More about Mayberry
CBS Sunday Morning’s segment on Mount Airy has caused quite a stir among the political class. I wrote about it last week. John Hood, former President of the John Locke Foundation, wrote about it this week. So did Sara Paqueño, an opinion writer for...
Pass a Damn Budget!
By custom and rule, the purpose of North Carolina's legislative long session is to craft and pass a state budget. In years past legislators would do little else and depart Raleigh on a prompt basis after sending their spending plan to the governor. But Republican...
Bob Orr, Pat McCrory, and the Strange Death of Moderate Republicanism
When they entered the voting booth for the 2008 gubernatorial primary, Republicans had two moderate choices. One, a longtime fixture of GOP circles, was former Supreme Court Justice Bob Orr of Yancey County. Preceding him alphabetically was Charlotte Mayor Pat...
Watch Virginia
The best predictors of 2022 are not the polls we’ve seen. It’s the election in Virginia in November. Virginia is one of a handful of states that holds its election for legislature and council of state in odd numbered years. With governors limited to a single term,...
Progressive Democrats are being Responsible. Centrists are not.
In his trademark racist way, former President Donald Trump tried to make the Sqaud out to be the true face of the Democratic Party. He zeroed in on these four women of color because they were Black and Brown and progressive. The message: Democrats are not like you,...
More fearful of losing power than losing democracy
Over the past few months, several people have asked me about my audience and why I’m writing. My audience is people who follow North Carolina politics, but I also write for myself. I started PoliticsNC in 2013 because I was frustrated with the coverage of North...
Southern Republicans’ Opposition to Critical Race Theory is Deeply Ironic
The story America told about itself for the first few hundred years went a little like this. Persecuted in their homelands, brave settlers (it went without mentioning that they white) departed Europe for what F. Scott Fitzgerald called the "fresh green breast of the...
Mayberry and the children of the Reagan Revolution
CBS This Morning ran a segment on Mount Airy, Andy Griffith’s home town and the basis for the fictional Mayberry of the Andy Griffith Show. Ted Koppel explores why Mount Airy has become a booming tourist destination for people searching for Mayberry. The show, he...
K Street is Eviscerating Joe Biden’s Agenda
Two politicians of diametrically opposite character have utilized the same, populist slogan: Drain the Swamp. Then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi popularized the phrase in her party's 2006 drive for a Congressional majority. A decade later, her characterological...
Red America is Holding Blue America Hostage
Immigration polling is complicated, but one kernel of public opinion that shines through in nearly every survey is that Americans support a pathway to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants. This position has held throughout the decades in which our political system...
The rise of Neo-Patriots and the Idiot Wing of the GOP
When John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate, he inadvertently created the Idiot Wing of the Republican Party. Until then, the anti-intellectual, anti-democratic tradition within the GOP was kept at bay by the free marketeers dedicated to profits instead of...
Dying because Democrats are worse
Seems every week, we watch some prominent or vocal conservative anti-vaxxer die of COVID. Today, it was a couple in Alabama who called themselves “Alabama Pickers.” They gave people advice on buying and selling used items on their Youtube channel. The husband, Dusty,...