The 50-50 controversy
Dr. Michael Bitzer, the political scientist from Catawba College, posted interesting numbers on Twitter yesterday. Bitzer totaled up the results from all the 2020 statewide races in North Carolina and found the vote favored Republicans 50.9% to 49.1%. That would make...
Affirmative Action Strengthens UNC and American Higher Education
The guts of the college admissions process are distasteful. Whatever else may be said of the exchange between UNC admissions officers revealed in the pending case on that university's race-conscious admissions policies, crudely reducing a young person's profile to...
The NCGOP Wants the US Supreme Court to Defend Gerrymandering in North Carolina
Jubilant at holding the reigns of power, North Carolina Republicans' loonier members claimed the right to nullify Supreme Court decisions. A Trump presidency later, such hostility has given way to a supreme confidence that the Court will act as a Republican ally....
Is Madison Cawthorn getting hung out to dry?
As far as I can tell, Madison Cawthorn has no redeeming qualities. He’s a grifter who will say anything for attention. He’s an anti-intellectual who appeals to the basest instincts of ignorant people. He’s been credibly accused of inappropriate sexual behavior. He...
Products of gerrymandering
The Supreme Court of North Carolina struck down the state’s heavily gerrymandered districts that would have given Republicans at least ten, and possibly eleven, of fourteen Congressional seats. The legislative redistricting might have given the GOP veto proof...
Race and Voting Rights Are Inextricably Linked
Republicans have gloated over political science findings that their voter ID laws have not cratered Black turnout. This, they claim, is evidence of their party's racial innocence. Let's interrogate that assumption a bit. It doesn't hold up given that in the state...
Democrats are out of sync with the country on the COVID response
Back in the early 1990s, my ex-wife was studying public health and I was working as a carpenter. I came home with some injury and called it an accident. She told me that her professor said that there are no such things as accidents, because every event has a cause and...
If you are a conservative now, you probably would have been a conservative then
Facebook serves me up a lot posts that are supposedly history. Often they’re false and a lot of them are about the Civil War and about Confederates in particular. They come from pages with names like “Defending the Heritage” or just “Confederates.” Facebook says they...
Hamilton, Jefferson, Democrats, and Republicans
"The state of the public mind in North Carolina is a mystery to us," declared a perplexed President Thomas Jefferson. Like observers today, Jefferson saw a state whose public life was hard to parse and harder to pigeonhole into the prescribed categories of ideology...
Democrats Have Opportunities in CountryPolitan North Carolina
Seeing my longtime friend Mac McCorkle, along with his fellow researcher Rachel Salzberg, in PoliticsNC, was a great pleasure to me. I first met Mac nearly 13 years ago when he was first transitioning out of political advising and into the academic world, and he is...
Aid and comfort
Last week more clearly defined the direction in which the Republican Party is moving. Even relatively moderate conservatives blasted Joe Biden for pledging to appoint a Black woman to the Supreme Court. They also went out of their way to defend the book-banning taking...
Countrypolitan voters and cultural Southerners
On Wednesday, Mac McCorkle and Rachel Salzberg released a study that show North Carolina’s “countrypolitan” counties hold the key to victory for Republicans in North Carolina. According the authors, Democrats need to cut into the GOP margin in these counties if they...