idols. It’s not really a patriotic party anymore.

But back to Berger’s concession. If we’re ever going to get back to more normal politics, we need civility instead of threats and denials. Berger delivered. Governor Josh Stein did, too.

After Berger conceded, Stein put out a tweet saying, “I thank our election officials for ensuring that all votes were counted and that the people’s voice was heard. I congratulate Sheriff Page on his victory and commend Senator Berger for his service. While we didn’t always see eye to eye on the issues of the day, I appreciate Senator Berger’s deep love for North Carolina.”

That’s classy and acknowledges that we can agree to disagree while sharing some broader goals. Stein is playing his politics right, both for his own purposes and as a state leader. He’s getting back to a level of decorum that’s been missing at every level of government.

I’m probably not the best messenger here, since I’m not very civil. Still, I want to see our politics work. One of the first steps is restoring faith in our institutions. Berger’s concession and Stein thanking the board of elections is a start.

Back in 2020, Cheri Beasley trailed Paul Newby by less than 500 votes out of more than 5.4 million cast. She followed protocol and asked for a recount. When that process reduced the margin to about 400 votes, she asked for a hand recount of 3% of the precincts. Republicans jeered her, claiming that she was doing the same thing Donald Trump was doing in Washington, questioning the results of the election.

Here’s the difference. When the hand recount showed the margin would likely increase, she graciously conceded, publicly congratulating Newby and wishing him well. Today, her response seems almost quaint.

Four years later, when Justice Allison Riggs defeated Jefferson Griffin, not only did he refuse to concede, he tried to change the rules of the election after the fact. He almost succeeded because Paul Newby and his Republican court sided with Griffin’s anti-democratic claims. A federal judge had to step in to protect democracy from Republicans in North Carolina.

And 25 years ago, Al Gore gave up his fight for the presidency, conceding to George Bush even though the ballots in Florida still hadn’t been counted. Gore said that he was concerned about violence in the streets. Donald Trump sicced a mob on Congress.

Today, we’re watching Phil Berger drag out the process, trying novel procedures to change the outcome of the election. He wants the board of elections to do a hand recount of all the ballots and take a special look at 220 ballots that the board rejected either because nothing was marked or too many candidates were chosen. The state board rejected his request last week, but he’s continuing his claim.

Berger is also challenging the votes of 13 people, citing various irregularities. Using disenfranchisement as a tool to alter elections is a bad precedent.

The problem with Berger’s claims is threefold. First, he essentially gave the board of elections to state Auditor Dave Boliek. The board is full of Republican operatives instead of election professionals, many of whom probably have some connection to Berger, either directly or indirectly.

Second, Boliek campaigned for Berger during the election. He defends it by saying that the governor used to support candidates in races. The difference is that, as stated, Berger gave Boliek his power.

Finally, if the case goes to the Supreme Court, Berger’s son is a justice. I would hope that Berger Jr. would recuse himself, but the case should not go to the court at all. Berger should respect the process. When he’s gone through the allowed recounts, he should gracefully concede.

Unfortunately, I don’t think many Republicans have grace or humility anymore. The party that once insisted that we respect institutions now trashes them. Elections are no exception. On the contrary, they are the main event.

Republicans have been casting doubt on the legitimacy of elections ever since Barack Obama got elected. Much of their base just could not accept that a Black man could be elected president. There must be fraud.

They also couldn’t believe that Donald Trump could possibly lose an election because Fox News and talk radio insisted he was leading by miles. Besides, everybody they knew supported him. Self-awareness is not common among MAGA.

People like Phil Berger exploit these fears and misperceptions for personal advantage. Berger is doing that now. However, the conspiracy theorists who would otherwise be storming the boards of election support his opponent, Sam Page. He might be able to pressure lawyers and bureaucrats but he won’t be able to gin up anger among the base.

Berger would be wise to step down once a hand recount of 3% of the precincts shows that he’s still losing by a handful of votes. He could go out with the grace that his party so badly needs. Going down attacking the system and voters is just not a good look.

If there’s one thing that’s consistent about Mark Robinson, it’s that he craves attention. Yesterday, he released a new podcast where he admits, explains, and defends his porn habit. I’m not watching it, but I thank Bryan Anderson for falling on his sword so I don’t have to.

The most preposterous statement Robinson makes is blaming his campaign team for his troubles. He says if he had changed consultants he would have survived and won the election. That’s delusional. He lost to Josh Stein by 15 points.

It’s hard to know, but Robinson is probably trying to creep back into public life. This podcast is his trial balloon. It’s not going to fly, but I wish it would.

Mark Robinson is the candidate the GOP deserves. He was a creation of the outrage machine that excites the right. He got his start with a viral video when he made a gun rant before the Greensboro City Council. Knowing little about him, conservative influencers and groups like the NRA turned him into a rock star, drawing cheering crowds at gun shows and conventions. Robinson turned his fifteen minutes of fame into a political career.

North Carolina Republicans had numerous chances to stop him, but they didn’t. They encouraged him, electing him lieutenant governor and then nominating him to be their gubernatorial standard bearer. He defeated State Treasurer Dale Folwell, a mainstream conservative politician, in the primary.

In that primary, the GOP leadership in North Carolina lined up behind him. Senate President Pro-tem Phil Berger was among the first to sign on and showed up at his campaign kickoff rally. Before it was over, Republicans were clambering to get their photos with Robinson. Of course, after it was over, they were scrubbing their social media feeds of him.

Republicans knew exactly who Mark Robinson was. He had a long history of racist, misogynistic, and homophobic social media posts. He made outrageous comments like “Some people just need killin’.” The base ate it up and the politicians ignored it.

Around the general assembly the year before the election, Republican lobbyists and legislators were giddy. By their calculation, Mark Robinson would split the Black vote, defeating Josh Stein. The party that talks about the “soft bigotry of low expectations” applied the theory to politics. They assumed that skin color would take precedence over positions and values for a large number of African American voters.

They also wanted desperately to say, “See, I’m not racist. I support the Black guy.” They would overlook all kinds of awful behavior to tell themselves that subtle lie. Instead, they just confirmed their prejudice.

Mark Robinson is a symptom of the disease that’s infected the GOP. They created Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Megyn Kelly, and a host of other deeply flawed on-air personalities. For years they coddled them and cheered them. As Fox News and talk radio lied, misled, and incited their base, once responsible Republicans either looked away, trading truth for votes, or embraced the carnival show.

The conservative message machine built up grifters and liars as credible messengers, telling their base for years that the Tucker Carlsons of the world were shooting straight with them. They were creating monsters from whole cloth. As long as they attacked Democrats with distortions, half-truths, and outright lies, Republicans were fine with them.

When Tucker and company either turned on the GOP or, in the case of Candace Owens, their flaws became too apparent to ignore, Republicans recoiled in horror. Today, the monsters are routinely bashed by the people who nurtured and created them. They claim the Carlson’s of the world have changed, but that’s not true. And the Republicans haven’t, either.

They are the same party that lacks the judgment to walk away from a Mark Robinson. They’re still embracing Donald Trump even as the Epstein files make clear that Trump was probably at least aware of the abuse and may well have participated in it. Power, though, matters too much. Accountability is no longer a Republican value.

As for Mark Robinson, I hope he can make a comeback. The people who embraced him knowing his flaws should welcome him back into the fold, but they won’t. Maybe he can build some sort of relationship with the GOP base. They’ll believe anything. He’s a good representation of what the party has become.

I sure am enjoying the unleashed Thom Tillis. I wish he had shown up earlier. Of course, if he had, he might well be on his way to re-election, something I definitely would not enjoy.

Yesterday, he missed the vote to open debate on the SAVE Act, though he said earlier he would oppose it. Tillis knows what’s right and he’s doing it, despite Donald Trump. It’s refreshing to see his candor and watch him embrace principles instead of bungling politics.

The SAVE Act is an anti-democratic and deeply flawed voter suppression bill. Republicans claim it will prevent illegal immigrants from voting, though they’ve never been able to prove it’s a problem. States already do a good job of reserving access to the ballot box to citizens. We don’t need a heavy-handed federal bill that will probably disenfranchise a lot of citizens.

The act would require voters to bring either a birth certificate or passport to register to vote. That’s an undue burden for people who have already proven their citizenship when they registered in the first place. Only about half of Americans hold passports. Birth certificates can be burdensome to obtain.

The bill requires the information on the birth certificate or passport to match a photo ID like a driver’s license. In a blog post yesterday, former North Carolina Republican House Majority Leader Skip Stam explained the problem.

Many constituents don’t have a copy of their birth certificate and will need to get it right now. Think of the married constituent whose name on her photo ID doesn’t match whatever birth certificate she has. Many women (and a few men) have four names. Some include last names from prior marriages.

I pulled out my three government-issued photo IDs: my passport, driver’s license and my military ID from 1974. None of them are identical to what is on my birth certificate. None are identical to the name on my Board of Election voter card.

Stam says tens of thousands of people could be denied the right to vote, far more than the tiny number of non-citizens who might be voting.

About ten years ago or so, I needed to get a birth certificate. I had to go to the Anson County Register of Deeds office to pick up a notarized copy. For me, that was about a two-hour drive. For my friend in Colorado, that’s a much longer trip. I’m not sure those rules still apply but I doubt seriously there’s any uniformity in getting birth certificates across all fifty states.

Growing up I knew an African American woman born before World War II who chose her own birthday. She did it because she didn’t know exactly when she was born. She didn’t even know her exact age. She would be unable to produce a birth certificate because there wasn’t one. I’m sure she doesn’t have a passport.

In her case, she was born into the Jim Crow South where she was systematically denied the right to vote. Because of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act she gained the opportunity to enjoy her citizenship. In the twilight of her life, Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress would disenfranchise her again. I’m sure she, more than the “illegals,” is their real target.

Which gets to a broader point. The Roberts Court has been whittling away at the Voting Rights Act for more than a decade. John Roberts, despite all evidence to the contrary, wants to believe we live in a post-racial America. Republicans in North Carolina and now in control of Congress and the White House have shown how wrong he is. As soon as the court strips a protection, the GOP exploits it.

The MAGA form of the Republican Party is following the playbook of the populists who disenfranchised African Americans for most of the 20th century. They are trying to shape the electorate by eliminating access to the ballot box for people who might vote against them. They aren’t interested in winning the battle of ideas. They want to rig the system so they can impose their point of view. In North Carolina, they’ve done a pretty good job already.

Republicans are trying to cast the SAVE Act as a simple voter ID bill. It’s not that at all. I’m not opposed to requiring voters to show an ID at the polls, but I think it needs to be broad to protect people’s right to vote. The SAVE Act is designed to prevent people who should be able to vote from voting. Fortunately, it will almost certainly fail.

Thom Tillis and Skip Stam are standing up for democracy. I appreciate that. They are telling because more Republicans probably think like them than are willing to admit it. They know the act is wrong. They just aren’t willing to do what’s right.

This year, the North Carolina Association of Educators recruited six members to run in Republican primaries for the legislature. They didn’t really expect to win, but they wanted to elevate the conversation about public schools and give Republicans and independents a choice in Republican primaries.

They filed in Republican primaries because the districts are so Republican that no Democrat could win. I applaud it, but I think there are more effective ways to counter gerrymandering and alter the conversation. Democrats need to start trying them.

The biggest problem with running in Republican primaries is the electorate. Primary voters are the most engaged and usually the most ideological citizens. They believe in Republican principles, whatever those are, and they are going to support GOP candidates they know. They get their information from sources they trust who see the world similarly. They are the Republican base and essentially unpersuadable.

A better way to challenge Republicans in heavily gerrymandered districts is to run centrist independents. Democrats should clear the field for them. With no Democratic candidate in the race, independent candidates will get the vast majority of Democrats to vote for them. Their job becomes to persuade fellow unaffiliated voters to come to their side.

It’s not an easy process. First, unaffiliated candidates need to collect enough signatures to get on the ballot. In the case of legislative races, they need 4% of the total that voted in the last gubernatorial race. That’s a lot of signatures and takes a lot of time.

Next, they have to build an infrastructure that the two parties offer to their nominees either for free or at a vastly reduced price. It’s expensive and takes expertise.

Then, they have to raise money without a donor base. Both parties have reliable contributors who will fund competitive races. Independent candidates will need to peel off some of those donors while also building their own network.

Finally, if independent candidates are successful in all of those tasks, they have to convince a majority of unaffiliated voters to support them in the election. That may be the easiest part of the task, depending on the year and the district. They are targeting people who have already eschewed both parties and will likely find many who hold similar views among unaffiliated voters.

I wish Democrats and their allies would think more strategically. I agree that they need to contest every race, but not always as Democrats. In districts where the Republican candidate is likely to get 55% or more of the vote, no wave is big enough and no candidate good enough to put Democrats into office.

There are lots of reasons to run for office and not all of them involve winning. I ran for Congress in 2016 because I believed Democrats needed to fill the ballot. Now, with the state Supreme Court allowing partisan gerrymandering, Democrats need to think differently. Independent candidates are worth the shot.

After the 2018 election, in North Carolina’s Ninth Congressional District, Charlotte pastor and Republican Mark Harris appeared to have eked out a victory over his Democratic opponent, Dan McCready. After provisionals were counted, Harris led by just over 900 votes. Then, people started noticing something was off in one of the counties.

In Bladen County, Harris won by a significantly larger margin than any other Republican on the ballot. A deeper dive revealed that most of his margin came from mail-in ballots. Republicans requested only 19% of the ballots, but won 60% of the vote. In addition, the return rate on mail-in ballots was far less than other counties, indicating something happened to some of the ballots.

Wake County District Attorney Lorrin Freeman announced that her office was already investigating voting irregularities in the county from previous elections. Bladen had a long history of shady dealings. A man named McCrae Dowless kept showing up in the middle of them.

The State Board of Elections voted not to certify the result pending an investigation. By the end of November, the AP rescinded its call of the race and then McCready retracted his concession. Republicans had a different take.

Executive Director of the North Carolina Republican Party Dallas Woodhouse demanded that the votes be certified and called on the chair of the state board of elections to resign, claiming he was “hyper-partisan.”

Chair Andy Penry did just that, saying, “The investigation of criminal conduct and absentee voting fraud in the 2018 Republican primary and 2018 general election in Congressional District 9 is a matter of vital importance to our democracy. I will not allow myself to be used as an instrument of distraction in this investigation.”

The board, including Republicans, still voted to delay certification.

As the scandal unfolded, the fraud became increasingly evident. The Bladen County board of elections had apparently counted absentee ballots before election day and shared the information. It was too much for even Woodhouse and GOP State Party Chair Robin Hayes. They both said that if the accusations were true, they would support a new election in the district.

Then came a stunning reversal. Just a week later, they demanded the board certify the election and blasted the board for not resolving the issue fast enough. It would be the beginning of a two-month attack on the state board of elections, attempting to undermine its credibility in the midst of a massive election fraud scandal.

Woodhouse and Hayes likely folded under pressure from their right flank and Washington Republicans.

Over the next two months, the details of the scheme became clear. The Harris campaign hired Dowless who, in turn, hired friends and family members to collect absentee ballots in violation of state law. Some of the people he hired admitted to filling out ballots that supported Republicans. In addition, the return rate for African Americans was far lower than for white voters, indicating many may have been discarded.

Still, even up until the day of the initial hearing, Republicans bashed the state board and called for Harris to be seated. Harris, for his part, repeatedly denied knowing about the fraud.

The hearing was dramatic. At the time, I wrote:

Yesterday saw stunning developments in the State Board of Elections hearing in NC-09. The day played out like a Greek tragedy with a son exposing the sins of a supposedly pious father. In an apparently surprise move, Mark Harris’s son, John, took the stand. Neither Harris, his wife nor Dan McCready’s lawyer, Marc Elias, knew he was going to testify. John, an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of North Carolina, directly contradicted statements made by Harris and his campaign team.

In emails and phone conversations, John warned his father numerous times that McCrae Dowless was crooked before he was hired to work on the Harris campaign. John went as far as to email his father the statute that says collecting absentee ballots is a felony. His father dismissed the concerns, saying he believed McCrae Dowless when Dowless said everything was above board. The picture that emerges is one of a man so consumed by ambition that he’s willing to accept lies to further his own quest for power.

John had turned over the emails in pre-trial testimony, assuming the board already had them from the campaign. But the Harris campaign had never shared them, despite a subpoena requiring them to do so.

As his son testified, Mark Harris sat in the audience with tears running down his cheek. John concluded his testimony by saying he loved his mother and father but would have done things differently.

After the testimony, Spectrum’s Tim Boyum posted a video of Mark Harris vehemently denying that anyone had ever warned him about Dowless.

The next day, Mark Harris took the stand. He said that he was not mentally or physically up for testifying. He admitted to making misstatements and said that he believed a new election was warranted. He could have either lied to the board, admitted he had been lying in the past, or walked away. He chose the latter.

The state board of elections voted unanimously for a new Congressional election.

Again, I wrote:

The trial underscored the political inclinations of the current GOP. Both Executive Director Dallas Woodhouse and Party Chair Robin Hayes defended Harris and the campaign to the end despite overwhelming evidence that fraud occurred. They attacked the press, the Democratic Party and implied that the work of the SBOE was part of a partisan smear. In another era, the party leadership would have been more measured and cautious, asking people to reserve judgment until the investigation was complete.

Despite Harris’s admission and the preponderance of evidence, Republicans kept up the attack on the state board of elections, trying to undermine its mission and credibility.

Robin Hayes warned McCready, “You will be held responsible for…your role to erase more than 283,000 legal votes by citizens of the Ninth Congressional District.” Dallas Woodhouse accused the state board of elections on Twitter of wanting to “get Dowless so bad after a decade they chose a sting operation over protecting the democracy.” Even Mitch McConnell weighed in, blaming Democrats for the fraud.

The fraud was heavily documented. North Carolina reporters Michael Graff and Nick Ochsner wrote a book, The Vote Collectors: The True Story of the Scamsters, Politicians and Preachers Behind the Nation’s Greatest Electoral Fraud, detailing their work to uncover the scheme. The podcast “Serial” covered it in “The Improvement Association.”

For years, Republicans had insisted the state had rampant voter fraud but never proved it. When their side was caught in the act, they denied it existed.

In the special election that summer, state Senator Dan Bishop defeated Dan McCready. After January 6, Bishop was a vehement defender of Trump’s baseless voter fraud claims.

McCrae Dowless died of cancer before he went to trial.

Six weeks after Harris called for a new election, the FBI announced that Republican Party Chair Robin Hayes was under investigation for bribery. He pled guilty to lying to the FBI and agreed to cooperate with the investigation. Donald Trump pardoned him on January 20, 2021.

Dallas Woodhouse now works for the North Carolina State Board of Elections, serving as liaison to county boards of elections.

Mark Harris is now the Congressman for North Carolina’s 8th Congressional District.

This primary in State Senate District 26 is a big test of the new state board of elections. Phil Berger, the most powerful Republican in the state, trails his opponent Sam Page by 23 votes. The race will probably go through at least a couple of recounts and may end up in court. This state board has never been through a full election cycle, much less a race as contested as this one.

State Auditor Dave Boliek, who appoints the state board of elections, campaigned in Rockingham County for Berger. He and his staff claim that’s no big deal. Before this year, they claim, the governor appointed the state board of elections and Roy Cooper campaigned for candidates. The difference is that the constitution gave the governor control over the board of elections. Berger gave it to Boliek. At the very least, the move shows incredibly poor judgment. Maybe they just don’t care.

Over the past fifteen years, the GOP has consistently tried to undermine democratic norms in North Carolina. They’ve taken a systematic approach to holding power and have shown no indication of stopping now. They’ve attacked checks and balances to remove the accountability that’s supposed to be built into the system.

They passed the most extreme gerrymandering in the country after the 2010 census, giving themselves veto-proof majorities in the legislature and a 10-3 majority in Congress, even though Democrats garnered more votes across the state. They’ve continued to draw districts that protect their power while limiting the will of the voters.

They passed a voter suppression bill that tried to effectively disenfranchise African Americans. They researched the methods that Black voters used most frequently and then restricted them. They figured out which kinds of identification Black citizens use and then disallowed them as a form of voter ID. They moved early voting sites away from African American communities. When the law was struck down by the courts, they attacked the judge, vowing that his ruling would be overturned by another court. It still stands today, though the Republicans have successfully implemented many of the provisions piecemeal over the past decade.

Republicans have been trying to take over the board of elections ever since Roy Cooper defeated Pat McCrory in 2016. They first tried to shift the authority of the board to the legislature, but the courts shot that down. When that didn’t work, they tried to create a nonpartisan board evenly divided between the two parties, creating a toothless agency like the Federal Election Commission, which is an essentially nonfunctioning agency consumed by deadlock. They even put a measure on the ballot as a constitutional amendment but the voters rejected it.

After losing in court so often, the Republicans decided to try to rig the judiciary. In 2018, they gerrymandered judicial and prosecutorial districts in the middle of the decade to favor GOP candidates. They passed a law reducing the size of the state Court of Appeals by preventing Roy Cooper from appointing replacements for vacancies.

They also made statewide judicial races partisan. When they realized that their MAGA base might nominate an unelectable candidate, they eliminated primaries, setting up a winner-take-all general election.

After haggling over how to rig the judicial races for much of the year, the Republicans set a filing period for court races that ended in late June. Democrat Anita Earls and Republican Barbara Jackson filed to run for the Supreme Court seat. On the last day of filing, a man named Chris Anglin filed for Supreme Court as a Republican. He had changed his registration from unaffiliated just weeks before. With no primary, he would likely split the Republican vote, handing the seat to Earls.

Republicans were apoplectic. They had stepped on a rake. In an effort to fix it, they passed a law in July that would require a candidate to have been registered with a party for at least 90 days before filing. They applied it retroactively, effectively disqualifying Anglin. The courts struck it down, but it would not be the last time the Republicans tried to change the rules of an election after the fact.

While Earls won in 2018, the Republicans’ maneuvers would pay off. By 2022, they had a majority on both the Supreme Court and the Court of Appeals. After Josh Stein won in November, the legislature again stripped the board of elections and gave it to the auditor’s office, now controlled by Republican Dave Boliek. This time, the compliant Supreme Court allowed the move, ignoring the will of the voters and judicial precedent. That’s an activist court.

In the race for Supreme Court in 2024, the Republicans again tried to change the rules of the election after the fact. Jefferson Griffin, narrowly trailing Alison Riggs, tried to disqualify tens of thousands of voters based on a technicality even though they had shown voter IDs and been allowed to vote by boards of elections. While lower courts dismissed Griffin’s complaint, the higher courts allowed it.

Fortunately, a federal judge — a Trump appointee, no less — overruled the Supreme Court, almost mocking them by saying, “You establish the rules before the game. You don’t change them after the game is done.”

I’m afraid the GOP sees controlling the state board as a political advantage, not as a way to protect our freedoms. Boliek didn’t appoint election professionals. He appointed partisan warriors to oversee the election system.

Chair Francis X. De Luca oversaw independent expenditure campaigns targeting Democrats when he was president of the Civitas Institute. He sued to disqualify 90,000 voters after the fact when Cooper won in 2016.

Dallas Woodhouse served as executive director of the North Carolina Republican Party and worked for numerous independent expenditure groups that supported Republicans and attacked Democrats. Today, he is the state board’s liaison to the county parties. While leading the NC GOP, he sent an email to Republican county election boards urging them to make “party line” changes to early voting sites.

The executive director, Sam Hayes, seems to be a serious fellow and I hope he oversees a fair process. Still, he worked for two Republican House Speakers and was very involved in drawing the rigged maps that protect GOP majorities by reducing democracy. He needs to prove his mettle.

So, no, I don’t trust the state board of elections, because I don’t believe the Republican Party respects democracy. They’ve been trying to undermine elections in the state for 15 years. When they’ve been stopped by the checks and balances that are supposed to preserve our way of government, they’ve attacked the very system that has sustained our country for 250 years. Our state is failing the stress test of democracy and I’m afraid nobody is noticing.

In January 2011, State Senator Phil Berger and then-State Representative Thom Tillis entered the North Carolina political stage at the same time. As Republicans took control of the legislature for the first time in more than a hundred years, they led their respective chambers. If Berger loses his primary, they will exit at the same time.

They were very different leaders then and they still are. Berger had sat quietly in the back row of the Senate, watching his predecessor, Marc Basnight, competently lead Senate Democrats for years before he took the reins. Thom Tillis was only beginning his third term when he skipped the line to become speaker of a rowdy Republican caucus that would become even rowdier in years to come.

Berger seems introverted and reflective, mostly shying from the press except for planned interviews or press availabilities. Tillis is gregarious, often bantering with reporters in hallways. Berger rarely needs to make retractions. Tillis’s mouth occasionally lands him in the news.

Together, Tillis and Berger steered North Carolina hard to the right in the early days of the state’s version of the Republican revolution. At first, they seemed to be in sync. They held press conferences together and shared an agenda. They also had a Democratic governor who mitigated their most extreme instincts and gave them a common adversary.

In 2013, Pat McCrory won the governor’s office and Republicans gained complete control of both the legislature and executive branch for the first time in more than a century. Cracks in the unity emerged as both Berger and Tillis were considered as potential candidates to challenge Democratic U.S. Senator Kay Hagan in 2014. The two men also had conflicting legislative priorities.

Tillis and McCrory were both from Charlotte and moderate, business-friendly Republicans more interested in cutting taxes and regulations than taking on social issues. Berger was a small-town lawyer from rural Rockingham County and more of a hardliner. When Tillis and McCrory started making plans to set up a state insurance exchange and expand Medicaid under the newly enacted Affordable Care Act, Berger killed the move and opposition to Medicaid expansion became the GOP party line for another decade.

Berger ran a tight caucus operation that looked a lot like the one Basnight ran. Members didn’t leak and generally stayed in line. Ambitions were kept in check, though senators must have felt they had enough say or there would have been more grumbling.

Tillis oversaw a rowdy bunch of house members who proposed crazy legislation like a state religion and withdrawing from the Federal Reserve. Members spoke freely to the press, often garnering embarrassing headlines. Before he was halfway through his second term as Speaker, Tillis was running for U.S. Senate.

Berger emerged as the most powerful man in the state, outflanking the hapless Governor McCrory, who spent four years unsuccessfully trying to figure out how Raleigh worked. Tillis became the luckiest politician in the country, narrowly beating Hagan when ISIS and Ebola tanked the political environment in October 2014. Six years later, he looked poised to lose his seat when his opponent got caught with his cyber pants down in October of 2020.

Tillis never really figured out how to navigate Trump’s Republican Party. He wasn’t MAGA but he spent a lot of time pandering to them or to Trump. Instead of currying favor, he just looked insincere. Trump obviously didn’t trust him and the base could sense it.

Tillis’s views of the world never really changed. He’s still the business-friendly Republican who went to Raleigh from the suburbs of Charlotte. In other words, he’s part of a dying breed — or at least one in serious decline.

As I’ve said repeatedly, he knows what’s right, but often does what’s wrong. Every time, he’s betraying his better instincts to pander. He knew people like Kristi Noem, Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, and RFK, Jr., have no business anywhere near the levers of power, but he lacked the courage of his convictions to vote against them. Of course, he was still worried about a primary back then. He’s like Louisiana Senator John Kennedy without the political skills.

Berger, for his part, morphed into the MAGA world a bit more easily. Berger probably does have less respect for the democratic norms that Tillis still respects, but he also knows better. He embraced Trump and endorsed Mark Robinson knowing full well the guy was unqualified to get anywhere near the Governor’s Mansion. His capitulation to Trumpism was disappointing and, really, beneath him, but power is intoxicating and getting on the wrong side of the base would have complicated his political life.

Berger is the fish that outgrew his pond. He may have been the most powerful Republican in the state, but he was still beholden to the voters of a provincial rural district. He lost touch with the people back home and should have read the writing on the wall.

Berger would have been smarter to have retired with the changing of the guard that brought in a new governor and new council of state. Instead, he’ll either lose in a humiliating manner after spending more than $10 million to try to hold his seat, or win in a race that will forever be suspect to the voters who see him trailing after votes have been counted. It’s an inauspicious ending for a politician who has climbed so high.

Tillis, for his part, seems like he’s auditioning for a second act. He’s all over cable news, speaking his mind. He sounds sincere finally, but if he is, it brings into question his record of flip-flops and pandering. He may find a place on Fox News or some podcast while he lobbies and becomes a gazillionaire, but I have doubts about a future political career.

Tillis can leave the political stage with some impressive bipartisan legislative accomplishments. He also survived twelve years in a chaotic GOP political transformation that ended the careers of like-minded colleagues like Arizona Senator Jeff Flake and Tennessee Senator Bob Corker. Eventually, though, he fell victim to MAGA. He decided not to run because he lost the trust of the conspiracy-minded authoritarians in his own party.

I was never going to agree with either Phil Berger or Thom Tillis politically, but I wanted to find some common ground for the good of the state that I love.

In the beginning, I respected Berger for the way he ran his caucus and for his humility. In 2013, when Moral Mondays were roiling the state, he invited William Barber to meet in his office, saying the protesters’ concerns deserved to be heard. Maybe it was an insincere political move, but it’s what leaders should do. I doubt that would happen today.

With Tillis, I could respect his desire to make government work through compromise and bipartisanship. I couldn’t take his habit of saying one thing and doing another. I detested watching him pander to the worst instincts of his party for political gain. At a time when his party needed people with political courage to stand up, he was always just a little too late. Berating Kristi Noem last week in the Senate may have been good theater, but keeping her away from the position she left in the first place would have been the right thing for the country. He knew better, but lacked the courage of his convictions.

As both men leave the state stage, the biggest threats to the country are not the taxes and regulations that were the focus when they took power in 2011, but an anti-democratic reactionary movement that has taken root deep in their party. Neither man stood up to it, though Tillis tried more than Berger. Both leave with legacies of accomplishments, for better or worse, that transformed North Carolina.

I wish them well in retirement, but I can’t say I hate to see them go.