More national outrage about NC GOP voter suppression efforts
The controversy swirling around the efforts of the North Carolina Republican Party to make it more difficult for African-Americans to vote went national this week, with stories around the country about the memo by NC GOP Executive Director Dallas Woodhouse urging support for local elections boards to restricting access to early voting.
The move is a startling attempt by Republicans to defy the intent of the recent ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit that struck down the massive voter suppression law passed by the General Assembly in 2013 and signed by Gov. Pat McCrory.
The court found that legislative leaders asked for data about how people vote, broken down by race, and then changed the voting methods used disproportionately by African-Americans. The intent could not have been clearer.
Well, you have to give him this: Dallas Woodhouse, executive director of the North Carolina Republican Party, didn’t try to be clever or subtle when he sent an email to GOP members of county boards of elections and other party members last weekend. No, he basically instructed those board members to use their majorities to curb early voting, keep polling sites closed on Sundays, close college campus voting sites and in general, to, as he put it, “make party line changes to early voting.”
Republican leaders believe college students and African-Americans who favor early voting or Sunday voting are liable to vote Democratic. In the spirit of the voter ID or voter suppression law passed by Republicans in the General Assembly, they’d like to do what they can to limit voting even in the wake of a federal court ruling that threw out the state’s voter ID law.
Woodhouse couches his orders to county elections officials in the terms of guarding against voter fraud. Although that’s a virtually non-existent problem in North Carolina, Republicans use the threat of it as an excuse to tamp down as many Democratic votes as possible.
Two important stories from Joan McCarter
The immediate response of the North Carolina Republican party to a federal court decision striking down that state's voter suppression laws was to find the loophole. A memo to Republican county elections board members from NCGOP executive director Dallas Woodhouse encouraged those boards to do what is still in their power—shut down early voting hours and locations. As Ed Kilgore smartly argues, this is what Republicans do.
You would think North Carolina Republicans might want to be a little more subtle than they have been now that the Supreme Court will be weighing whether they can keep their voter suppression laws for this election—particularly in light of the finding from the lower court of "intentional discrimination by the state." But no, they're still at it, with no effort to hide their motivation.
The Democrat seeking to unseat Cherie Berry as North Carolina labor commissioner criticized her Wednesday for accepting “improper contributions” from corporate executives who have cases pending before her agency.
Candidate Charles Meeker, a former Raleigh mayor, said in a statement that if he’s elected, he will not accept such political contributions. Meeker cited recent campaign donations to Berry totaling $20,000 – from the executives of four companies whose workplaces have recently been fined or inspected by the labor department.
He pointed to contributions totaling $10,000 from Ronald Cameron, the chairman and CEO of Mountaire Farms, a large poultry producer based in Delaware. Mountaire Farms has had a previous workplace death and had three open cases before the labor department earlier this year, Meeker noted.
Last month’s sudden resignation of a Mecklenburg County lawmaker has boosted Democratic hopes of breaking the Republican grip in the North Carolina General Assembly.
Republican Rep. Charles Jeter’s decision makes it more likely that his district, which twice voted for President Barack Obama, will flip to Democrats. It would be one of four seats Democrats need to crack the GOP’s “super-majority” in the 120-member House, the number needed to over-ride a gubernatorial veto.
Analysts say Democrats stand a good chance to win those – and more.
In the political battleground of North Carolina, the racial demographics of the state's voters are rapidly changing, with African-American, Asian and Latino communities giving rise to a more diverse electorate.
But the big donors that bankroll the state's elections don't reflect this growing diversity, according to a new report by the Institute for Southern Studies.
Drawing on campaign finance reports, the Institute identified the 574 biggest North Carolina donors in the state's 2014 U.S. Senate race, the five most expensive U.S. House races in the state, and the 2016 presidential contest so far. Researchers then examined the racial demographics of the donors, drawing on state voter files and other sources. The findings offer a snapshot of North Carolina's "donor class".
ASHEVILLE, N.C. — Hillary Clinton "owes the state of North Carolina a very big apology," Donald Trump thundered, condemning the loss of manufacturing jobs due to free-trade deals supported by the Democratic presidential nominee. The attack line drew no more than polite applause at his event last week in Charlotte.
In the state that may be the most pivotal to Trump's White House bid, the audience for the Republican's chief economic pitch is shrinking by the day. Textile and furniture manufacturing no longer dominates the state's economy as it did a generation ago. Banking, technology and others industries have driven North Carolina's economic output to grow faster than any state in the past three years.
Voters are flowing into the state at a firehose rate — young, educated and many to take high-paying jobs when they arrive. They're coming from everywhere and quickly diluting North Carolina's conservative political underpinnings.
"Clinton is winning," said North Carolina Republican pollster Michael Luethy. "Particularly because folks who have moved to the state in the last five years are very different voters. They're persuaded by a different issue set than those have been here a while."
North Carolina Republicans moved quickly after gaining control of both General Assembly chambers in 2011 and then the governor’s office in 2013 to weave conservative policies and legislation into the fabric of a state that had not experienced such a political reordering in more than a century.
If you want to understand the larger dynamics at play in the 2016 election — and how they are reshaping the clash between Republicans and Democrats in real time, from the top of the ticket to the bottom — there’s no better place to look than North Carolina.
And that’s a problem for the GOP.
Once upon a time, the Tar Heel State was reliably Republican, at least on the presidential level. Sure, Jimmy Carter — a southern governor with strong Evangelical ties — won there in 1976. But otherwise N.C. voted for every GOP nominee from Richard Nixon in 1968 to George W. Bush in 2004, and much of the time it wasn’t even close: George H.W. Bush trounced Michael Dukakis 16 percentage points in 1988, and his son defeated another Massachusetts Democrat, John Kerry, by more than a dozen points 16 years later.
Republicans across the country are starting worry about Richard Burr. For most of the cycle, GOP insiders seemed to think that he would be alright. He had a large war chest and has proven to be hard campaigner with few high negatives. Now, though,Donald Trump threatens to bring everyone down with him.
North Carolina is starting to look like a “perfect storm,” as one conservative publication called it. Not only is Trump in trouble in the state, but Governor Pat McCrory is also struggling. He faces a strong opponent in Attorney Roy Cooper and has found himself on the wrong side of a number of polarizing issues, including HB2. Between the so-called “bathroom bill” and recent court decisions about redistricting and voting rights, the Democratic base is energized.
Burr is not a strong personality and is relatively undefined in the state despite more than 20 years in Washington. He’ll need to separate himself from the pack somehow to fend off Deborah Ross, who has turned out to be a much stronger candidate than many people expected. She’s out-raised Burr for two quarters in a row and a recent poll has her leading by two.
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