Congressional Special Election (last call! unstickied after NY-27 final results)

[Chancellor Tanterterg]

Jim- Spin as you will. Harris hired a man who engineered the illegal taking of ballots from old black rurals and either changed them or threw them away. Your “no, do this with the numbers; look over here” “state senator...one stop...blah blah” doesn’t change the anomalies in Bladen and Robeson. It’s sad you’ve been here this long and don’t get election stats better than that.

Plus, you weren’t even responding to what you quoted of mine. Why’d you bother?

“Harris ran behind the local Republicans in Bladen County.”

Harris is clearly a misogynistic sleaze who feels the need to cheat to win, so that’s not surprising.

Do we reallly know this illegal activity is attributable to the Harris campaign though? If it was done in 2016 as well for a different Republican challenger, it just as easily be a local group of hyper-partisans.

Yeah, we actually do.

[Chancellor Tanterterg]

henster posted more details in the general election night thread:

This comment on reddit is interesting.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Charlotte/comments/a10kqk/nc_elections_board_declines_to_certify_9th/ean1n30/?st=jp1g5esc&sh=15095a86

That's strange enough to warrant a deeper look.

If nothing else, I want a reporter to visit the precinct which doubled (!) turnout between 2016 and 2018 while the county as a whole saw turnout go down 12%. Must be a fascinating place.

Is this a rhetorical question?

Why is it OK for you to mention the 2016 election, but others are not?

Is it because you are moderator?

Placed on ignore until this election is resolved.

May I suggest others do likewise? Preferably en masse.

Already there.

[Chancellor Tanterterg]

Is this seat the Charlotte suburbs?

Charlotte suburbs, Lumbee country, and rural areas in-between.

That is probably why McCready lost - he didn't know that Bladen County was in the district. How many times did he speak in Elizabethtown, and how many times did he fly out to Hollywood or San Francisco for a fund raising event?

Except McCready won...

[Chancellor Tanterterg]

It's very strange to me because NC-9 isn't a Jewish district like GA6 is, but I guess whatever it takes to get elected.

That confirms my supercynical approach to politics and elections: candidates (mostly) run to win, not to make some policy changes. Win at almost every possible price, victory being valuable enpugh by itself...

Of course. Why do you think Lujan flip-flopped on Omar?

Err...he didn’t.  Lujan simply condemned the folks making death threats against her.  Speaking from my own personal experience, it’s easy to do that while also considering her a vicious anti-Semite who was sickeningly dismissive of the 9/11 attacks and deserves to be expelled from the Democratic Caucus.  Even if someone is pond scum like Omar, that doesn’t mean it’s okay for people to make death treats against them.

[Chancellor Tanterterg]

Rumor has it that there will need to be a special election in KS-02 in the near future.

woah, can you elaborate?

It's starting to come out: https://www.cjonline.com/news/20190822/us-rep-steve-watkins-ducks-reporters-amid-speculation-he-could-resign

Well, as long as someone besides Paul Davis takes the challenge, this ought be interesting if true.

Paul Davis is literally the only chance we have to win here and even that would take a weak Republican nominee

[Chancellor Tanterterg]

https://twitter.com/JoeBrunoWSOC9/status/1169323806437117958

F***

[Chancellor Tanterterg]

You know Republicans are worried when they want to give people more time to vote.

[Chancellor Tanterterg]

If you look at the PVI and how nearly all comparable seats are held by Rs, it’s 2018 which was the extraordinary outcome for Dems in this district. It’s really remarkable that McCready got so close that Harris’s cheating was required to put him over the top... no wonder Harris thought he would get away with it.

I mean, even if McCready hadn’t underperformed 2018 so badly in rural areas like Richmond County and especially Robeson County (which McCready won by about 15% in 2018 yet only won by 1% in the special), he’d have won.  And if McCready had done that *and* held his ground in Cumberland County from 2018, he’d have definitely won given that McCready actually over-performed 2018 by quite a bit in Mecklenburg County (his double-digit win in such a conservative part of the county speaks for itself which, lest we forget, the NRCC initially thought would be Bishop’s ace in the hole for some reason).

In any case, this district may not even exist in its present form in the 2020 cycle given the challenge to NC’s congressional maps.  Anyway, we’ll see what the NC Supreme Court does.