Ok. I can’t stop trying to figure out what is going to happen in this election. I’ve been using both vote trackers from Carolina Forward and the John Locke Foundation. I’ve also been looking at recent polling that’s coming in. Everything points to a banner year for Democrats.

Right now, Democrats are outpacing their Republican opponents by a wider margin than either 2022 or 2018. Through yesterday, Democrats have a 313,000 voter advantage over Republicans. In comparison, at this point in the early vote in 2018, Democrats led Republicans by about 200,000 early voters. In 2022, the number was around 124,000.

The unaffiliated voters are also showing up in unprecedented numbers. So far, 744,740 unaffiliated voters have voted compared to 421,300 in 2018 and 489,606 in 2022. I’m pretty certain those unaffiliated voters are breaking for Democrats by a wide margin.

The next three days will determine the size of the Democrats’ margin heading into Election Day. In both 2022 and 2018, early voting spiked during the final days of the period. If Democratic turnout slows down, Republicans might be able to staunch the bleeding, but if it continues on pace, Democrats will go into Election Day with an almost insurmountable lead.

Republicans will most likely turn out at around 58% overall since that’s what they’ve done in both 2018 and 2022, and they seem on pace to repeat it this year. Over the next three days, they will probably add 187,000 or so voters. Their early vote total will likely be around 730,000 voters. They will dominate Election Day.

If Democrats add voters at the same pace they did in 2022, they would add another 284,000 or so voters, but that’s not likely. Instead, they will add a low of about 206,000 more voters, the average of 2018 and 2022, and most likely somewhere between 250,000 and 270,000. They will probably end early voting with between 1,050,000 and 1,130,000 voters.

The unaffiliated voters are the wildcard. They now make up about 40% of the registered voters. They turn out at a lower rate than voters registered with a party, but their impact is significant. How they break determines elections.

So far, 744,740 unaffiliated voters have voted. They are on pace to add another 260,000 or so voters. At that rate, they will have around 1 million at the end of the early voting period.

If my scenario is right, Democrats will lead Republicans by more than 300,000 votes heading into Election Day. If unaffiliated voters break for Democrats by 13 points, like Gary Pearce’s poll of unaffiliated voters suggests, Democrats will have a lead of around 500,000 votes.

After early voting, Republicans will likely have voted about half of their voters. In 2018, their Election Day vote made up 49% of their total, and in 2022 it made up 48%. In 2022, Republicans had about a 177,000-vote advantage over Democrats on Election Day. In 2018, that margin was about 16,000 voters.

To offset the margin that Democrats likely hold going into Election Day, Republicans would need to have a record surge of between 950,000 and 1 million voters. And that’s assuming that late-breaking unaffiliated voters are more conservative and split their votes between Republicans and Democrats. In other words, GOP total turnout would need to be around 73%.

And that’s why Republicans are about to lose big. They are not going to turn out at presidential levels on Election Day this year. They might cut the margin some, but Democrats are poised to win by large margins, maybe enough to sweep some people into office.

All of this is speculation based on past turnout projections. I could be way off. Unaffiliated voters may not be heavily supporting Democrats. Democratic turnout could drop dramatically over the last three days of early vote and drop even more on Election Day. But I don’t think so.

Republicans are already trying to meddle in elections. They are trying to steal an election preemptively in Alaska. The Department of Justice has sued to block the certification of Alaska ballots if the Republican incumbent loses. Trump and the GOP have so denigrated our election process that the move is not even getting much attention.

The Department of Justice is trying to overrule the Alaska Supreme Court. There are two men named Dan Sullivan on the ballot. One is the current senator; the other is a stalking horse. The case has already gone before the state supreme court, and the second Dan Sullivan has been allowed to stay on the ballot.

DOJ says the second Dan Sullivan on the ballot should not be able to run because he’s just trying to steal votes from incumbent U.S. Senator Dan Sullivan. The ballot identifies one as “Sullivan, Daniel J. Jr.” and the other as “Sullivan, Dan S. (Registered Republican) Incumbent.” Can you tell which one is the incumbent Republican? You would have to be MAGA stupid to confuse them.

Don’t expect any Republicans to speak up about the shenanigans. They’ve already shown a willingness to undermine democracy, or to look the other way while their fellow travelers do it. Even Thom Tillis is getting into the act, saying it should be investigated. According to a report in the Washington Post, officials in numerous states are concerned about Republicans trying to undermine the election.

In North Carolina, we know better than anybody. Last cycle, they tried to steal a state Supreme Court seat by changing the rules after the election was over. Only a ruling from a federal judge stopped them, but they are constantly pushing up against the guardrails meant to protect our democracy. They have become an anti-democratic party, rigging elections and casting doubt on the system to delegitimize it in the minds of citizens.

In this state, Republicans shifted control of the board of elections from the governor’s office, where it had lived for decades, to the state auditor’s office, where they’ve stacked the board with GOP activists and partisans. They redistricted congressional seats in the middle of the decade to try to rig another seat for Republicans. And, of course, few elected Republicans will admit that the 2020 election was not stolen, and even fewer will speak out against the pardoning of the people who stormed the Capitol.

As early voting gets underway with unusually high turnout both in North Carolina and across the country, Republicans are needling Democrats about their accusations of voter suppression. But just because Republicans have failed to suppress the vote doesn’t mean they haven’t tried.

It’s indisputable that Republicans try to put up more barriers to voting while Democrats try to reduce them. Republicans call their attempts at restriction “voter integrity” instead of voter suppression. They claim they’re protecting elections against massive voter fraud that’s never occurred.

To hear Republicans tell it, Democrats have opened the borders to bring large numbers of immigrants to vote illegally. It’s an absurd theory rooted in right-wing fantasies, but it’s given credence by Republicans who should know better.

We never heard much about voter fraud until Barack Obama was elected president, and then suddenly it was a major GOP talking point. Republicans just couldn’t believe that many Americans would actually vote for a Black man for president. There must have been voter fraud, they decided, and they would make sure it didn’t happen again. They’ve been trying to rig elections ever since.

In North Carolina, we’ve been ground zero in the GOP assault on democracy. Their monster voter-suppression bill was struck down by the federal courts for targeting African American voters “with almost surgical precision.” The state is one of the most gerrymandered in the country. They tried to steal a state Supreme Court seat by changing the rules of the election after it was over. And they’ve taken over the state board of elections and packed it with activists.

They passed a bill this year aimed at making it easier to disqualify mail-in ballots, to combat the imaginary fraud. Governor Josh Stein has urged people to vote in person. He’s also questioned the motives of the new state board of elections under state Auditor Dave Boliek. It’s good to have our elected officials watching out for people instead of their political party.

In North Carolina, we know, firsthand, that Republicans will do whatever they can to alter elections in their favor. Alaska will almost certainly not be the only state they try to sabotage this year. The American people are really the only check on them. Democrats need to win by large enough margins to remove any doubt about the outcome. Then they need to protect our democracy from Republicans who want to dismantle it.

With votes coming in at a steady pace, most of the armchair analysts on social media are watching the Democratic versus Republican share of the ballots being cast. Democrats started with a massive lead, making up more than 46% of the votes cast while Republicans initially made up less than 20%. Over the course of the week, though, Republicans’ share of the votes has increased while Democrats’ share has decreased. As it stands right now, Democrats make up 42% and Republicans 23%.

So where is the balance? With unaffiliated voters, of course. This election they are coming into their own. They make up 34% of the voters so far, about 8% more than in 2018 and 5% more than in 2022. These voters will break Democratic this year, probably in a big way.

Democratic registration has been falling for decades. Today, there are almost 360,000 fewer Democrats than there were in 2018 and 160,000 fewer than there were in 2022. Republicans have about 200,000 more voters than in 2018 and 110,000 more than in 2022.

Unaffiliated voters have increased by more than 530,000 in the past two years. They make up 40% of registered voters now. Almost half of voters under 40 years old are registered unaffiliated.

The surge of unaffiliated voters are people who are motivated. And the people who are motivated this cycle are voting against Republicans. We will see if they slow down in the coming week.

Early in the early voting period, I suggested Democrats had a 31-point lead. Now, I suspect it’s down to about 24 points. In 2018, Republicans won Election Day by about 13 points. In 2022, they won it by about 21 points.

Republicans need to close the gap considerably before Election Day. They are more likely to win by their 2018 margin than their 2022 margin, and it might be less than that. Unaffiliated voters are the only ones consistently outpacing both their 2018 and 2022 turnout on a day-to-day basis.

In 2022, Cheri Beasley led the early vote by 193,000 votes, or 54% of the early vote. Ted Budd won the Election Day vote by 315,000. In 2018, with the Republican vote split, Democrat Anita Earls garnered 54% of the early vote and just under 50% of the total vote. Republicans won the Election Day vote by about 13 points and may have edged out Earls except for the two Republicans on the ballot.

Democrats need to go into Election Day with a larger margin than they had in 2022 or 2018 to get the wins they need. Right now, they look poised to do that. Republican turnout is a bit lighter than it was in either 2018 or 2022 while Democrats are mostly keeping pace. Unaffiliated voters are the big unknown and the only ones voting consistently, and considerably, above their percentages in the last two midterms. They will determine the depth of the Democratic victory in North Carolina.

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In the early vote in North Carolina, Democrats are still dominating the turnout, though their plurality is slowly shrinking. They make up 44% of the voters so far, and Republicans make up 22%. Unaffiliated voters are at 34%, outpacing Republicans. Those unaffiliated voters are breaking for Democrats by about 15 points, according to a recent poll. The gap between Democrats and Republicans will continue to shrink, but the question is by how much. What’s happening outside the voting booth will influence the turnout and the outcome.

For Republicans overall, the news keeps getting worse. Last night, a Trump-aligned super PAC pulled out of NC-11, signaling that it believes Democrat Jamie Ager is likely to win the congressional seat. Donald Trump went on stage in Greenville and conceded that Roy Cooper would be the next senator for North Carolina. Virginia Foxx is running ads in a district that Trump won by 18 points.

In Ohio, Republican gubernatorial nominee Vivek Ramaswamy released an ad featuring Democratic nominee Amy Acton’s estranged mother calling her a liar. It turns out the mother lost custody of Acton and her brother for abusing them. Acton’s stepfather was indicted for sexually abusing her, and the mother sided with the stepfather and apparently still does.

The ad is horrific, and it’s being condemned by both sides. It’s also the kind of thing that reminds voters that Trump never released the Epstein files, and that Republicans seem willing to protect pedophiles when it’s in their political interest.

In Texas, Neil Bush, George W. Bush’s brother, went on social media to let the world know that he voted for James Talarico over Ken Paxton. He says he has “deep concerns” about Paxton. In particular, Bush criticized Paxton for pushing election denial in 2020 and believes he’s done damage to the Republican Party. Bush is creating a permission structure for Texas Republicans to sit out the Senate race or support Talarico.

The election forecasters at Sabato’s Crystal Ball pushed 30 seats toward Democrats, including moving Don Davis in NC-01 and Ager in NC-11 from toss-up to Lean-D. They now have enough seats favoring Democrats to shift control of the House. They say there are enough competitive races for Democrats to capture as many as 235 seats, matching their majority after 2018.

All of this reminds me of 2006. Back then, the cycle began with most people expecting Republicans to keep control of the Senate while the House seemed to be in play. By September, the situation looked different. Candidate quality was hampering the GOP, and a series of scandals hurt Republican credibility. Combined with Bush’s handling of Hurricane Katrina and setbacks in the war in Iraq, the political environment deteriorated until anything seemed possible by the fall.

Republicans kept making unforced errors. Virginia Senator George Allen called an Indian-American tracker “macaca,” a scandal that eventually cost him his seat. Florida Congressman Mark Foley was exposed for sexually harassing male pages, forcing his resignation about a month before the election. Republican Rep. Bob Ney, after months of maintaining his innocence, pleaded guilty in the Abramoff scandal in October. Finally, Ted Haggard, an evangelical leader and adviser to Bush and congressional Republicans, got caught paying for sex with a male escort.

This year, Republicans are plagued by a president who can’t keep his mouth shut. Ramaswamy’s ad might remind people of why they don’t like Republicans, but Trump’s actions indicate he doesn’t care about them. While Americans are worried about rising prices, Trump is upgrading golf courses and building monuments to himself. In North Carolina, he threatened to withhold support for veterans who suffered ailments from toxic water if Democrats win.

Republicans are sending him into states knowing that he’s alienating swing voters, but also knowing he may be the only person who can motivate his reluctant base. It’s damned if you do and damned if you don’t. It was all so avoidable, and all so delicious to watch.

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We now have competing online vote trackers for North Carolina. For years, Civitas has had a tool to track early voting. Now, Carolina Forward has one. I’ve relied on the Civitas tracker for years, but I think it will need an update if it wants to compete.

The two trackers mostly have the same information, but the Carolina Forward one is more user-friendly, with an updated interface that makes the Civitas tracker feel clunky and a little outdated. The new tracker also offers easy comparisons with previous years and readily surfaces information about vote propensity and demographics. Much of that information is available on Civitas, but it takes some searching.

Civitas has one advantage that I can’t find on the Carolina Forward tracker: more history. While Carolina Forward offers comparisons to the last two general elections, Civitas goes back to the 2000 cycle. I’m as interested in the turnout in 2018 as I am in the 2022 turnout. I use Civitas for that.

That said, most of what I’m looking for is more easily accessible on the Carolina Forward tracker. I’m grateful to both organizations for providing the information. I hope the competition makes them better tools. The more information, and the easier it is to access, the better.

In using these tools, I’ve had a lot of fun watching the votes come in. While it’s still very early, some trends are starting to develop, and they bode well for Democrats. First, turnout so far is high. Far more people have voted this year than in either 2022 or 2018. More than 525,000 people had voted through Sunday. During the same four-day period in 2022, only 383,000 had voted, and in 2018, only 426,000 had.

Democrats are dominating the voting. They make up about 46% of the voters, more than the 41% in 2022 or 43% in 2018. Republicans make up only 20% of the vote, instead of the 29% in 2022 or the 30% in 2018. Unaffiliated voters are making their presence felt. They make up about 35% of the voters, as opposed to 30% in 2022 and 26% in 2018.

Probably the best news for Democrats is the turnout among African American voters. They make up 23% of the voters, and made up only 19% at this point in both 2022 and 2018. Declining participation from African American voters has hurt Democrats in the past. In 2022, they made up less than 17% of the overall vote. In 2018, it was 20%. If they sustain their momentum, they could make the difference between a good night and a great night on November 3.

It’s very early in the process, and the current trends could easily reverse in the next few days. We’ve seen it before. The excitement dies down, and the Democrats’ easiest votes—the low-hanging fruit—come in early. Republicans make up ground in the latter days of the early voting period. They vote much more heavily on Election Day than Democrats.

Unaffiliated voters will show their influence this cycle. Their increased numbers so far indicate they are motivated, and according to a recent poll, they are breaking hard for Democrats, by about 15 points. If that’s right and holding, Democrats have about a 30-point margin so far. They need to keep banking votes to offset GOP margins of Election Day voters.

In 2022, Republicans won Election Day voting by about 21 points. In 2018, they won it by about 13. They’ll need to close the gap considerably before early voting ends if they don’t want to get blown out.

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Early voting has begun. It’s far too early to tell much about what is happening. That said, the first day of in-person early voting saw a 46% increase over 2022. That should be a good sign for Democrats.

In this election, higher turnout will be better for Democrats. As I wrote earlier, Republicans are consistent, voting about 58% of their registration. Democrats are the most inconsistent. In 2018, they voted at 54.5%, and in 2022 only 51%. Yesterday, they made up almost half of the in-person votes cast—47.5%. That’s a healthy start.

There are two things to consider while watching the votes. Democratic registration has been dropping for several decades. It finally hit a floor, but there are far fewer registered Democrats today than there were just four years ago. So if the same raw number of Democrats shows up, it will take a much higher turnout rate.

In 2018, 54.5% turnout produced 1,466,238 votes from Democrats. The same number of votes today would require about 63% turnout. That’s not likely, and the second point is why.

Unaffiliated registration has increased pretty dramatically in recent years. Today, they make up almost 40% of registered voters. Democrats haven’t lost registration to Republicans. They’ve lost it to unaffiliated voters, many of whom still vote for Democrats even after shedding the party label.

According to the poll I discussed in a previous post, those unaffiliated voters are breaking for Democrats by 15 points. So a larger unaffiliated turnout probably adds to Democratic margins too. In 2018 and 2022, they voted at about 45%. If that number goes up, it’s probably good for Democrats.

Republicans, for their part, have been remarkably steady. They’ve made up about 30% to 31% of voter registration for the past two decades and they’ve turned out at 58% in both 2022 and 2018. For years, they benefited from unaffiliated voters—many of them former Democrats, others newcomers who arrived from up north supporting lower taxes, fewer unions, and less regulation.

Today, the growing share of unaffiliated voters leans more Democratic. Both Republicans and Democrats are aging. As they die, they are replaced by younger voters with less affinity for either party, but who skew Democratic in the voting booth.

Almost half of unaffiliated voters, 46%, are 40 or under. For comparison, voters 40 and under make up about 30% of Republicans and 34% of Democrats. Only 17% of unaffiliated voters are over 65, while 28% of Democrats and 29% of Republicans are.

In 2022, a strong year for Republicans, turnout among voters over 65 was up about 3 points over 2018, to more than 71%. Meanwhile, turnout among voters under 26 was down more than 5 points from 2018, and voters 26–40 were down almost as much. The more those younger voters show up this year, the better the year for Democrats.

So far, the people voting are mostly people who always vote. We won’t know much about trends for another week or so. The numbers to watch are Democratic and unaffiliated turnout, to see if they surge. Republicans are likely to vote like they always have, whether early or on Election Day.

Buckle up.

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We’re coming down to the wire. Election Day is less than three weeks away, and in-person early voting begins tomorrow in North Carolina. Opinions are basically set, and any changes will be at the margins. About this time in the cycle, I get a bit obsessed with trying to figure out what is going to happen.

A poll commissioned by my buddy Gary Pearce has helped me scratch my itch. Gary actually did two polls—one of rural voters and one of unaffiliated voters. I was especially interested in the unaffiliated voters. I’ll probably write about the rural poll later.

According to Gary’s poll, unaffiliated voters favor Roy Cooper over Michael Whatley by 15 points. That number seems key to understanding how the race will turn out. Intuitively, it also seems about right. I expect Gary’s poll is the largest sample of unaffiliated likely voters done this cycle. They interviewed 1,154 people.

I wrote about the East Carolina University poll earlier this week. It has Cooper winning self-described independents by 16 points. I looked at a couple of polls that have Cooper up by double digits, and they have him leading among independents by around 30 points or so. I hope it’s true, but I don’t believe it. Throughout this exercise, I’ve leaned on the most conservative numbers I could justify—if anything, I’m understating Cooper’s position, not inflating it.

Understanding where Cooper is among unaffiliated voters gives us a road map to the potential scenarios for this election. According to the State Board of Elections, Republicans turned out at 58% in both 2018 and 2022, the last two midterm elections. Their registration has been steady, so we can expect them to vote at 58% again this year.

There are currently 2,330,643 registered Republicans. If they turn out at 58%, 1,351,773 will vote this year.

Unaffiliated voters turned out at 46% in 2018 and 45% in 2022. I suspect that will stay about the same. There are 3,168,005 of them registered now, so at 46% turnout, 1,457,282 will vote.

Democrats are the wild card. In 2018, 54.5% of Democrats voted. In 2022, only 51% voted. There are 2,331,133 registered. If they turn out at 55% this year, 1,282,123 Democrats will vote—almost 70,000 fewer than Republicans.

Democrats will win anyway, because of unaffiliated voters breaking their way. But turnout only gets us partway. The margin comes from how each group splits its vote.

Give Cooper 97% of Democrats and just 5% of Republicans—a few points of crossover each way, which is modest for a six-time statewide winner against a little-known opponent—and split the unaffiliated 58-42, matching Gary’s 15-point margin. Run the numbers and Cooper takes about 53% of the two-party vote to Whatley’s 47%, a six-point win. If Democrats can push their turnout up to match Republicans at 58%, Cooper wins by eight. Third parties will likely take about three points, so on the full ballot the margin looks more like 51-45.

Republican turnout could drop, but I don’t think it will—or if it does, not by much. They are older, more reliable voters. Their turnout has been consistent in midterms.

Unaffiliated voters could vote in higher numbers, but they don’t have a history of doing so. I suspect 45% or 46% is about right. If it does get significantly higher, Cooper could do a little better.

Democrats have the less reliable base. Their younger voters, who give Democrats their widest margins, never top 40% turnout. Pushing them above that this year could give Democrats bigger margins.

Gary’s poll shows Democrats with a 13-point advantage on the legislative generic ballot among unaffiliated voters, similar to Cooper’s 15-point lead. That’s certainly enough to break the veto-proof majorities in both chambers, but Democrats will probably need to push up turnout to capture the House or Senate.

I don’t think opinions change much between now and Election Day. There are too few undecided voters left, and too little time, to move things far from where they are now. The game in North Carolina should shift from persuasion to turnout. Democrats will likely have a good year. Boosting turnout could make it a great one.

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The election is three weeks from tomorrow. In North Carolina, some of the polls are starting to come back to earth. Roy Cooper is not going to win the state by double digits. The latest East Carolina University poll and one from Trafalgar released yesterday probably have more realistic assessments.

The ECU poll has Cooper up 50% to 43%, with 6% undecided. When the pollsters pushed undecided voters, they split evenly, with Cooper ahead 53% to 46%. That sounds much more plausible. I don’t really think any Democrat gets more than 53% of the vote, and I believe it could be less.

The Trafalgar poll shows Cooper leading by eight, 49% to 41%. They tested the third-party candidates, Shannon Bray and Michael Dublin, who get a combined 3.4% of the vote. Seven percent are undecided. None of these polls show Whatley with enough to catch up, but they do show Cooper with a cap just above 50%. As I’ve said before, the outcome of the Senate race will influence campaigns down-ballot.

Independent voters are breaking for Cooper by 16 points, according to the ECU poll. That’s probably decisive in an evenly divided state and bodes well for the court and legislative races. We aren’t likely to see a large percentage of those folks splitting their ballots.

The size of Cooper’s win will be determined by turnout among each party’s base. The Democratic base seems motivated, judging by steadily increasing registration numbers. They surpassed Republicans in voter registrations this week. While the numbers might not make a difference in an election with almost 4 million voters, they indicate an enthusiasm that hasn’t been seen in recent years.

Since early-August, Democrats have consistently outpaced Republicans in net voter registrations. Last week alone, Democrats gained more than six times as many as Republicans, 5,055 to 804, according to Andy Jackson of the John Locke Foundation. That may signal Democratic motivation. In the same stretch of the last midterm, the pattern ran the other way. In the week ending Oct. 8, 2022, Republicans outgained Democrats 1,460 to 921, and Ted Budd went on to defeat Cheri Beasley by about three points.

In 2018, the last really good election for Democrats, Republican turnout was about four points higher than Democratic turnout. The independents breaking for Democrats gave them the edge. For a wave to happen in North Carolina this year, Democrats need to match or surpass Republican turnout.

I think the polls will get a bit more realistic as we head down the stretch. In a state like North Carolina, it’s hard for either party to win by more than about three points. If Cooper gets beyond that, he will have coattails, and the bigger his margin, the longer they’ll be. With enthusiasm in their favor, Democrats need to push hard to motivate their base to drive up the score. They should have a good night in three weeks. They could make it a great one.

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Pete Hegseth says the military will live-stream the firing squad execution of the Fort Hood shooter. He’s making a government-sponsored snuff film. What a sick bastard.

Hegseth is clearly excited about it, just like he was about blowing up boats in the Caribbean. He thinks it’s tough and glorious to kill people who can’t fight back. He’s a guy who revels in the suffering of others and in belittling people who have little power. He’s the personification of MAGA.

Trump loves a spectacle. Live-streaming a military execution is the same impulse as his military parade. It’s why they renamed the Department of Defense the Department of War. For him, it’s all about the ratings.

In reality, the move will disgust decent Americans. The last public execution in the United States was almost 90 years ago. Western nations stopped public executions for a reason. They believed their societies had moved away from barbarism and become more humane. Execution is punishment, not entertainment.

Firing squads were fairly common during the Civil War, and witnesses found them distasteful. At one execution early in the war, a soldier wrote home, “It was the most horrible sight I ever seen [sic]. It was the first time that I ever seen a man shot and hope the last…I would rather be shot myself than to shoot another man.” He likely went on to see worse, but most Americans won’t.

In making America great again, Trump, Hegseth, and company are mimicking tin-pot dictatorships. As conservatives demand we defend Western values, they are embracing the morals of the mullahs in Iran. Instead of appealing to our better angels, they are summoning our demons.

This whole episode comes on the heels of a botched execution in Tennessee that tortured a woman for hours and left her on life support. That’s truly the theater of the absurd. Instead of promoting the death penalty as entertainment, we should be moving to abolish it, like every other Western nation.

I don’t have much sympathy for most murderers, and I’ll admit many deserve to die, but I don’t believe in torture and I don’t believe our justice system is infallible. We’ve already seen numerous botched executions, and we’ve almost certainly executed innocent people. We should be moving forward in history, not returning to barbarism. Glorifying a killing by making it a public spectacle demeans us as a country.

If Trump and company publicize this execution, I hope the backlash is fierce—but I suspect it will mostly reveal, once again, who among us we should fear and can never trust, in public and private life alike.

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This week highlights how unserious North Carolina’s Republican Party really is. Panicking Republicans are heading back into a special legislative session to suspend the gas tax in an attempt to staunch the GOP bleeding caused by rising fuel prices. Thom Tillis is on a book tour that exposes him as more of a charlatan than a serious political thinker.

As Tillis goes on various cable news outlets, he shows how disappointing he is as a senator. He loves the idea of being the Republican rebel but always ends up being the Republican toady. Tillis likes to brag about the things he says but is mostly quiet about the things he actually does. He proves, over and over again, that he knows what’s right and does what’s wrong.

In particular, Tillis voted for the most incompetent Cabinet in modern history. He claims that supporting Pete Hegseth’s nomination for secretary of defense is his biggest regret, and he defends it by saying, essentially, “If I only knew then what I know now.” But he did know. We all did, and if he couldn’t see it then, that really speaks to his judgment—or lack thereof.

In his interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, Tillis reveals his tribalist nature. He blasts the cabinet members he supported and admits that Republicans have caused their own problems, but says that electing Republicans is the most important issue. He seems to think that Trumpism is a passing fancy and that he and people like him will lead the party back to Reagan conservatism. In other words, he’s delusional.

In the legislature, Republicans are throwing a Hail Mary, trying to ease the anger over rising gas prices. It’s a nakedly political move that will get them little credit but ultimately cost the state. It also highlights their cynicism and hypocrisy.

Four years ago, when gas prices were putting pressure on consumers, the Republican-led legislature refused to act. Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger’s office said, “If President Biden is serious about easing the burden on working families he should re-evaluate his administration’s policies that have led to surging prices at the gas pump.” If Berger really believed what he said, he should apply the same standard to Trump.

North Carolina Republicans aren’t serious people. They are desperate people. Tillis is milking his final moments in the limelight. He loves attention, and he’s trying to shape his reputation as a renegade when in reality he was mostly just a coward. He made a lot of noise about standing on principle but almost always chose politics instead. Republicans in the legislature are casting desperate votes that only highlight how badly GOP policies have damaged the country. They are in Raleigh today because of Trump, not because of gas prices.

Tillis wants to be remembered as a rebel, and the legislature wants to be seen as fighting for you. Neither is true, and in four weeks voters get to say so.

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As Republican chances in November continue to plummet, Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Berger and House Speaker Destin Hall apparently have been besieged by panicked calls from GOP legislators screaming, “DO SOMETHING!” So they have.

Late on a rainy Saturday, Berger and Hall announced they are bringing legislators back to Raleigh to draw attention to how much Donald Trump has raised gas and diesel prices. They are going to fix the situation by stripping resources from some needed program to cut the gas tax. They are robbing Peter to pay Paul.

The move might make them feel better, but it won’t distract voters from the damage Donald Trump and the Republican Party have done to the country. They might be able to get the tax down a bit, but prices will still be higher than they were a year ago. Gas is more than a dollar per gallon higher than when Trump took office. Diesel is up $3.00 per gallon.

A special session to address these prices won’t mitigate what’s going on nationally—and what’s most influencing the election. Trump is more worried about monuments to himself than the plight of average Americans. He seems disengaged from the war that’s driving up fuel prices and oblivious to the pain his erratic tariff policies are causing consumers. Republicans in Congress have done nothing to restrain his worst instincts and everything to enable them. What happens in Washington will drive this midterm, not some late action in a statehouse.

Democrats should make the return to Raleigh a reminder of why those prices went up. Donald Trump took us to war with Iran for no reason, and the Republicans in Congress refused to restrain him. Now fuel prices will be higher for the foreseeable future. Cutting taxes on gas and diesel for drivers will force cuts somewhere else in state government. It was all so avoidable, and Republicans did nothing to avoid it.

I don’t like Republicans coming back into session, because they will most likely cause other mischief. In November 2024, just after the election, Republicans called a special session claiming to address Hurricane Helene relief. Instead, they passed a bill stripping power from the governor and from council of state offices won by Democrats. This time, I worry they are going to try to interfere with an election they are about to lose.

Republicans face a bleak political landscape in North Carolina. The national Republican Party has largely abandoned GOP Senate nominee Michael Whatley, leaving the party with seriously diminished coverage in the final month of the election. A tweet shows that Democrats have out-registered Republicans by more than 6,000 voters in recent weeks. That number might not affect the vote totals, but it’s almost certainly an indication of voter motivation.

To top it off, Republicans have done very little to help North Carolinians in the last few years. They failed to pass a budget for almost three years, leaving teachers, state employees, and schools underfunded and underappreciated. Instead, they’ve focused on consolidating power, changing voting laws, and diminishing the authority of Democratic officials.

Now they are coming back to Raleigh to try to make things right. It won’t work. Any effort to relieve the pressure of gas and diesel prices will be too little, too late. That’s why I worry they will try to gain advantage through other, anti-democratic measures. Democrats’ best defense is to get out the vote and run up the score.

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National Republicans have abandoned Michael Whatley. The Senate Leadership Fund, the chief super PAC of Senate Republicans, is halting its ads in North Carolina after already spending $30 million here and shifting the money to—wait for it—Kansas, a state that hasn’t elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1932. Another Super PAC pulled $6.5 million last weeks and another Trump-aligned group has nothing reserved past this week. The wheels are coming off the machine for the GOP.

But now is not the time to relax. Now is the time for North Carolina Democrats to kick their campaigns into high gear. Cooper needs to run like a scalded dog toward November 3. He needs to wail on Whatley along the way, demoralizing his supporters and building momentum as he goes.

The U.S. Senate race will still drive the turnout. People want to be with winners, and Cooper needs to encourage everybody to get on board. The larger his margin, the more down-ballot Democrats he will drag across the line. If his margin is greater than about five points, the makeup of the electorate is going to be beneficial across the board. There’s nothing above Cooper on the ballot to mitigate the impact of his victory.

The game now is juicing Democratic turnout and depressing GOP voters. Whatley won’t have the resources to respond to what should be devastating attacks. Democrats need to make sure Cooper has the resources so he doesn’t have to pull punches. The harder he beats Whatley down, the fewer Republicans will turn out. It’s like leaving the stadium with five minutes left because your team is losing so badly.

And nobody deserves a good beating more than Republicans like Whatley. They embraced and encouraged Trump, knowing he had tried to undermine our democracy and overturn an election. All of them, including people like Thom Tillis, have either participated in or covered up massive corruption by the Trump family and their cronies. They need to pay a steep price. It’s time to return to accountability.

North Carolina Democrats, for their part, need to open up their pocketbooks and keep the money in state. Give to Cooper. Give to the North Carolina Democratic Party. Give to local candidates. Dig deep.

As Republicans shift money to other states, national Democratic money will leave North Carolina too, as the party tries to expand its Senate map. We need to expand it right here in North Carolina, picking up legislative and congressional seats and winning the important judicial races.

Even if Republicans are surrendering the state, the Senate race will still dominate the midterm elections. As Whatley sees his chances fade, Cooper needs to keep the heat on and run like he’s behind. Every Democrat needs to get in the game and run up the score. Press the advantage. Opportunities like this one don’t come around often.

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The most important race on the ballot in North Carolina is, arguably, for Supreme Court. Justice Anita Earls is trying to hold the seat she won eight years ago. Former Republican state representative Sarah Stevens wants to unseat her. Earls is one of only two Democrats on the court and needs to hold the seat to give Democrats a decent shot at gaining a majority before the end of the decade.

In a forum this week, Stevens said that her judicial heroes were Paul Newby, chief justice of the Supreme Court of North Carolina, and John Roberts, chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. That answer alone should disqualify her. She could have said Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court and a conservative. She could have said Antonin Scalia, a conservative judicial giant. Or she could have mentioned Susie Sharp, the first woman to serve as chief justice of the Supreme Court of North Carolina. Instead, she chose two men who will be most noted for politicizing their courts.

Newby, in particular, is a petty man who repeatedly puts politics ahead of jurisprudence. He whined when then-Governor Roy Cooper appointed Cheri Beasley to the chief justice position instead of him. When Republicans took control of the court, he scrapped the concept of judicial precedent to make nakedly partisan decisions on gerrymandering and voting restrictions. He tried to change the rules of an election after it was over, until he was slapped down by a Trump-appointed federal judge. And he removed senior judges at the Court of Appeals, superior court, and district court from administrative duties if they were not sufficiently conservative or loyal to him or the GOP.

North Carolina has never seen a more activist judge than Paul Newby. His court often behaves more like a legislative body than a judicial one. He has made judicial review subservient to legislative action, ruling consistently in favor of the General Assembly instead of providing checks and balances.

Newby has forgotten North Carolina’s judicial legacy. In 1787, in the case of Bayard v. Singleton, a North Carolina court was the first in the nation to find a legislative act unconstitutional. It set the precedent for Marbury v. Madison, which established judicial review as a core function of the court system. Newby’s court has been little more than a rubber stamp for Republican legislative and political desires.

Anybody who cites Newby as a judicial hero has no business anywhere near the Supreme Court. Stevens has signaled she would take her partisanship to the state’s highest court to protect the GOP’s legislative agenda. We don’t need more hacks than we already have.

In contrast, Earls has been an outstanding jurist. She has a judicial philosophy with deep historical roots that guides her decisions. She believes strongly in civil rights, equality, and the court as part of a system of checks and balances. She also understands the administrative role the court plays. She’s clearly the better candidate, both for the seat and for the state.

Sarah Stevens brings little to the court that it doesn’t already have. She’s indicated she would be beholden to a hyper-partisan chief justice, and her experience is more political than judicial. We need thoughtful justices who will add the accountability that’s sorely lacking.

Anita Earls will provide the oversight and checks our system demands.

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The Republican cope game is strong! This weekend, North Carolina Republican operative Jonathan Felts reposted a tweet by a right-wing news outlet that compared polling in this year’s Senate race to the Tillis-Cunningham race in 2020. The outlet claimed, “@WhatleyNC is already ahead of where Thom Tillis was 6 years ago, and Tillis went on to win by about two percent.” I guess now they’re waiting for Cooper’s sexting scandal to drop.

The comparison is ridiculous on all fronts. This is not a presidential election cycle. Michael Whatley is not an incumbent. Roy Cooper is a former governor who has been elected statewide six times. Most importantly, the political environment right now is nothing like the political environment in 2020. It’s all just cope and spin.

An AARP poll from Republican pollster Fabrizio Ward and Democratic pollster Impact Research shows Whatley trailing by eleven points and Cooper with a majority at 53%. Cooper has a positive favorability while Whatley is upside down. The national money is already leaving the state, and that trend will accelerate as we get into October.

I trust this poll because Impact Research is John Anzalone’s firm. He’s been polling North Carolina for more than 30 years, and his firm knows how to get a sample right. With firms from both parties involved, the samples and questions should be free of bias.

Republicans are desperately trying to convince their rank-and-file that they can still win this cycle, but not even the donors believe it. At a donor retreat this weekend, GOP donors scoffed at a pollster who told them Republicans might be able to pick up a Senate seat. Attendees scoffed at the report, with one calling it “delusional,” according to Axios.

Republicans are hanging on a massive financial advantage. Their third-party groups have stockpiled cash and appear ready to spend it. According to the New York Times, GOP-aligned super PACs have reserved $220 million more in ads than Democrats. The Republican National Committee also has far more cash than its counterpart at the Democratic National Committee.

On the flip side, Democratic candidates have raised far more money than their GOP opponents. Candidate money goes further because campaigns are guaranteed the lowest unit rate for television ads, while outside groups pay market rate.

I don’t think ads have much impact at this stage of the campaign, at least not for those at the top of the ticket. Ads have become increasingly less effective over the years, in part because people no longer believe them. They may move things a little around the edges with the least informed voters, but they can’t shift the political environment, which is the force driving voters right now.

For every ad that voters see, they see a gas station marquee that reads $4.15 per gallon. Hamburger is about $7.00 per pound. Even cheap coffee is no longer cheap. No ad can change those realities, and voters blame the party in power for the hits to their pocketbooks.

The late money flooding campaigns is probably too late. It would have been better spent organizing. Mobilizing voters takes time, and even a big influx of cash can’t jumpstart a GOTV program in October. I suspect it’s too little, too late.

We’re five weeks out from the election. We could still see an October surprise, but it would need to be a significant national event to alter the political environment. The electorate is driven by rising gas prices and the increasing cost of goods caused by diesel fuel that’s $3.00 per gallon more than it was in September 2024. Finally, Republicans have lost the confidence of voters who were told Trump would lower prices and keep us out of foreign wars. Changing those perceptions in five weeks will not be easy.

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North Carolina has a bunch of constitutional amendments on the ballot again. And once again, they are all bad. Republicans keep trying to enshrine conservative principles in the state constitution with mixed results. This year, they might get what they want.

The worst of the amendments hampers state and local ability to raise revenue. Republicans argue that they are preventing tax hikes, but they’re really just protecting wealthy citizens from paying their fair share. They are also screwing their base again.

One amendment would cap the income tax at 3.5%. It’s already capped at 7%. Republicans want to prevent Democrats from ever again enacting a progressive tax system that would tax wealthier residents at a higher rate. If the state needs more revenue, they are trying to ensure that lower-income residents shoulder a greater burden.

Republicans have been touting their flat tax since they enacted it more than a decade ago. Since then, the tax burden has increased for the poorest North Carolinians and decreased for the wealthiest. This amendment would make the trend irreversible.

The next amendment would hamstring local governments by letting the legislature—not county or municipal elected bodies—determine property tax rates. It blatantly strips power from the government closest to the people and would make raising property taxes difficult without offering local governments any other way to bring in money. The counties that suffer most would be those with the fewest people and the smallest sales tax base. So screw you, rural North Carolina. It’s a big-government move from the party that used to argue for smaller government.

The final amendment is another voter ID amendment. This one is directed at people who vote by mail. It requires them to provide a voter ID.

I don’t really oppose most voter ID laws, but I don’t support anything Republicans are doing to elections and democracy. They’ve shown no interest in making our elections fairer and have repeatedly tried to undermine our system of elections. They are trying to use their power to restrict the franchise for anyone who might vote against them. They are an anti-democratic party, more interested in maintaining power than in protecting the rights of North Carolinians.

Right now, the polls indicate all of these amendments will pass with flying colors. I wish one of the money groups would step up to educate the public. People need to know that these amendments are not in their best interests. Somebody needs to urge them to vote no.

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The Washington Post this morning has a story about the Senate race in North Carolina. It’s the latest in a number of articles from national outlets that suggest Republicans believe North Carolina is getting out of reach. What’s different about this one is the title. It reads, “GOP appears deeply worried about Senate race in N.C., a once reliable state.” That’s not how I see North Carolina, but I think it’s the misperception of too many national journalists.

North Carolina has never been “reliable” for Republicans. It’s always been a fight, even if Republicans have won most presidential races over the past fifty years. Senate races have been notoriously competitive, and for the past twenty years the GOP has benefited from fundamentals. In particular, there’s been no midterm Senate race with a Republican president in the White House since 2002—until now.

In the two midterms in the past 20 years when the president was a Republican, 2006 and 2018, Democrats had banner years. Had North Carolina had Senate races those years, Democrats almost certainly would have won. The narrative would be significantly different.

As I’ve said before, Thom Tillis is the luckiest politician in recent memory. In 2014, he caught a break in his race against incumbent Kay Hagan. She almost held off Tillis in a wave election until the environment deteriorated because of the Ebola scare and ISIS executing journalists on live video. In the end, she lost by less than two points.

In 2020, Tillis got lucky again. This time, as an incumbent senator, he faced Cal Cunningham. Cunningham got caught in a sexting scandal just weeks before the election. Again, Tillis won by less than two points, and his own pollster said he would likely have lost without the scandal.

So here’s my point. Democrats, with a solid candidate, were always the favorite in North Carolina in 2026. They hit the jackpot with Cooper, a popular former governor and seasoned campaigner who knows how to run in the state. He drew the perfect foil in Michael Whatley, a Trump toady with little name recognition and less charisma.

Democrats also got a political environment tailor-made for the opposition party. Trump has been a disaster as president. He tanked a quickly recovering economy, got us into a war with no end in sight, allowed (encouraged?) rampant corruption, and has made his presidency about himself instead of the people he serves. Gas and diesel prices skyrocketing in the final weeks of the election are the icing on the cake.

Even though Cooper is the favorite right now, Republicans will probably continue to spend in North Carolina. Nationally, they have a huge financial advantage, even if ads can’t compete with gas prices. They want to keep Democrats spending here instead of in some other state. Eventually, though, they will probably drop Whatley unless something changes dramatically.

In the end, Cooper will likely win, unless some sort of monumental event occurs in the next few weeks. Polls show him up by double digits, but that won’t be the final margin. Most of those undecided voters are disgruntled Republicans who will either come home or stay home. Cooper will garner slightly more than 50%, and Whatley will probably land somewhere between 45 and 48 percent, with the difference going to third-party candidates.

Even with an advantage, Democrats here will run hard till the end. They understand the stakes—and the possibilities. A strong top of the ticket can bring riches down-ballot. Supreme Court candidate Anita Earls, arguably the most important race on the ballot, has a better chance of winning if Cooper performs well. His coattails could also help break Republicans’ veto-proof legislative majorities and, possibly, give Democrats control of the state House.

This election cycle was always going to be good for Democrats. The reason Michael Whatley is in the race is that Thom Tillis is so unpopular with Republicans that he couldn’t win a primary. The open-seat dynamic in a state like North Carolina would favor almost any competent Democrat. Having Roy Cooper running just added to the advantage. North Carolina was never reliably Republican.

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Last week ended with Republicans debating whether or not to pull funds from North Carolina and Georgia and spend them in other states where Senate Republicans are in trouble. In North Carolina, Michael Whatley has never caught fire, and Donald Trump’s visit to the state last week probably hurt him more than helped him. In Georgia, incumbent Democrat Jon Ossoff has led his opponent by a substantial margin all cycle.

Roy Cooper has sounded a warning, claiming that the election is a long way from over and that he expects the final margin to be in the low single digits. In such a race, anything can happen down the stretch. Cooper, Ossoff, and every other candidate should run through the tape. The fable of the tortoise and the hare applies to campaigns.

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Cooper could be right. There are still six weeks left in the election, and Democrats might be peaking too soon. Republicans could recover. Voters might start to move back toward the GOP because, for all their dissatisfaction now, they’re more concerned about what Democrats could do if they gained power. They may decide that the devil they know is better than the devil they don’t.

But that’s not how it feels right now. It feels like the forces driving this election are bigger than either party or their efforts to control the dialogue. It feels like a wholesale rejection of Trump and the GOP.

Most indicators suggest that Republicans are about to take a shellacking. As Nate Silver pointed out this weekend, gas prices are now over $4.00 per gallon, we’re stuck in a war with no end in sight, and Trump’s approval rating is about 20 points underwater. He says the conditions are right for a wave. If the election is a referendum on Trump’s performance, Democrats should have a big night on November 3.

Republicans really have no one but themselves to blame, not even Donald Trump. When voters elected Trump in 2024, they knew they would get a lot of bluster and bravado. They had lived through it before. They also expected Republicans to keep his worst instincts in check. They had seen that before, too. They expected Trump 2.0 to be a continuation of Trump 1.0.

Boy, were they wrong. Instead of holding Trump accountable, Republicans in Congress gave him everything he wanted. They confirmed an incompetent cabinet loyal to Trump, not the country. They let him impose tariffs that wrecked a quickly recovering and growing economy. They looked away as his family and business cronies plundered the government. They refused to put the brakes on his ill-advised war with Iran. And they’ve been muffled as Trump increasingly drives a wedge between the US and our Western allies.

Ironically, Republicans caved to Trump out of fear of electoral defeat. They believed they would lose their elections if they crossed MAGA. That might have been true in some primaries, but now Republicans are at risk of losing the Senate, a scenario virtually unthinkable a year ago. MAGA won’t save them now. The swing voters who narrowly broke for Trump in 2024 are overwhelmingly opposed to him now.

The national indicators favor Democrats, who have widened the congressional ballot to more than eight points—on par with 2018 or 2006. In North Carolina, Andy Jackson at the John Locke Foundation notes that last week, “Democratic registrations have picked up some steam. Republicans, not so much.” Almost 1,700 people registered as Democrats while only 357 registered Republican. Those numbers won’t mean much in the final vote, but they do indicate which party is motivated.

Republicans are starting to panic. I suspect they will shift funds away from Whatley in the coming weeks. They’re at risk of losing seats in places like Texas, Iowa, and Kansas. If those states become swing states, the Republican electoral college advantage vanishes quickly.

I hope Cooper keeps running as hard as he has been all year. I hope he wins big, and I hope he drags a bunch of Democrats across the line. It’s time for every Democrat to kick into high gear. They probably won’t get another chance like this for a long time.

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Donald Trump came to North Carolina to rally the GOP and instead chose to trash the state. He called it “one of the worst in the whole nation.” He threatened to withhold Helene relief to struggling western North Carolina. He lied about coming to the state in the aftermath of the storm. And a room full of Republicans cheered wildly.

Why do they hate North Carolina? Or more broadly, why do they always need to hate something?

Michael Whatley, for his part, posted a tweet that called North Carolina a “killing field for career criminals.” He was just trying to impress Trump, but it sure is insulting to the people whose votes he needs. Maybe they are trying to lose the election.

No prominent Republicans are calling Trump out. They are so beholden to him that they will throw the whole state under the bus to stay in his good graces—or to avoid the wrath of MAGA. They’ve created a monster that is consuming them.

If the state is really such a hellhole, the GOP gets the blame. They’ve controlled the legislature for the past 15 years and have asserted the superiority of the legislative branch, backed up by a Republican-controlled Supreme Court. They’ve weakened the executive branch, stripping powers from the governor and taking control of boards and committees throughout state government.

The Republicans in the legislature are the ones passing laws and addressing problems. If it’s the worst state, as Trump claims, it’s their fault. As Trump put it, “Nobody used to think of North Carolina as a dangerous state. It was like, North Carolina, it was beautiful, it was apple pie.” Then we elected Republicans, right?

Trump also threatened to withhold disaster relief funds for western North Carolina if the state doesn’t elect Whatley. That ought to go over well with the people and businesses who got clobbered by Helene. Now federal help comes with a partisan price tag. Trump may have given Jamie Ager the assist he needs to become the next member of Congress from the 11th District.

The rally really exposed Trump, MAGA, and the Republican Party. The first two are mean-spirited bullies, kicking people when they are down and trying to intimidate them into compliance. The Republican Party is made up of a bunch of cowards who won’t even stand up for the people they are supposed to represent. As I’ve said before, it’s the pathetic party.

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With the election now less than seven weeks away, polls are coming fast and furious. Almost all of them show Republicans facing strong headwinds caused by Trump and his policies. Voters are dissatisfied with the direction of the country and the hit to their pocketbooks from rising prices. Most prognosticators believe Democrats will take the House and have a good shot at the Senate.

Polls have taken a beating in recent elections. In 2024, they mostly had Harris winning, or at least didn’t have Trump sweeping the swing states. In 2022, most of them predicted a red wave that never materialized. We’ll find out soon whether or not they fixed the problems.

In North Carolina, Roy Cooper has led in every poll since the race took shape. The latest poll, by Republican pollster Trafalgar, has Cooper up by six, 48-42. Elon University has Cooper up by 11 points, 49-38, in a poll released last week. I suspect Cooper is closer to the six-point margin than the eleven-point one. Still, Whatley will struggle to close that gap considering Cooper’s consistent lead.

Republicans have been throwing a lot of mud at Cooper, but it’s not sticking. I suspect they’ve largely blown their wad. They hit him with their hardest shots and came up empty, mostly because they weren’t true and voters know it. People have been watching Cooper closely for more than a decade. Whatley’s asking them both to question their judgment and to believe they missed something obvious—that crime went out of control because of Cooper.

Instead of hurting Cooper, Whatley has likely damaged his own credibility with voters. If he was just making stuff up about Cooper in September, he’ll say anything going down the stretch. I suspect he’s done, and national Republicans will slowly start pulling out of North Carolina in October—maybe sooner if the environment continues to crater and they have to defend places like Texas, Iowa, and Kansas.

The dirty little secret about ads and money is that they can only do so much. The political environment is the 800-pound gorilla in any election. People vote the way they feel. Ads and money might move voters a couple of points, but they can’t shift the electorate by five or ten unless their opponents aren’t spending at all.

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And that’s why these generic ballot numbers are so concerning for Republicans. Nationally, Democrats have an 8.6-point lead in RCP’s generic ballot average and 8.2 in Nate Silver’s average. So far in September, the generic ballot is getting worse for Republicans.

In these generic ballot questions, a small number of voters, 7 or 8 percent, are still undecided. They will almost certainly break for Democrats, giving them another point or so, because this election is a referendum on Trump. At the end of the 2018 election, the RCP average was D+7.3. The final result was D+8.4. Expect to see a similar dynamic this year.

When a cycle turns against a party, the mistakes start to pile up. In 2006, Republicans spent the whole year fighting the Abramoff scandals, two unpopular wars, and a botched Katrina response. Then, in late September, the Mark Foley scandal broke and drove the final nails into the GOP coffin. A party already on its heels couldn’t absorb one more blow. You can see the same thing starting now, with Republicans turning on each other over a Texas candidate attacking Indian-American Longhorn fans for supposedly replacing white ones. These are the self-inflicted wounds that turn a bad situation into a catastrophe.

In 2022, Republicans thought they would have a wave and might have if the court hadn’t overturned Roe v. Wade. This year, Republicans don’t yet have anything to offset the trend line. It’s probably not too late, but it’s getting there fast. If something doesn’t change the dynamic of the race by early October, Republicans should prepare for a shellacking.

I’m bullish on Democrats. I think Cooper will win and Democrats will control the House. I’m not sure about the Senate, but I wouldn’t be surprised. Every time I make these predictions, I get yelled at by people who worry Democrats will become complacent.

That’s not how it works. People want to be with winners. They don’t sit out an election because they believe they will win. Instead, they wish they could vote twice. Undecided voters will feel the momentum and go with the flow. It’s like watching your team in the finals of a tournament. You don’t sit it out because they are the odds-on favorite; you revel in every moment of victory.

And winning teams don’t just keep their fans—they pull in the bandwagon. The undecided break late, and they break toward the side with the wind at its back. That’s not complacency. That’s a crowd sensing which way a game is going and wanting to be part of it.

Tell the people that Democrats are winning. Get on board.

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Democrats have momentum heading into the midterms, with an outside chance to even take the NC House. Instead, they've put principle before politics and rejected one of their own in a district they'd need to win the chamber. Shelly Headen, the Democratic nominee in a Guilford County district, made social media posts that called for violence against Trump supporters. She also compared herself to Jesus Christ, Martin Luther King, and Lincoln. The House Democratic caucus told The Assembly that she no longer has their support.

Republicans would never have done that. They would have stuck with her, just like they backed Mark Robinson to the end. Just like they are now defending Republican candidates who make vile claims about women and racist comments about their fellow Americans. That’s the moral difference between the two parties. Democrats have lines and Republicans don’t.

Unfortunately, the media holds Democrats to a higher standard. Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed can’t go through an interview without a journalist asking about his relationship to Twitch streamer Hasan Piker. Republican Ohio Senator Jon Husted quietly parted ways with a campaign staffer who apparently had Nazi sympathies. In Georgia, Republican Congressman Mike Collins hired numerous people with white supremacist views and ties to neo-Nazis, including his son-in-law. Minnesota congressional candidate Eric Pratt had to force out his field director after his social media accounts were found to be full of white supremacist and antisemitic posts. It seems like there’s a pattern here, but none of it is getting the coverage that Piker gets.

Republicans are no longer hiding their bigotry. This weekend, House Speaker Mike Johnson went on CNN and defended a Texas congressional candidate who referred to mothers as “cum trophies” and called Nazi machine guns “the original ghetto blasters.” There’s no way Democrats would support a candidate like that, and if they tried, the story would dominate the news for weeks. With Republicans, it’s a Sunday morning segment that will be history by Monday.

In North Carolina, Republicans nominated Mark Robinson as the candidate for governor. Virtually the entire GOP political establishment endorsed him knowing that he had made antisemitic comments and posts. Even when it came out that he called himself a “black Nazi,” Republicans refused to pull their endorsements. It took salacious porn posts to bring him down, and even then, nobody questioned the associations of people like Congressman Tim Moore or Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Berger.

There’s a double standard in American media and politics today. Democrats, who are fighting over the direction of the party, get painted with a broad brush when left-wing commentators make inappropriate or controversial statements. Republicans as a whole rarely get called out when their candidates engage in racist, misogynistic, or anti-American behavior.

Still, I’m glad Democrats reject candidates like Shelley Headen. One party needs to have a moral backbone and standards for their candidates even if the other one doesn’t. I think it’s more important for Democrats to condemn the harmful and hateful rhetoric of shock jocks and provocateurs like Piker who want to insert themselves into our politics. The party should be led by pragmatists who span the political spectrum instead of guided by ideologues who alienate too many Americans.

Republicans have lost their core values to the whims of a carnival barker and his troupe of con men like Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Loomer. Democrats need to stick to their principles and reject the contemptible. Winning cannot be the core value of the party.

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