First, Carter Wrenn, a longtime Republican campaign manager in North Carolina, has this to say about the election:
“What went wrong for Republicans here in North Carolina? What didn’t go wrong is happier to contemplate: Half the voters didn’t troop down to the Board of Elections and suddenly change their registration from Democrat to Republican. We didn’t wake up this morning as liberal as New York or as ‘blue’ as Massachusetts.
“Instead, voters asked themselves a simple question: Do I think Republicans deserve to be reelected? Then they looked at the last eight years and gave a pretty emphatic answer.
[...]
“All the pundits and talking heads in TV land are pontificating about how Republicans revive themselves politically. Do we move to the middle? Do we turn somersaults and stand on our heads? The better question for Republicans to ask ourselves is how did we do such a disastrous job of running the country for eight years? That, not politics, is the root of our problem.”
Wrenn also expresses strong skepticism toward the idea that the politics of race will be going away any time soon, and I'll defer to his years of experience with the electorate in North Carolina.
As for state races, the Democratic candidates pretty much swept the field down here, except for the Commissioners of Labor and Agriculture and some U.S. House incumbents. In fact, all the House incumbents in North Carolina won, except for Robin Hayes, who claimed at a Palin rally that “liberals hate the real America.” David Price won in my district. (I previously expressed opinions on Hayes and Price, in larger contexts.) And the Labor Commissioner, Cherie Berry of the GOP, probably owes her victory to name recognition: on every single slow elevator ride in the state, you get a chance to study her signature on the safety certificate.
Carter Wrenn's blogging partner, longtime N.C. Democratic campaign manager Gary Pearce, has his own rundown of the results of state races.
I'm not a “politics junkie,” so I don't understand exactly why the Democratic candidates won pretty handily in the races for Senate and Governor, but Obama just barely edged out McCain. (And Bob Barr swung the race!) But North Carolina has a long history of split-ticket voting for Democratic governors and Republican presidents, so maybe that explains it. I wish I knew more about this sort of thing.
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3 comments:
if you didn't vote for Cherie Berry, you don't love America.
here is my favourite song about the patron saint of elevators:
http://13thfloor.governing.com/2007/07/love-in-an-elev.html
also, from what i understand of the Senate race here in North Carolina, everyone was really excited about Elizabeth Dole when she was elected 4 years ago, but no one has heard anything from her since. Meanwhile, Erskine Bowles (former white house chief of staff under the Clinton administration), her opponent then, became president of the UNC System and everyone thinks he is great.
Bowles: 1, Dole: 0.
Then Dole ran that attack ad against Kay Hagan calling her a 'Godless American', intimating she was an athiest who didn't love the Lord or America, when in reality Hagan is some sort of Presbyterian who even had her own Sunday School class at a church in Greensboro. Say it ain't so, Libby.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kay_Hagan
Hagan: 1, Dole: -1
looks like it's back to television ads with your husband.
Yeah, that attack ad was messed up.
I did get a letter back from Dole when I wrote in about the bailout. So she let at least one constituent know about something she did. Too little, too late, I suppose.
Not a personal letter, of course.
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