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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I want to acknowledge the 25th anniversary of 9/11. The event divides the timeline of those of us who came of age before the attack. The 20 years preceding it seem more innocent and naive. The image of the falling Twin Towers defined us for the next twenty years and kicked off a century of unrest and discontent in the American psyche.

We’ve been embroiled in some war for almost the entire time. We’ve gone from a nation that celebrated the melting pot to one demanding a wall. The man who was America’s mayor on 9/11 ended his career in a parking lot of a landscaping company, making false accusations about a stolen election. Much of the division in the country today seems to stem from a singular event that shook us to the core.

Those who came of age after 9/11 have never known a world at peace and have lived in almost constant transition. They grew up with phones we couldn’t even imagine in 2001. Social media gave them a warped sense of truth and reality, though they are probably less susceptible to distortions than many of us who knew a world before them. They went through the Great Recession, the pandemic, and Donald Trump—twice. They’ve never experienced stability.

They did not have to live in such a world. The aftermath of 9/11 was our country’s great missed opportunity. Never have I felt more American or more unified than in the weeks immediately following the attack. For a fleeting moment, George Bush seemed to be the right leader for the times. His speech at Ground Zero brought a wounded nation together. He offered us hope for the future. And then he spoiled it by invading Iraq in a cynical and naive attempt to remake the Middle East.

This first quarter of the 21st century has been difficult, and it feels like 9/11 started it. I hope that in the next 25 years, we can reconcile our divisions and learn lessons, not just from the attack, but from the aftermath, too. We need a period of healing and reconciliation. We owe the generation that came of age after 9/11 some stability.

Andy Jackson at the John Locke Foundation tracks weekly changes in North Carolina’s voter registration. Since mid-July, more people have been registering Democrat than they have Republican, though neither party comes close to matching the number registering unaffiliated. Until then, Republicans had kept a consistent edge over Democrats in new registrations for years. The shift might feel good to Democrats, but the real story is the surge in unaffiliated voters.

To me, the change completes the transition from a one-party state to a two-party system that began over fifty years ago. In 1966, the first year that I can find voter registration records, Democrats made up 80% of the registered voters in North Carolina, Republicans 18%, and independent or other about 2%. Democratic registration has been dropping ever since—until now.

Before the Civil Rights Movement, Republicans were heavily concentrated in areas of the state that had remained loyal to the Union during the Civil War. During the period of racial integration, Republicans invited the segregationists into their camp. Conservative commentator Jesse Helms switched his registration from Democrat to Republican and ran on an anti-Civil Rights platform in 1972. A majority of white Democrats voted to send him to Washington and kicked off a long, steady decline in Democratic registration that finally bottomed out this summer.

For years, many voters kept their Democratic registration even though they supported Republicans, particularly at the federal level. Closed primaries kept people from changing their registration, especially in eastern rural counties where votes for local office often became racial affairs. Black Democrats voted for Black candidates while white Democrats voted for white candidates for offices like sheriff and county commissioner.

As primaries opened to unaffiliated voters, many white Democrats changed their registration to unaffiliated before transitioning to Republican. For years, most people registered as unaffiliated, especially in rural counties, were reliable Republican voters.

In the late 1980s and 1990s, the state’s population began to explode. Newcomers from northern states arrived in urban areas and registered as Republicans because they wanted lower taxes and fewer unions. They turned the state’s largest municipalities red.

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After a decade or so, those urban Republicans realized they didn’t have much in common with the socially conservative and often evangelical native North Carolinians who dominated the party at the state level. They started supporting more liberal candidates and, like the earlier transition, began registering unaffiliated. Today, rural unaffiliated voters are likely to lean Republican while more urban/suburban ones tend to favor Democrats.

When I started working in politics in the early 1990s, Democrats made up about 60% of the voters, Republicans 30%, and unaffiliated voters, a designation added in the late 1970s, about 10%. Republicans’ quick rise over 20 years would slow to a crawl while Democrats continued to fall precipitously and unaffiliated voters began their ascendancy. For years, we knew anyone registered Republican would support GOP candidates, but we didn’t trust registered Democrats to support the Democratic candidate.

As of today, the Jessiecrats, as we called them, have finally died off. Democrats can largely count on the support of the people who are registered with their party. To win elections, though, they will still need to convince the plurality of voters who rejected both major parties.

While Democrats are benefitting from the anti-incumbent sentiment driven by the Trump administration’s failures, it’s hard to call the advantage a surge. Republicans surpassed Democrats in total registration for the first time in state history this past January, and Democrats have been narrowing that gap since mid-July. To put it in perspective, Jackson’s last report showed Democrats increased their registration by 668 voters and Republicans by 198, while 3,735 registered unaffiliated. Unaffiliated voters make up 40% of the vote, while Democrats and Republicans make up 30% each.

The transition from the old Solid South is complete. Neither party is going to dominate the state again.

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Earlier this week, a somewhat prominent social media account posted on Twitter that Roy Cooper would win by double digits. I think Cooper is the favorite in the race, but that type of exuberance is absurd. North Carolina is a 50-50 state. Five points here is a shellacking unless your opponent is Mark Robinson.

I’m still a bit skeptical that the year is going to be as good for Democrats as it looks right now. I’ve been snake-bit too many times. Elections tend to get closer when swing voters start tuning in sometime between Labor Day and the early voting period. Occasionally, like in 2014, the gap widens, but usually the disgruntled Democrats or Republicans who have been griping about their party all summer come home.

There’s some evidence that this year could be different. Gas prices are going in the wrong direction, the war in Iran seems poised to continue for the foreseeable future, groceries cost too much, and Trump is deeply unpopular. There’s not a lot for the GOP base to either rally around or blame on liberals since Republicans control everything. In 2014, Ebola and ISIS scared Americans and they blamed Obama and the Democrats, turning a good GOP year into a great one.

That’s why, as I wrote earlier, Republicans are doing all they can to juice the base. They’re trying to scare their voters to the polls. The ads they are running against Cooper are more than just misleading — they are flat-out lies. They are trying to engage disaffected Republicans by giving them something to fear, even if it’s just made up.

The effort feels desperate. Making such audacious claims this early shows that Republicans believe the Senate race is slipping away. Normally, campaigns make these types of dubious accusations in the final stretch when there’s little time for a response or for voters to check their outrage. Running those types of ads this early gives Democrats and the media too much time to debunk them, but Whatley needs to engage his base now before it’s too late.

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While Republicans in North Carolina might be panicking, they have a natural advantage in turnout. Their base is older and more reliable. Even in 2018, when Democrats broke the GOP’s supermajority in the legislature, Republican turnout was about four percent higher than Democratic turnout, 58% to 54%. Swing voters broke for Democrats, but the more engaged GOP base prevented the election from becoming a real wave.

The real story was age. Voters over 40 years old turned out at around 65% while voters 40 and under turned out at only about 35%. Younger voters needed to show up to make it a truly transformative election.

In 2022, Biden’s midterm, Republican turnout stayed about the same at 58% while Democratic turnout dropped to 51%. For Democrats to have a really big year in 2026, they will probably need to match Republican turnout to go along with their advantage with swing voters, who will almost certainly break for Democrats this year. That’s the formula for winning the Supreme Court race, picking up Congressional seats, and taking control of the state House.

I’m optimistic about Roy Cooper’s chances. I don’t think Republican lies can offset the effects of the wave heading our way. I feel good about the chances of breaking the veto-proof majorities in both chambers of the legislature and I’m optimistic about Supreme Court Justice Anita Earls holding her seat. I’m also bullish on Congressional races, especially Don Davis in NC-01 and Jamie Ager in NC-11.

However, I’m not buying a double-digit win by Cooper. A five-point victory would be a blowout and would probably have coattails. For that to occur, we’ll probably need to see record high turnout for midterms among people under 40 and depressed turnout among older white voters. It could happen, but it’s too early to tell and we probably won’t know until the votes are counted.

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When the 1994 GOP wave hit, I never saw it coming. I was working on a state senate campaign in Cleveland County. We didn’t have the polls that are so ubiquitous today, but I felt fairly confident about the election. I could not have been more wrong.

In Congressional races, Republicans won seats nobody expected. The delegation flipped from eight Democrats and four Republicans to eight Republicans and four Democrats. Even Congressman David Price, who represented Orange, Wake, and Chatham Counties, lost to Fred Heineman, a guy most people had never heard of. Waves like that come rarely but when they do, they upend politics.

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This year might be one of those waves. Political prognosticator Charlie Cook, founder of the venerable Cook Political Report, writes, “The worst-case scenario for the GOP and best for Democrats today would have sounded ludicrous eight months ago; the most plausible today resembles Republicans’ nightmare scenario at the beginning of the year.”

Cook suggests that Republicans could lose 25-35 House districts and up to six Senate seats — and that’s only because the mid-year gerrymandering will protect Republicans from greater losses. He says that “…the sum and cumulative impact of Trump’s second-term baggage seems now to match or exceed those of Presidents Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama.” He notes the impact of Trump’s most egregious mistakes — tariffs and the Iran War — have hit rural Republicans the hardest, driving up the cost of fuel for people who are vehicle dependent and drive larger, less fuel-efficient cars and trucks. Those folks may not vote for Democrats, but they probably won’t show up at all.

In that scenario, like 1994, certain races that aren’t getting much attention are suddenly relevant. In North Carolina, the Third and Ninth Congressional Districts might be in play. They’ve been overshadowed by the 11th Congressional District race where Democrat Jamie Ager has put together a strong campaign and the First Congressional District where Representative Don Davis is defending his newly gerrymandered seat, but both districts have caught the attention of national Democrats.

In the Ninth Congressional District, retired Army Major Richard Ojeda is challenging Congressman Richard Hudson, chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee, the campaign arm of the House Republicans. Ojeda has run an aggressive campaign in a district that includes much of Fort Bragg. He fits the district well with his military background and rural roots. He was elected state senator in West Virginia in 2016 before returning to North Carolina. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee added the seat to its Districts in Play program last month.

In the Third Congressional District, former state Representative Raymond Smith, Jr. is challenging Congressman Greg Murphy. A poll released by House Majority PAC, the Democratic Super PAC, shows Smith neck-and-neck with Murphy, trailing by three points in a poll with a margin of error of four. Smith, a retired educator and combat veteran, is known and respected in the region after having represented part of the district in the legislature.

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Last year, Donald Trump ordered North Carolina legislative leaders to redistrict the state in the middle of the decade to create another GOP Congressional seat. Of course they bent over for him. Republicans moved some of Murphy’s Republican supporters into the First Congressional District held by Democrat Don Davis. Now, the First and Third Districts seem to be in play. Losing both would be some serious karma.

This might be the year when a Richard Ojeda or Raymond Smith could win seats that people thought were safe for Republicans. They’ll need the resources to win, though. They don’t need the most money, but they do need enough to get their message out and reach those swing voters looking for a change. They are good investments for people betting on a wave.

Cook finishes his analysis citing Trump’s most performative and egotistic moves — like renaming the Kennedy Center and Lake Ontario — as more reasons to drive voters away from Republicans who have failed to hold him accountable. He writes, “It appears to me that the president has now reached a critical mass of problems that are threatening to take this election to a place that the 2026 map and the small number of competitive districts and Senate seats should not allow it to go. I confess this is a lot bigger than I expected, but here we are.”

It feels like 1994 all over again, but this time my side is riding the wave, not missing it.

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The Republican outrage machine has so little material that they’ve resorted to reruns. Now that nobody believes teachers perform gender reassignment surgery in schools, they’ve gone back to COVID. All over the internet, conservatives are getting outraged over restrictions that ended five years ago.

They dragged Anthony Fauci in front of a Congressional committee and used his refusal to testify — citing the Fifth Amendment — as proof that he was up to no good. In their telling, Fauci was the villain of COVID. They don’t like to remember that Trump appointed him to the White House Coronavirus Task Force, took his advice, and stuck him in front of the cameras. They’re really just blasting Democrats for policies that Trump enacted.

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In North Carolina, Republicans are trying to make a conversation then-Governor Roy Cooper had with Fauci a campaign issue. At the time, the pandemic was less than six months old and Fauci was Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Cooper wasn’t doing anything nefarious. He was just doing his job, checking in with experts before making difficult decisions at an unprecedented time in our history.

Most people don’t care. They’ve moved on. The pandemic is in the past. We got some things right and some things wrong, but we survived. It’s in the rearview mirror for most Americans and they are looking forward, not back.

So why are Republicans bringing up COVID just before the midterm elections? Because they still haven’t engaged their base. They’ve essentially given up on trying to win swing voters. They’re now trying to mitigate the impact of the coming wave by reminding Republicans that they should still be mad.

The people who will determine the outcome of the election are focused on affordability — the price of groceries, gas, energy, and housing in particular. It’s too late for Republicans to win their support. Trump has doubled down on tariffs and wars and is getting the blame for the financial pinch hurting too many families.

To offset the loss of swing voters, Republicans are trying desperately to engage their base. That’s why we’re hearing so much about COVID, crime, and, to a lesser degree, immigration. The GOP hopes they can make less-engaged Republican voters angry enough to go to the polls. Right now, those voters are just as mad about prices and endless wars as everybody else.

As I’ve said before, wave elections happen when one party shows up, the swing voters side with them, and the other party stays home, disengaged and demoralized. Republicans are trying to prevent that third part of the wave. They need their base to go to the polls, even in a bad election year. That’s how they prevent districts that should be relatively safe from flipping to the other party.

In other words, COVID is a distraction. Crime is a bit more salient, but it’s still not among the top concerns of most voters — except Republicans. Immigration has been neutered as an issue for most voters because of the brutality of Trump’s enforcement, but it’s still a top priority for Republicans.

Two months before the election and Republicans are still talking to their base, ignoring the concerns of most Americans. Either that or they are engaged in a futile effort to change the national conversation. Regardless, the election is moving on without them.

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We’re back in the stupid. Donald Trump thinks he’s renamed Lake Ontario “Lake America,” just like he thinks he renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. Republicans like Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum cheered him on. I’m sure MAGA is pumping its collective fist, shouting, “Hell, yeah!” Other Republicans are looking the other way, pretending it’s not happening. It’s all pathetic.

Burgum, of course, knows better. He’s just sucking up to Donald Trump and trying not to alienate the shrinking MAGA base that’s dumb enough to think it’s actually great. Other Republicans will try to equivocate. I can hear Thom Tillis now: “The president is getting bad advice,” as if Trump isn’t the one constantly making the dumb decisions — from threatening to invade Greenland to renaming large bodies of water to implying he will annex Canada.

And, of course, there’s the idiot wing of the GOP that honestly believes Trump can rename the Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico. They think the Canadians would gladly join the United States. Natural selection will eventually get them, even if it might take a while.

There are those who really believe Trump’s false narratives — mostly paranoid people easily manipulated by confirmation bias. There are those who know better but cynically use the dark fantasy of hordes of immigrants voting to push through voting restrictions. And finally there are those who should know better but don’t because they have allowed their political inclinations to cloud their judgment and reason. They are all pathetic — and dangerous.

So in that vein, I’m renaming the Republican Party the Pathetic Party. It’s long past time for them to change their name. They haven’t been republican in a long time. They don’t want power to reside with the people. They want a tinpot dictatorship or a cabal of cronies who rule with little accountability.

They are pathetic because they cater to the whims of Donald Trump and indulge the prejudices of our most ignorant people. In North Carolina, they banned Sharia Law even though only one percent of the state is Muslim and the parts of Sharia Law they don’t like are already illegal. They keep creating solutions to imaginary problems.

But renaming lakes is just the silly end of a much more dangerous pattern. The same people cheering “Lake America” are the ones who believe millions of non-citizens are voting in our elections. They use the power of social media to spread these false narratives and then cynically use them to push through legislation that restricts access to the ballot box. It’s all the same impulse — manufactured outrage over imaginary problems while real ones go unaddressed.

They’ve been pushing the fallacy of massive numbers of non-citizens voting without any evidence. It was the root of Trump’s attempt to overthrow the government when he lost in 2020. It’s become an article of faith among many otherwise sane conservatives.

But the whole storyline falls apart when you step back. Why would a bunch of immigrants, whether here legally or illegally, vote en masse? What is the purpose of threatening their livelihoods to cast a ballot that’s certainly not going to make that much of a difference? They have a greater chance of getting deported than getting some sort of windfall.

If some organized effort were underway, it certainly would have come to light after fifteen years of scrutiny. But they’ve got nothing — just a nightmare fantasy about dark-skinned people controlling the country. They’ve been pushing this lie for fifteen years and all they’ve got to show for it is a more restricted ballot box.

The Pathetic Party has decided to overlook the blatant corruption and indiscretions of the president for some sort of political gain. They’ve indulged the basest instincts of the most paranoid and narrow-minded citizens to engage them politically. And they’ve come to believe their own lies to justify undermining democracy and embracing authoritarianism.

They are ignorant, cynical, and delusional, putting their politics above the good of the country. They are pathetic, not patriotic, and they can’t even tell the difference.

I was hoping that the Michigan Senate race would get out of the national news. I thought Abdul El-Sayed was a savvy enough politician to pivot toward the middle and start talking about the problems facing Michigan voters. Unfortunately, I was wrong.

Instead, El-Sayed went on Fox News to debate Jesse Watters. First, he’s not running against Watters. Second, probably 90% of the people watching can’t vote for him. If he wanted to talk to Republicans, he should have been on some Michigan talk radio program, not cable news.

El-Sayed is making the race about him, not the voters. At least it sure looks that way from here. He’s talking about national issues that turn off swing voters instead of kitchen table issues that affect the day-to-day lives of average Americans. If his race is about Medicare for All, Gaza, and ICE, he will probably lose. If it’s about gas prices, groceries, jobs, and Trump he’ll probably win.

Maybe El-Sayed was fishing for more low-dollar donors, but he seems to still be running a primary campaign. He’s appealing to his base while largely ignoring the people who will determine the election. Not many swing voters are watching a debate on Fox News.

I worry that El-Sayed is just another one of these performative politicians who love the applause and reaction more than the hard work of governing. He’s focused more on slogans like Medicare for All than outcomes like universal health care. He should be talking to the people who will vote for him instead of cable news junkies.

He can still win Michigan, but he can also blow it. The political environment for Republicans seems to be getting worse, not better. Trump’s trade war with Canada will hurt Michigan especially hard. His war with Iran is keeping gas prices high. According to a recent poll, he’s underwater on almost every major issue, including border security and immigration.

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The race needs to be about Trump and his failures more than El-Sayed and his slogans. The solutions need to be broad, not specific. He should be addressing the rising cost of living in terms that make people believe he hears them and is not just pushing an agenda.

He should be talking about ending tariffs to bring cheaper goods into the country and create more jobs to send American-made products to our trading partners. He should be talking about bringing down the cost of gas by ending the war in Iran. And, yes, he should be talking about bringing down the cost of health care, even for people who would prefer to keep their private plans.

And he should be making these arguments in Michigan town halls and on Michigan TV and radio stations, not on some cable news show that attracts a national audience. He’s not running for president and he shouldn’t be debating infotainment stars anyway.

It’s time to pivot. The fall is almost here.

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Back in 2008, then-state Senator Kay Hagan was leading incumbent Republican US Senator Elizabeth Dole in the final weeks of a long campaign. In an attempt to shift the momentum, Dole’s campaign ran an ad that implied Hagan was an atheist funded by a group called the Godless Americans PAC. It backfired tremendously.

The ad reeked of desperation. Republican consultant Alex Castellanos remarked, “When you’re making ads that say, ‘There is no God,’ it usually means your campaign doesn’t have a prayer.” It heralded the end of Dole’s campaign.

This week, Michael Whatley’s campaign released a similarly desperate ad. This one is more vile than the Dole ad because it exploits a tragic death and has almost no truth in it. Whatley blames Roy Cooper for Iryna Zarutska’s death in the Charlotte light rail murder. The claim is absurd and has no basis in fact. Cooper wasn’t even in office when the killing took place.

It’s another act of desperation by another sinking campaign. It gives credence to the polls that show Cooper at or above 50 percent and Whatley stuck below 45. His only chance is to bring Cooper’s numbers down, and nothing he’s tried has worked.

The timing is telling, too. Whatley’s campaign knows he can’t wait much longer. That he’s launched such an ad in August shows the race is slipping away from him. If the numbers get too solid, he won’t be able to catch up in the final stretch. He’s trying frantically to make it close now. He’s flailing.

Whatley may temporarily close the gap, but it probably won’t last. The initial shock might evoke an emotional response, but voters will see through it with more rational reflection. That’s why ads like these usually run at the end of the campaign: the election is over before voters can come to their senses.

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Whatley’s ad says a lot about him and the modern GOP. That he allowed his campaign to run such an ad lets us know that Whatley has no boundaries. He’ll say anything. He’s bought into the post-truth world. The ad is the logical conclusion of the “alternative facts” that Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway once defended. Facts no longer matter because everything is just words.

Exploiting the murder of Iryna Zarutska is despicable. Showing her death in the video is exploitative and disrespectful. Whatley should be ashamed, but after a decade of Donald Trump, shame is not an emotion shared by Republicans.

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In December 1996, my brother was diagnosed with a rare genetic disorder called Wilson’s Disease. His body would not process copper, a mineral found in foods like nuts, shellfish, and dried fruits. After 36 years, copper had severely damaged his soft tissue and organs, including his liver, brain, and kidneys. At the time, the disease was most often diagnosed post-mortem.

He had been misdiagnosed for years. Finally, a doctor checked his eyes and identified copper-colored circles around the edge of his cornea. These Kayser-Fleischer rings gave a definitive diagnosis of Wilson’s Disease.

The doctor who diagnosed him had never seen the disease before. The standard treatment at the time was a drug called penicillamine, which often had severe and sometimes irreversible side effects. My brother was scheduled to start treatment the following week.

I went to my Power Mac with its Bill the Cat screen saver and dial-up internet and typed the words “Wilson’s Disease” into the Netscape browser. I found an organization called the Wilson’s Disease Association. I read about the organization and the disease and found a contact number. It was the weekend, but I called and left a message on an answering machine anyway.

Just a few hours later, I got a call from a man who said he was returning my call and started asking questions about my brother. He told me that under no circumstances should my brother take penicillamine. Instead, I should call the Wilson’s Disease Clinic at the University of Michigan, where they had new treatments that could save my brother’s life.

He was right, and my brother survived for another thirty years. My family was amazed that I had found the clinic in Michigan on this newfangled thing called the web. Technology had given us information that even his doctors didn’t readily have available. It truly seemed remarkable.

So eight years later, when I was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, I went to the now-ubiquitous internet to figure out who was studying it. Google helped me find the Bing Center for Waldenstrom’s Macroglobulinemia at the Dana-Farber Cancer Center in Boston. Fortunately, I was asymptomatic with a slow-growing cancer and was put on a watch-and-wait protocol. After a few years of monitoring me, Dr. Steven Treon, who had founded the Bing Center just five years before my diagnosis, told me to go live my life and keep monitoring my disease. By the time it started affecting me, he said, they would have it under control.

Fast-forward twenty-two years, and I’m suffering painful headaches of unknown origin. They started in January, and my primary care provider suspected I had an ailment called temporal arteritis — a swelling of the membrane around an artery that runs from above the eye down the neck. She prescribed 20 milligrams of prednisone and referred me to an ophthalmologist.

After two weeks, I saw the ophthalmologist and had a thorough eye exam and a battery of blood work. He sent me to have an ultrasound to see if they could detect swelling around the temporal artery. I came back a week later and the doctor said he didn’t think it was temporal arteritis because the ultrasound couldn’t detect swelling and the headache was the only symptom. The blood tests all came back normal.

Instead, he was concerned about the prednisone and started to reduce the amount I was taking. He also ordered an MRI and referred me to a rheumatologist. The MRI would scan my brain for abnormalities and the rheumatologist would look for evidence of an autoimmune disorder.

The MRI showed minor swelling on my optic nerve but nothing else of concern. The ophthalmologist suggested it might be a temporary condition that would resolve itself, especially since there was no indication of other swelling in the eye. He wanted to wait for the rheumatologist’s report before doing anything else.

At this point, I began wondering if my cancer diagnosis might be at play. Waldenstrom’s shouldn’t have anything to do with my eye, but I couldn’t help but wonder. I had been getting blood tests that track a protein called immunoglobulin M, or IgM. I watched my IgM levels grow slowly but steadily for 20 years even though I never developed symptoms like bleeding gums, extreme fatigue, or swollen lymph nodes.

I had been playing around with the AI chatbot Claude and decided to see what it could tell me. By now, I had multiple test results and had been dealing with the headaches and eye problems for more than a month.

I started by asking about a few abnormalities in my tests, including a low IgG, high sedimentation rate, and high C-reactive protein. I didn’t really know what any of those meant, and Claude explained each one. The AI then gave five reasons that could cause all three abnormalities at once, including hematologic malignancies.

Claude wrote: “This trio of findings warrants prompt medical evaluation — not to alarm you, but because the underlying causes range from treatable infections to conditions that benefit greatly from early diagnosis. If you haven’t already seen a hematologist or been referred by your primary care doctor, that would be a reasonable next step.”

I then told Claude about my Waldenstrom’s diagnosis, and the chatbot responded, “That makes perfect sense — Waldenström’s explains all three findings beautifully…Are you currently on watch-and-wait, or are you being treated?”

I answered, “Yes. I’m currently on watch and wait. I had a headache on the right side above my eye near my temple. It came back every day but I could control it with ibuprofen or acetaminophen. After about three weeks I went to the doctor. The doctor thought it was Large Cell Arteritis, but the specialist doesn’t think so. MRI shows swelling around the membrane of the optic nerve. I can give you screenshots of all recent tests.”

Claude wrote, “That’s a very concerning and complex picture. Let me share some thoughts before you upload the screenshots.” The AI went on to describe a rare complication called Bing-Neel Syndrome where WM cells cross the blood-brain barrier and infiltrate the central nervous system. It said I would need a lumbar puncture to confirm the diagnosis.

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I had been monitored for the past decade or so by my primary care physician but had not seen an oncologist in several years. Now the AI was telling me to get a hematologist quickly, laying out potentially dire consequences of waiting.

The bot wrote, “Given your IgM level and the optic nerve findings, I would make these calls first thing tomorrow morning and specifically use the phrase ‘urgent referral’ — your situation genuinely warrants prompt evaluation, not a routine wait.”

Claude pointed me to the International Waldenström’s Macroglobulinemia Foundation’s directory of doctors. I found two specialists who focused on Waldenstrom’s in North Carolina, one at UNC Lineberger Cancer Center. When I shared his information with Claude, it seemed genuinely excited.

Great find! Let me look him up.

You found the perfect doctor. Seriously — this is about as good as it gets for your situation.

Then, Claude told me how to get their attention.

Call UNC Health and ask specifically for Dr. Christopher Dittus in the Lymphoma Program

When you call, lead with: “I have Waldenström’s macroglobulinemia” “IgM is 2,780” “MRI shows optic nerve sheath swelling” “I need an urgent appointment”

Those words together should get you seen very quickly. You could not have found a better match at a more convenient location. This is your person.

Those conversations with Claude took place on March 16 and 17. I followed its script and left a message on a Lineberger Cancer Hospital voicemail. Within hours I had a response, and in a few more hours I had an appointment on April 15 with Dr. Dittus, a hematologist specializing in Waldenstrom’s research.

By the time I made that appointment, I had seen a primary care physician, who referred me to the ophthalmologist because of suspected Giant Cell Arteritis (GCA), also called temporal arteritis. The ophthalmologist ordered an ultrasound that found no evidence of GCA and an MRI that found slight swelling. He began reducing my prednisone by 10 milligrams a week since the diagnosis of GCA seemed unlikely. He also referred me to a rheumatologist, who found nothing unusual at my visit but ordered another battery of blood tests and a CT scan.

Over the next four weeks, I continued my doctor’s visits and tests. I told the rheumatologist and ophthalmologist about my suspicions of Waldenstrom’s but didn’t get much response. The CT scan found no additional swelling, and the rheumatologist follow-up wasn’t until June 5, more than two months away.

I continued to interact with Claude, feeding it my test results and asking for explanations. By now, Claude seemed certain that I had Waldenstrom’s with central nervous system involvement — i.e., Bing-Neel Syndrome, a serious complication that can cause cognitive impairment and loss of motor skills. In a March 22 exchange, Claude explained what would likely happen at my meeting with Dr. Dittus: he would order a bone marrow biopsy to assess the spread of tumor material in my bone marrow and a lumbar puncture to determine whether there were cancer cells in my spinal fluid.

Claude also discussed likely treatment. It suggested a relatively new targeted therapy that blocks an enzyme the cancer needs to grow. “The most likely conversation will be around zanubrutinib alone or combined with rituximab, possibly with plasmapheresis first if viscosity is critically elevated.”

Meanwhile my symptoms were worsening. By early April my eye was blurry, red, and watering. Emergency calls to the on-call physician produced advice to wait for my scheduled appointments. Each specialist was managing their piece. Claude was the only one looking at the big picture.

The week before my appointment with the hematologist, I had a follow-up MRI. The minor swelling had developed into a lesion that was now a centimeter in diameter. While my prednisone decreased, my tumor had grown.

On April 15, I had my appointment with Dr. Dittus. After a month of going over test results with Claude, I had no surprises. The hematologist-oncologist was fairly certain that I had Bing-Neel Syndrome. He ordered a bone marrow biopsy and lumbar puncture and said that once we had those results, he would likely start me on a drug called zanubrutinib, which essentially starves cancer cells. He also boosted my prednisone to 60 milligrams a day — and then 100 milligrams a day — to slow the growth of the tumor on my optic nerve and control the headaches.

Dr. Dittus seemed impressed with my relationship with the Bing Center and Dr. Treon. Treon no longer sees patients, but he is now the foremost authority on Waldenstrom’s in the world and is responsible for discovering the treatments I would be taking. Because of my prior connection, the Bing Center would consult with Dr. Dittus on my treatment.

Two hours after I met with Dr. Dittus, I had a teleconference with my ophthalmologist to go over the MRI results. He was clearly alarmed. He believed the swelling was a meningioma — a normally slow-growing and benign tumor — but did not understand how it had grown so rapidly. I told him about the Bing-Neel diagnosis and he marked it in my chart. Had we not had that diagnosis, he probably would have ordered an invasive and somewhat dangerous biopsy of the lesion growing on my optic nerve. Instead, ten days later, I had the bone marrow biopsy and lumbar puncture on the same day.

The diagnostic tests confirmed what Claude had suspected all along: I have Bing-Neel Syndrome. I started zanubrutinib in May, and after 38 days of taking it, the mass on my optic nerve was gone and I tapered off the prednisone. I will have regular MRIs for the foreseeable future. My life will be a little different with more doctor’s visits, but my routines will mostly remain unchanged.

For me, with very limited understanding of medicine, technology has been a lifesaver three times over. The internet found the right treatment for my brother in 1996. It connected me with top researchers when I was diagnosed with my own rare cancer years later. And now, AI helped me navigate a complex and frightening medical crisis.

Claude was careful to never diagnose me, but it explained the connections I couldn’t see myself, showed me how Waldenstrom’s could be the thread running through symptoms that had stumped my doctors, and then urged me to take action instead of waiting for the medical system to catch up. It pushed me to find the right doctor and gave me the language to get prompt attention. It gave me the information to walk into every appointment knowing what to expect and what to ask.

That preparation mattered in ways I couldn’t have anticipated. When my ophthalmologist was heading down the road toward an invasive biopsy of the lesion on my optic nerve, I had the knowledge and the diagnosis to redirect him. When I finally sat down with Dr. Dittus, I wasn’t a frightened patient hoping to be told what to do. I was a participant in my own care.

I still needed the doctors. I needed Dr. Treon’s decades of research, Dr. Dittus’s expertise, and the team at UNC. But I found them faster, understood them better, and lost less time to dead ends because of what AI made possible. Technology didn’t save my life — the doctors did. But it helped make sure I reached the right ones in time.

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Republicans in the legislature passed a “sweeping elections bill” that is now on Governor Josh Stein’s desk. Conservatives argue that North Carolina needs the law to protect the integrity of our elections. The problem is that Republicans have no credibility on election integrity. On the contrary, they’ve spent the past fifteen years trying to corrupt the system and rig results. There’s no reason to believe this bill has any other purpose.

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Republicans began by passing the most egregious gerrymander in the country when they took power in 2011. They gave themselves veto-proof majorities in both chambers in a state that splits evenly among Democrats and Republicans. Former Republican Representative David Lewis, chair of the Redistricting Committee, 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.” In other words, Republicans bragged about their ability to rig districts to favor Republicans and undermine democracy.

Two years later, Republicans passed the “monster” voter suppression law that sought, among other things, to limit access to the polls for African American voters. Republicans requested data on the methods most used by Black voters and then attempted to restrict them. The Federal Court of Appeals overturned the law, saying “provisions target African Americans with almost surgical precision.” The decision was so well documented that the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal.

While Republicans used the specter of fraud to push legislation, they used malicious accusations to cast doubt on the integrity of elections. After Governor Pat McCrory lost his re-election bid in 2016, he cried voter fraud. Fortunately, his claims were so preposterous that his own board of elections shut him down.

Four years later, Donald Trump would make the same false claims about an election being stolen. Today, few if any of the Republicans in the legislature pushing the bill will admit that Trump lost the 2020 election. Integrity, indeed.

By 2024, Republicans had moved from legislation and conspiracy theories to using the courts to reverse election outcomes. Republicans sued to change the rules of the election after the fact in an attempt to steal a state Supreme Court seat in broad daylight. The scheme almost worked when the current partisan Court of Appeals and Supreme Court sided with GOP candidate Jefferson Griffin. They were only stopped after a harsh rebuke from a Trump-appointed federal judge who stated the obvious when he said, “You establish the rules before the game. You don’t change them after the game is done.”

As Griffin and the GOP were busy trying to undermine the will of the voters, Republicans in the legislature moved oversight of the State Board of Elections from the governor’s office to the state auditor after the GOP captured the seat. Auditor Dave Boliek then appointed Republican political operatives to oversee the agency. Today, we’re seeing the fallout from that decision.

Boliek hired former executive director of the North Carolina Republican Party Dallas Woodhouse as a liaison to the county boards of elections. But there was a catch. Woodhouse wasn’t working for the Board of Elections — he was working directly for Boliek. Texts indicated that Woodhouse was pushing county boards of elections to eliminate or reduce voting methods preferred by Black voters, including Sunday voting. Sound familiar?

Now, Boliek is throwing Woodhouse under the bus after he deleted texts that should have been public record. The Office of State Auditor released a statement saying, “Mr. Woodhouse informed the Legal Affairs Division that the messages had been deleted from his phone in direct contravention of OSA policy.” Of course he did. Woodhouse is a political operative and knows not to keep incriminating communications around.

But this isn’t about Dallas Woodhouse. This is about Dave Boliek and the GOP. The Republican legislation would give Boliek far more control over monitoring elections. He appointed a lifelong political operative to a position that’s not just supposed to be nonpartisan, but central to our democracy. He also placed another political operative, Francis X. De Luca, as chair of the State Board of Elections. De Luca was a Republican candidate for Congress and before that oversaw independent expenditure campaigns designed to defeat Democrats when he was president of the conservative Civitas Institute.

Boliek either had nefarious intent or remarkably bad judgment. Either way, he’s not qualified to oversee our elections. He’s done nothing to inspire confidence or indicate that he wants our elections to be fair. He certainly never explained these hyper-partisan hires. He should not have more power over our elections.

For fifteen years, Republicans in North Carolina have been assaulting our democracy, rigging districts and attempting to make voting more difficult for people who might disagree with them. They created the myth of rampant voter fraud out of whole cloth to justify making voting more difficult. Their legislation is nothing more than a solution looking for a problem. The incidence of election fraud is minuscule while attempts to undermine our elections are very real and ongoing in Republican circles.

Right now in Minnesota, the My Pillow guy is claiming his Republican primary was stolen from him despite losing by double digits. Destroying the credibility of elections has become a GOP campaign tactic. Whittling away at democracy is the broader strategy.

Josh Stein should veto the legislation. The race for state auditor should be a rallying cry for Democrats in North Carolina in 2028 to truly protect the integrity of our elections. This year, Democrats need to win enough seats to protect Stein’s veto so Republicans can’t give control over the State Board of Elections to the labor commissioner or some other GOP Council of State member in a lame-duck session.

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I hate to write two pieces about polls in the same week, but we’ve just had a flurry of North Carolina polls released within a week of each other. What’s striking is how consistent they are as we head into the final stretch of the midterm election. All indicators point to a rough year for Republicans.

I’ve already gone over the Carolina Forward poll that showed Roy Cooper leading Michael Whatley by seven points, 50-43. It showed Democrats leading the generic legislative ballot by seven points, too. Now two more polls have dropped that essentially confirm Carolina Forward’s findings.

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A poll commissioned by Carolina Journal has Cooper leading Whatley by more than eleven points, 51.5 to 39. That poll also has Democrats leading on the generic ballot by five points. In the state Supreme Court race, incumbent Democrat Anita Earls leads Republican Sarah Stevens by four points. Carolina Forward did not test the Supreme Court race.

In another poll commissioned by my fellow blogger and former political consultant Gary Pearce, the numbers are remarkably consistent. Cooper leads Whatley 50-41. Democrats lead the generic ballot by eight. And Earls leads Stevens by six.

After two weeks of failed polling, some people might be skeptical. However, primaries are notoriously difficult to poll and these are general election surveys with a much more predictable electorate. And they are remarkably consistent.

All three polls have Cooper reaching 50%. That’s especially bad news for Whatley and the GOP. Nationally, polls are showing a deteriorating environment for Republicans, specifically in swing states with Senate elections. Fox News polls have Democrat Sherrod Brown leading in Ohio, Democrat James Talarico leading in Texas, and Democrat Troy Jackson leading Susan Collins in Maine. If Whatley can’t significantly close the gap in the next few weeks, the GOP will cut bait in North Carolina to protect other states they need to hold the Senate.

Cooper, for his part, is going hard after swing voters and soft Republicans. He released an ad defining himself as an independent, tough-on-crime Democrat. He denounces defund the police, brags about locking up sex offenders, and touts working with Republicans to keep criminals behind bars and with Donald Trump to stop fentanyl from coming into the state. Cooper is trying to run up the score and if he wins by more than five points, he’ll have coattails all the way down the ballot.

Finally, all three polls have Donald Trump deeply unpopular in the state. Carolina Journal has him underwater by 15 points. Carolina Forward pegs his job approval rating at -14. Pearce’s poll shows it at -18. For comparison, Trump’s approval rating was only eight points underwater at this point in the 2018 election. If this midterm is a referendum on the president, which most are, then Republicans are in big trouble.

As we move into the second half of August, time is running out for the GOP. The consistency of the polls, which were commissioned by groups that span the ideological spectrum, indicates that Republicans will have a tough fall.

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Michael Whatley’s campaign is flailing. The Republican Senate candidate doesn’t have anything to run on, so he’s trying to find something to run against. So far, he’s stuck on re-litigating the COVID era. In particular, he’s trying to claim Roy Cooper released a bunch of prisoners who went on to commit more crimes. It’s not going to work because, one, it’s not true, and, two, this electorate is looking to the future, not the past.

Republicans are feverishly trying to make shutdowns, mask mandates, and vaccines the issue of the midterm elections. They’ve dragged Anthony Fauci before a Congressional committee and Trump is demanding he be indicted for something. RFK, Jr. can’t stop talking about vaccines, making Senator Bill Cassidy the biggest dupe in the Senate — no small accomplishment. Most of the country that’s not living on Twitter is ignoring the whole sordid episode.

Whatley’s campaign is accusing Cooper of releasing about 3,500 prisoners, implying that he’s soft on crime. Last week, the Assembly basically debunked that whole line of attack by reporting that Cooper’s administration fought the release of prisoners. The ACLU and other groups were suing the state, demanding 18,000 prisoners be released. The ones released were part of a compromise, not an initiative of the Cooper administration.

Besides, North Carolina was far from the only government to release prisoners. Other states also reduced their inmate populations to prevent the spread of the disease. Donald Trump released more than 13,000 federal prisoners to home confinement. Whatley’s certainly not complaining about his benefactor putting criminals back on the street.

Republicans are trying desperately to change the national conversation. It won’t work. Successful campaigns tap into voters’ concerns and let people know that they are being heard. Whatley is ignoring their problems and instead trying to distract them by talking about a time most people just want to forget.

He’s like a guy waving his arms at the back of a large crowd moving forward, yelling, “Look at me! Come this way!” As I said earlier, he’s flailing. And so are a bunch of other Republicans.

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Carolina Forward, the progressive advocacy and research organization, has a new poll out showing Republicans still mired in a tough political environment. With less than 90 days before the election, time is running out for the GOP to turn things around. The poll also offers a few warning signs for Democrats.

Roy Cooper leads Michael Whatley in the US Senate race by seven points, 50-43. In poll after poll, Cooper has held a lead outside the margin of error, but rarely above 50%. Whatley’s supporters hope that Cooper has a low ceiling and they’re probably right, but Cooper’s ceiling will be higher than Whatley’s.

Whatley is both unpopular and unknown. His favorability is underwater by eight points and 17% of voters have never heard of him. Cooper, in contrast, has a favorability rating of +2 and virtually universal name recognition. Whatley is still undefined while voters know Cooper and generally like him.

On the generic legislative ballot, voters prefer Democrats by seven points. That might tighten as we get closer to the election, but Democrats will head into the post-Labor Day scramble in a solid position. I don’t think Republicans will have super-majorities in either chamber after the election.

Voters seem to be happy with their choices of Democrats after the 2024 election. Governor Josh Stein and Attorney General Jeff Jackson both have strong favorability ratings, 48-42 and 51-23 respectively. In contrast, voters have remorse about top-of-the-ticket Republicans. Trump is underwater by 14 points, Senator Thom Tillis by 42, and Senator Ted Budd by 17. If Cooper wins this year, Budd will be a top target in 2028.

The poll also shows that Democrats could have trouble in North Carolina if they embrace the party’s left flank. They need the state if they hope to capture the White House. Democratic Socialists are underwater by 28 points with only 22% of voters having a positive view of them. Their favorability is less than 50% even among Democrats. They are less popular than ICE or MAGA.

In addition, AOC and New York Mayor Mamdani are less popular than JD Vance or Marco Rubio. If Democrats nominate a candidate too far to the left in 2028, North Carolina will likely not be in play.

We are still a state where candidates and parties need to persuade a lot of moderate voters. The poll indicates that a plurality of voters, 36%, consider themselves independents, with 13% being “pure independents” who don’t lean toward either party. That’s a lot of persuadable voters.

Democrats in North Carolina are in great shape on the cusp of the final push to Election Day. They lead in the US Senate race and on the generic ballot. It would take a major shift in the political environment to change the trajectory, but we’ve seen such shifts in recent election cycles.

That said, the state is still very purple and Democrats should not get too confident. Voters are more angry at Republicans than they are pining for Democrats. They want prices to go down and wages to go up. They aren’t looking for a socialist revolution.

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Republicans who have been bashing Democrats for pushing out flawed candidates after primaries but before the general election are about to disappear. Last night, Republican leaders pushed scandal-plagued Congressman Chuck Edwards out of his re-election campaign for NC-11. They have their sights on Ohio Representative Max Miller next. I doubt you will hear much criticism from within the ranks.

Edwards announced he is dropping out of the race in a 3am tweet. The House Ethics Committee recommended he be censured because he “created or fostered a hostile work environment and engaged in sexual harassment.” It was the final straw in a race where Edwards had struggled for a year.

Edwards’s Democratic opponent Jamie Ager has out-raised him and out-organized him. Recent polls have shown Ager leading Edwards in a district that was once considered safe Republican. Various political prognosticators have recently called the race a toss-up. We’ll see if a new candidate helps or hurts Ager’s chances.

Republicans will now pick a new candidate. Western North Carolina has several GOP legislators who might be strong candidates in a normal campaign, but starting a race in mid-August in a year that favors Democrats is not normal. Any legislator who runs would have to give up their seat in the legislature for an iffy shot at Congress. They would also be trading a seat in a likely GOP-majority legislative chamber for a back-bench role in the likely minority party in the US House.

In a broader context, the Edwards scandal is more bad news for the GOP in a year that’s already not working out for them. Whoever Republicans recruit will start from scratch — no money, no organization, no name recognition. The Republican Party campaign organizations — the National Republican Congressional Committee, the Republican National Committee, and their allies — will need to spend millions of dollars to get a campaign up and running with an election less than 90 days away.

In a good political environment, the task would be difficult. In this one, it’s daunting.

Republicans face an unfriendly economy, an unpopular war, and several emerging scandals. In the North Carolina Senate race, they have a weak candidate who has faced criticism from GOP operatives in western North Carolina. People in the district are still sore about the lack of support for hurricane relief from the Trump administration.

The Edwards debacle is just one more blow for a beleaguered GOP. They will lose at least a week finding a new candidate when they don’t have many weeks left. They will spend time, attention, and money launching a campaign at a time when they should be preparing for the post-Labor Day push. They will be introducing a new candidate while facing a popular and organized opponent who fits the district. They have a lot of catching up to do without much time to do it.

Thom Tillis pulled another Tillis. After weeks — months? — of posturing about Todd Blanche’s confirmation as attorney general, Tillis is going to put another Trump toady in the cabinet. He got played again, or maybe he was just playing us.

Tillis had long said that he would not vote to recommend Blanche for confirmation unless the Justice Department trashed Trump’s 1776 Fund to reward Capitol insurrectionists. He said otherwise Blanche was a fine pick, calling him “qualified.”

But that doesn’t make any sense. If Blanche was unqualified because he was willing to allow Trump to pay insurrectionists handsome sums of money using taxpayer dollars, how is he qualified just because the Senate forced him to back down? Blanche is still the same man willing to bend over for Trump and excuse people who assaulted the Capitol. His character and judgment haven’t changed.

Blanche is a bad pick by Tillis’s own standards. Of course, that brings into question Tillis’s standards. He’s never really had many firm ones. They are all negotiable and if he were still running for Senate, he probably wouldn’t have even raised these concerns.

It’s not just the perpetual double standard that defines Tillis this time. It’s also the deal itself. In exchange for ending the 1776 Fund, Trump, his sons, and his companies are protected from past audits. It’s all about Trump.

Blanche has shown no evidence that he puts the welfare of the country before his loyalty to Trump. That’s the problem with all of his cabinet members. They don’t see themselves as public servants. They see themselves as working for Trump. And Thom Tillis knows that. He should do better.

Join Anderson Clayton, Travis Fain, and Thomas Mills for all the skinny on North Carolina politics.

I can’t even finish the Wall Street Journal article it makes me so mad. Trump’s corruption is so blatant and he has no fear of accountability. All of Washington knows that pay-to-play is the order of the day and they also know that nobody is going to do anything about it.

Trump’s fundraising leans on billionaires and multinational corporations to fund his pet projects. They aren’t doling out tens of millions of dollars out of the goodness of their hearts. They are doing it because they will get something for their money.

The White House is for sale. Congress would be too, but Republicans there won’t do anything but defer to Trump. No need to pay twice. Washington is a one-stop shop of corruption. Pay Trump and you get the Congressional Republicans for free.

For billionaires and big corporations, the donations are investments. They give money to Trump and they get what they need — tax breaks, fewer regulations on their industries, government contracts, and so on. And Trump’s family and cronies are making bank while the rest of us struggle with mundane things like inflation and stagnant wages.

The rot may start at the head, but it’s infecting the rest of the GOP body. Here in North Carolina, Republicans in the legislature have been involved in their own pay-to-play schemes. There’s a widening investigation into a lobbying group called Greater Carolina that allegedly spent money on vacations and strip clubs in an effort to influence legislators. So far, four lobbyists have been indicted, but most people believe the State Bureau of Investigation is looking for bigger fish to fry.

Republican House Majority Leader Brenden “Boss Hogg” Jones is using his position to enrich big GOP donors. He tried to steer a liquor warehouse deal to a developer buddy despite opposition from the ABC chair. Fortunately, a spotlight on the corrupt deal has stopped it — so far.

In Trump’s first term, Republicans set a precedent. They wouldn’t hold him accountable for anything. He could abuse women, blackmail allies, try to overthrow the government, and the GOP would do nothing. Now, those rules apply to all Republicans. The party is rotting from the head down.

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Over the past few months, several readers have labeled me a “centrist,” clearly with a sense of derision. I would prefer pragmatic, but, yeah, I’m no raging leftist. Mainly, I want Democrats to win, especially in the places that matter — swing states and swing districts that will determine control of Congress and the White House.

My politics are less ideological and more strategic. I’m fine with Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York, Bernie Sanders as the senator from Vermont, and AOC as the representative from Queens and the Bronx. I think we need politicians pushing the country forward, but I don’t think any of them could win North Carolina, Georgia, or Wisconsin. I don’t believe Abdul El-Sayed can win Michigan.

I’m frustrated with the Democrats who call themselves “socialists,” not because I disagree with all or even most of their ideas, but because they are branding themselves with a label that costs votes. As a friend of mine wrote on Facebook, “You’re scaring people away from something everybody should want — affordable healthcare, affordable education, affordable housing, a living wage.” These are the same people who embraced “Defund the police.”

The left in this country is confusing frustration with a decrepit status quo with demand for transformational change. Broadly, people want, as Roy Cooper recognizes, stuff to cost less. They want their incomes to increase. They want the promise of a brighter future for their children.

Instead, they see stubborn inflation causing prices to rise. Their wages are stagnant and the future is uncertain. New technologies make some jobs obsolete and create others most people don’t even understand. Hence, the fight over data centers.

The divide between the haves and have-nots has grown too wide. We need a new tax code that makes powerful billionaires pay their fair share and laws that prevent them from exerting so much control over the government. But I don’t think most people blame the oligarchy for our problems. The masses aren’t grabbing their pitchforks yet.

To build the kind of transformational change pushed by the Democratic Socialists of America, the country needs certain conditions that are not present. There’s no broad consensus about what needs to be done. Trust in institutions is at an all-time low. People aren’t likely to embrace large government bureaucracies to deliver new services.

As I’ve said before, FDR launched the New Deal when the country had an unemployment rate of about 25% and we were in the midst of the worst depression in the nation’s relatively short history. The people were demanding that the government respond.

LBJ’s Great Society, which gave us civil rights legislation, Medicare and Medicaid, and food stamps, came about during the upheaval of the Civil Rights Movement and when Democrats and Republicans agreed that government could be a force for good. While many of the programs are still popular today, the reaction to the social programs and the taxes that funded them led to the Reagan Revolution fifteen years later.

The last great expansion of government came with the Affordable Care Act. Obama had watched Bill and Hillary’s attempt to pass health care reform go down in flames fifteen years earlier. He tried a different approach, setting broad goals and letting Congress hash out the details. It was still messy.

Passing the bill was hard even with 59 Democrats in the Senate. The country watched the sausage being made for almost a year. Progressives couldn’t even get a public option pushed through, much less single-payer. The uncertainty left voters skeptical for years, costing Democrats control of Congress and, arguably, setting up an environment that elected Donald Trump.

Before we can have the type of change that the left demands, we need to restore faith in the institutions that provide it. Government has to prove that it can deliver. We need to rebuild our public education system after years of assault from the right. Offering a public option for health care and expanding Medicaid to reach universal coverage is more likely to garner support than upending the existing system with a single-payer plan. A few years of smaller victories are more likely to build sustainable change than the massive disruption of wholesale transformation.

Finally, the left’s obsession with Gaza reminds me of my younger, more radical days. Back in the 1980s, US support for Central American death squads and Contras was the moral issue that consumed us. We protested and demanded that Americans pay attention and that Democrats take a stand. We were loud and drew a lot of media attention to our cause. However, like Gaza, most of the country didn’t care, or at least not enough to make them vote against the Republicans who supported those policies.

In North Carolina, Jim Hunt ran ads attacking Jesse Helms for his support of brutal right-wing nationalists. It didn’t work. Hunt lost. And while Iran-Contra became a scandal that brought down some people in the Reagan administration, George H.W. Bush was handily elected in 1988. Most Americans don’t really care too much about international affairs and may punish candidates who promote them over domestic concerns. Making Gaza a litmus test for Democrats is more likely to hurt the party than help Gazans.

My personal political journey has taken me from the far left to whatever you might call me now. Broadly, I believe that government can be a force for good. I also think that capitalism is the best economic system to deliver prosperity for the greatest number of people. That said, government is the only force powerful enough to mitigate the negative effects of capitalism and help the people who are left behind. The free market is the vehicle for creating wealth while government ensures that it is not too concentrated and is broadly distributed.

I believe that sustainable progress requires broad public support from an electorate that is inherently resistant to change. My political philosophy is basically to win elections to keep the assholes and greed heads out. I believe that competence and experience beat ideology most of the time.

Right now, I think that people want peace and stability. For the first quarter of the 21st century they’ve been roiled by 9/11, upended by technological change, knocked down by the Great Recession, quarantined by the pandemic, and plundered by Donald Trump and MAGA, all while some war rages in the background. The American people are tired. They don’t want more turmoil.

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Recently, a poll from Public Policy Polling (PPP) showed a much tighter race for US Senate in North Carolina than other recent surveys. According to the poll, Roy Cooper leads Michael Whatley by only four points. Other polls had shown Cooper with double-digit leads. The news rippled through the press with pundits saying the race is tightening.

In North Carolina, the polls almost always tighten for Democrats. Governor Josh Stein is the only statewide Democratic candidate to receive more than 52% of the vote in the last 15 to 20 years and he had a historically flawed opponent. If Cooper wins, he will probably garner around 51% or 52% of the vote and win by two to four points, about where the PPP poll lands.

North Carolina is a tough state for both sides. Republicans don’t get much more than Democrats when they win. Trump won by 3.3% in 2024 but only 1.3% in 2020. In 2022, Ted Budd won by only 3.2% despite a strong GOP year. He got less than 51% of the vote.

I agree with most of the prognosticators who rate the Senate race as leaning Democratic. Cooper is a demonstrably better candidate than Whatley. The former governor has outraised the former Republican National Committee chair by almost three to one. Whatley has faced criticism from his own party while Cooper seems to be energizing his base.

The political environment favors Cooper, too. The party in the White House generally loses seats in midterm elections. Right now, the country is angry at the GOP for rising prices and wars of choice.

Republicans will try to make the race about crime. It won’t work. Despite their greatest efforts, campaigns can’t drive the political narrative. Voters do that. Candidates either catch the wind driven by voters’ concerns or they fight against it. Whatley’s campaign will try to force the conversation to tack right, but it’s not likely to work.

Cooper, for his part, is tapping into voters’ angst. As New York Times columnist Frank Bruni points out, Cooper’s campaign slogan is “Make Stuff Cost Less.” It’s not flashy, but neither are the people who will determine the election. They aren’t activists looking for a hero. They’re just people trying to make ends meet and facing rising prices and higher bills.

Short of some sort of galvanizing event, I think Cooper wins North Carolina. I don’t think he wins big because nobody in North Carolina does. The four-point lead PPP found is probably how the race pans out. We’re a swing state for a reason. It takes a self-described Black Nazi with a porn habit to lose by double digits and even then he gets 40% of the vote.

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