What's ahead for NC after election wipeout | Hour 1

What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to three on WBT radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to the Pete calendar show.com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button, get every episode for free, right to your smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for your support. It's Tuesday, it's noon, and that means we chat with Andrew Dunn. He is the publisher of Longleaf Politics. Longleafpol.com is that website. Also the author of the book, The Change Agent, Pat McCrory's Rise, Reckoning, and Legacy. Andrew, good day, sir. Good day to you. Yes. When last we spoke. Yeah. A different world. Yes. All right. Let's start out in, well, first off, do you say Robeson County or Robeson County? I am 90% sure it's Robeson County. Okay. That's what I usually say about 90% of the time. And about 10%, I just throw in a Robeson just to, just in case, you know. All right. So let's head. Interesting. Right. All right. So Robison County, but also Scotland County and Hoke County. This is the Senate district that has been represented by Senator Danny Britt. He is a Republican and he is clinging to a roughly 270 vote lead. I want to say. Against the Democrat opponent named Katina ham. And if he loses this seat, then the Democrats would have 25 of the 50 seats. Republicans would have the other 25 seats in the Senate. That means Lieutenant Governor Rachel Hunt, daughter of former Governor Jim Hunt. She would then be the deciding vote in the Senate, which would basically give Democrats a trifecta in North Carolina. So to say that this is an important count is probably underselling it, I think. This is very, very important. It's pretty stunning that we're in this spot. You know, Senator Britt is really an institution in Robeson County. You know, that said, it is a heavily Democratic district. However, you know, Senator Britt has really turned the tide there and it's voted pretty reliably red and not just Senator Britt's race, but in other races up and down the ballot recently. How much of this, and maybe you don't know, but how much of this is the Lumbee tribe? Oh, I mean, that is the biggest single voting block in that area. Right. And Republicans have courted the Lumbees votes pretty aggressively over the last couple of cycles. And now, you know, we have Lumbee recognition. Right. So, yeah, I think that the inroads they have made with the Lumbee probably may contribute to Britt hanging on if he can. All right, so you went and did the thing that I'm contractually prohibited from doing, which is math. You went and did a look at, because what we're waiting on now are the provisional ballots, right? So let's first run through what are provisional ballots. So provisional ballots are votes. That are cast But there's some. Problem with it. It could be that you showed up to the polls and they couldn't find a record of your registration, which is pretty serious. It could be that you didn't have voter ID. And so you had to cast a provisional ballot. It could be that you went to the wrong precinct on election day. So basically what happens with those votes is they take your vote, put it in an envelope, and then after the election, the county elections board will investigate. The circumstances, try to figure out, all right, so what's going on here? Should this vote count or not? And different categories have different percentages or different likelihoods of ultimately being accepted. You know, if there was no record of your registration, I guess it's conceivably possible that there's just like some technicality things like voting in the wrong precinct, generally your vote will count. So it really heavily hinges on the reason for casting a provisional ballot, whether or not your vote will ultimately be counted. Right. And some of these provisional ballots also, right, if there's no photo ID, you can, quote, cure your ballot, right? The Board of Elections will reach out to the voter and say, hey, swing on back by, show us your ID, and then we. Can count this provisional ballot. So people, there can be some curing of some of these provisional ballots. Exactly. All right. So different categories, different percentages of acceptance. There's a higher percentage of them that are going to get spoiled if there's no record of registration. So, and there are three different counties and what, Hoke County, they're done already, right? They counted all of theirs, I think, on Friday. Okay. That's right. So Hope County is done. And, you know, the reason why I wanted to dive into this is because, you know, people ask me immediately after the election, well, what do you think are the chances that this actually flips? It's a, you know, 270 some vote lead for Senator Britt. And what I said was I would be surprised, but I wouldn't be shocked based on everything that just happened. I don't think anything would shock me now. But I don't just like giving opinions based on vibes. I like to try to back it up with some actual. Data when I can. So I went diving into the state data on what these provisional ballots actually are and looked at the makeup of the reasons for that. why they were provisional in the three different counties. And so Hope County was actually a pretty large majority were no registration record. And so it wasn't surprising to me to see that most of them, about 70% got thrown out. Now in Robinson County, it's kind of different. That had a minority that was a registration issue. Most of it was a hodgepodge of other things. A lot of it was the voter registration didn't have a driver's license number or social security number, which is required under North Carolina law to have. And so those are curable. And so the Republican Party and the Democratic Party have both been working pretty hard over the past week to get those fixed for their voters. So I think a majority of those will end up counting. But the long and short of it is I think we should know by the end of the day today pretty certain what's going to happen with that race. Robinson County at 10 o'clock. I don't think they're done yet. And then Scotland County, which is the third county, they meet starting at 1. And they'll work pretty quickly through that. So we should know by the end of the day. But after my rigorous analysis, I can confidently say that I don't know for sure, but it looks like Senator Britt will likely pull it out. All right. Did you enter an elevator? Are you in an elevator? No, I didn't. Oh, okay. Did I cut out? Yeah, it just sounded like you were underwater in a parking deck or something. Oh, weird. Oh, all right. Well, clear again. So it sounds like you think right now your guess is that Britt hangs on to win, and I'm assuming this is within the 1% margin, so there's probably going to be a recount of this as well. Yeah. Probably so, but in a recount, I mean, you might. See a swing of three or four. Votes, but nothing more than that. It's the provisionals where you could have. More substantive swings. But again, I mean, this is a small district, a small number of votes, and when. You look at the math here, basically the only path for HAM to. Actually flip the race is if two. Things fall into place. One, a large percentage of these. Voters uh, provisional ballots end up counting and then an, an unusually percentage of those ballots go for him. And I, you know, it's possible. But I don't, I, it's not likely. Yeah. She'd have to win like almost all of the provisionals, right. In order to pretty much. Yeah. To, to clear this. And the bulk of them are in Robinson County and Robinson County went pretty heavy for Brit. So you'd have to think, uh, he's feeling pretty good about that. Okay. Um, all right. So let's take a look then at, um, your piece that you did called Voters Just Delivered a Humbling Message to North Carolina Republicans. I believe, was this one over at the Charlotte Observer? I think so. It was, yeah. And, alright, so you say that the national mood cannot explain everything that happened in Raleigh. Alright, so what's your explanation, or one of your explanations? Yeah, so I mean, if you look at nationally, obviously it was a bad year for Republicans everywhere, but It was a particularly. Bad year in North Carolina, above and beyond what we saw in a lot of other states. And I think that the national mood, you know, a backlash against President Trump's second term, which has been a disappointment for just about everyone, I think explains a lot of it. But I don't think it quite explains everything that we saw. And so I think what you have to interpret these election results as is not just a repudiation of Republicans at the national level, but also a repudiation of how business has been done by Republicans here in North Carolina. You know, over the last couple of years, there's really been an emphasis on power plays and trying to cream things through, switching powers around, laying back sessions, all sorts. Of shenanigans that have have really turned off the center. Of the electorate in North Carolina. All right, we're going to leave it there. I don't know what's going on with the phone. I think it's degrading, much like Republicans' chances at holding the midterms. Andrew, we always appreciate the time, sir. Thanks so much. Yeah, thank you. All right, see you. That's Andrew Dunn. He is the publisher of Longleaf Politics. I apologize for the quality of the, I don't know what's going on. It was like coming in and it was going out, coming in and going out. Longleafpol.com is the website. The holidays will be here before you know it. And so now is the time to create precious and priceless family heirlooms that will last for generations. Take your old photos, slides, films, and tapes to create a video in Mint Hill. There, they'll turn those memories into the story of your lives, memories from past family events captured forever to pass down to future generations. Creative Video's skilled team will professionally transfer your family's stories onto easy-to-use USB drives or DVDs that won't deteriorate over time like the old photos and tapes are doing right now. They will create a keepsake video that you can share and copy and keep forever. I can see it now. 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I wanted you to be aware that the word boil has only one syllable, and you were mispronouncing it by adding a second syllable. That's not bowl. Bowl. No. It's boil. Unlike the word jail, that's one syllable. But a lot of people around these parts think it. Has two, jail. With the 704 number says, with the provisional votes, if they only count for 1% and all races are decided by 5% or more, is it worth counting the provisional votes? Yes, you always have to count the votes. John says, don't forget today is the anniversary of when the publisher of the News and Observer, led the insurrection against Wilmington. Oh yes. Yes. The Wilmington coup. And now I know a lot of the, a lot of the media nowadays likes to just call it the Wilmington riot, but it was a coup that was, uh, orchestrated by Democrats, the clan, uh, I believe was called, what were they? The red shirts is what they were called. I think they would, right. Yeah. I think they were called the red shirts. Um, And and the yeah, the publisher of the Raleigh News and Observer. And they were not happy that Republicans and blacks had joined together to create a fusion party in Wilmington. And they ran for offices and won. They took control of the local government. And this was just unacceptable to Democrats. And so they whipped up a race riot. and murdered some people and burned down a bunch of businesses and homes and ran a lot of the black leaders and Republican leaders out of Wilmington, thereby solidifying their power in Wilmington for several generations to follow. Oh, and today also, yes, the Edmund Fitzgerald. Today is also the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Not the song. I mean, the song came out later. The actual wreck of the ship was today, Lake Superior, which I've heard sings? No. Rolls? One of them. No, Superior never gives up her debt. That's right. That's right, producer Nick. Yes. Yes, I got another one from No Cash Bail Pete. It's the anniversary of of the loss of the Edmund Fitzgerald. See, now that there's a song about it, it's like, and it's a sad song, but I love the song. It's a great song. But now it's like I feel bad when I sing this song because it's like these guys died on that ship in pretty horrific fashion, you know? Anyway. All right, so Andrew Dunn also had a piece we didn't get to because of this poor quality of the phone line there, but he also... took a few shots at the gerrymandering whiners, right? These are the people that have been constantly complaining about literally every map that Republicans have drawn over the last 15 years for the congressional seats and the North Carolina House and Senate seats. They're like, these aren't fair maps. We can't win. We're locked out, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And people like me have been saying, that's not true. You can win these races. It is possible. Right? Demographic shifts, the mood of the electorate changes, right? There are all sorts of reasons why the district lines become less and less potent over time. And I think now we should just kind of put this all to rest, this idea that, like, you can draw yourself a seat so you'll never have a challenge or you'll never lose a race, and that's just not true, as we have seen. And he is now, Andrew, he wants there to be he wants better redistricting. He doesn't like the current system. And he talks about that in this piece at Longleaf Politics. But he said the argument I really want to get away from is that a statewide Democratic margin of, you know, X amount of points should produce a proportionate number of seats, right? This is what the Democrats have been crying about for a decade and a half when they say we want fair maps. And I, as I always say, when Democrats say fair maps, they mean maps that they win. They say, oh, well, you know, half of the state voted for our candidate for president. So we should get half of these congressional seats and that sort of thing. And like this, this argument should not fly any longer. Well, they'll still use it. I'm not, okay. I reckon they're still going to use the argument, but it should not be treated as a serious. Argument any longer. All right, real quick. Every government number gets revised, right? Every projection gets walked back. Gold does not file corrections like GovCo. Revelation Gold Group helps families hold physical gold and silver, including in a tax-advantaged gold IRA. It's real. It's in your name. And 10 minutes tells you if your retirement account qualifies. If you want to learn more, go to Calendarmetals.com. That's Calendarmetals.com. There is a link in the podcast description. Or if you want to talk to somebody, you can call 888-465-3049. I have also been informed on the text line, but I cannot confirm this is true or not because I haven't had time to go check during the break and check with my local data center. But this was also the day when Kyle Fleischman disappeared from Charlotte. All right, so. Brian Onorio, who is a mapmaker, he does a whole bunch of election mapping and all that stuff, and he was looking at the results from the North Carolina election, and he says, it appears Western North Carolina has either forgiven or forgotten the handling of the Helene aftermath by then-Governor Cooper. He said, the big story, the polls missed again. This time they missed the other way. Final polling averages had Roy Cooper up by 11, but he won by almost 20, 19.6. Anita Earls' Supreme Court race, her polls since September averaged about 7.5%. She won by almost 18%. If you look historically, he says from 2016 to 2024, Over that eight-year period, Republicans beat their final North Carolina polling average in seven of nine statewide races. Across all nine, the polls missed by about 2.4 points their way on average. This year, the miss ran 8.6 points towards a Democrat, the biggest of any of them. So why. It's like people were thinking before the election, like these numbers for the. Democrats seem so high. Surely, you know, the historical record where, you know, Democrats tend to get overrepresented in the polls. And then we had the pollsters that were coming out saying, oh, you know what? We actually were just lying about these poll results. It was a social experiment, right? And all of this. And there was a thought that The polling was off, but it was off in favor of Republicans. But as it turns out, at least in North Carolina, it was off by like 100% for Democrats. They did twice as well as the polling indicated they would. Why? Same ballots also. But the amendments that we were asked to vote on all passed by like 60 to 40%. Cooper won by a similar margin. All three amendments passed. That includes the cap on income tax rates, what's called a levy limit. So it caps the increase in property tax rates on an annual basis. So you don't see 10, 15, 20% annual increases in your property tax rate, and also a photo ID for every voter, including absentee mail. Interestingly enough, the income tax cap at 3.5%, that amendment, that got more votes than Roy Cooper did. 94,000 more votes than Roy Cooper won. So the question that our friend AP Dillon over at the North State Journal, a reporter, a reporter, Brian Anderson, a reporter at the North State Journal, but writing on her Substack newsletter, She says voters came out for Democrats this cycle who ran on affordability and pocketbook politics. The electorate in North Carolina underscored their desire for relief by widely approving the three constitutional amendments on the ballot. But are the Democrats listening? No, I'm just going to say that now. No, they're not. And here's why. The affordability message was always a lie. It was always a lie. It was simply a message. And now we have people admitting it. We have Democrats admitting it. Like Van Jones. Yeah. In fact, here, let me go ahead and play it. I was going to hold off till next hour, but we'll do it live. We'll do it now. Here it is. Now it can be told. How did we win the narrative on affordability? Were they just these nice little Democrats out there running for office and going to? No. The Republicans never figured out what we were doing. There's something called the American Accountability Network. Tens of thousands of online humans, not bots, coordinated to make the affordability message a winning message online. 32.5 million people hit on. Instagram every day. 88.8 million hit on Twitter every single day. And 185 million Facebook hits every single day. And they never figured it out. The Republicans could not understand. It wasn't bots. It was actual human beings. The most effective online organizing campaign called the American Account Billion Network flew under the radar screen. Never been told before. And they were talking about the issue or they were saying you need to elect Democrats to deal with this? Driving democracy. The kitchen table affordability message and tying that to Democrats on a positive and Republicans on a negative. The Republicans never figured out what we were doing. And what that meant was everywhere you go, people were talking about affordability and they were talking about kitchen table issues. They couldn't get any traction on these cultural war issues anymore because we figured out how to get around all that. So it's not just. All right. You hear what he just said there? Republicans weren't gaining traction. on any of the culture war issues and they couldn't figure out how to get around that until they, the Democrats figured out a way around the culture war issues. Why? Because they had been beaten on all of those issues. They, they got beat on immigration, right? They've lost. They, they just cycle after cycle after cycle. They were losing. People kept asking me during the Senate race, uh, Like, why is Michael Watley only focusing on crime? Look, I spoke to a local Republican group after last election, not this most. Recent one, obviously, but last year's. And Zoran Mamdani had just won on this affordability message. And I told the Republicans, there isn't any reason why you can't use that argument. that you can't use that same message. It's not his. He doesn't have it copyrighted or trademarked. You can run on that too. And in fact, your policy prescriptions have the benefit of being the correct ones. Like your policies actually do drive down the costs for everyday goods and services. Your economic policies, your fiscal philosophy actually yields benefits more affordable places that's why if you look at all the blue run cities they're not affordable and they're trying all sorts of government actions in order to try to make things affordable like roy cooper promised i'm going to make stuff cost less by doing what handing out more government money to people Like, that's not how you make things cost less, but that's how Democrats think things cost less. So that's what they kept messaging, and they used the American Accountability Network, tens of thousands of people, not bots, not bots. Like, dude, that's not even the point. Like, were these people paid? I'm curious. Who exactly is the American Accountability Network? How much money was being spent for influencer accounts? to pump this message into the social media space. What have I been saying? When you get online, you are entering the informational battle space. There is a constant war for your opinion to line up with whoever it is that's telling you their opinion. And that's what Democrats did because they could not win on all of these other issues. They just said, things aren't affordable, things aren't affordable, I can't afford stuff, you can't afford stuff, we need new direction, and eventually it sticks. It's just advertising. Same concept, same principle. It's just, you gotta have the impressions. You gotta say it enough, and then people just accept it as the truth. Things aren't affordable, things aren't affordable. And now we're getting all of the Economic data, yeah, not so much. All right, so what was I saying in the run-up to the election? I was mainly messaging to people on the right that were saying, I'm not going to vote or I'm going to flip my vote as a protest against the Republicans and I'm going to vote for Democrats. Because I'm mad about the price of gas. I'm mad about affordability. Because that's what I was seeing people citing. And that's what I was hearing in phone calls. I was seeing on the text line. I was reading in my emails, seeing it on social media. And by the way, the horseshoe right, the woke right, the post-liberal right, whatever you want to call them, the new right, I think is what they're calling themselves. They also have been engaged in that argument as well. Right? So whoever the American accountability network was utilizing to push this affordability message out, that message was being amplified by people on the right who also wanted to kneecap Trump, make him a lame duck, shatter the MAGA movement, demoralize evangelicals, right? Because they want to take over the party. That's what they're fixing to do. That's That's their goal. Okay. But what was I saying the entire time? Like the argument made no sense to me. This threat of I'm going to send a protest vote and it's a, you know, for the reason of affordability and in doing so, I'm going to put people in power that have actually done the opposite of make things more affordable. It made no logical sense whatsoever. And now I know why. So thank you, Van Jones. for waiting a week to spill the beans, he did say on the CNN panel that he did have permission to divulge this information. Victor Davis Hanson points out that the economic data does not line up with this idea that everything is becoming less affordable. Not everything. And the economy actually appears to be in the process of rebounding. The problem is that the economic data is backward-looking. It's telling us the month we just came through. So you just had the big jobs announcement, right? 165,000 new jobs. Virtually all of them, I think, are in the private sector. Poverty rate, all-time low. Did you know that? Does that matter? Per capita family income. $ 87, 000. That is a new record. GDP revised to 3.4, and the Atlanta Fed says that it'll probably hit 5 by the. End of the year. And by the way, GDP is really, really important for a country like ours that borrows itself into oblivion. That's the way that we've been able to kind of kick the can down the road is because of growth. Economic growth. If you have the economic growth, you're generating more revenue. And so you're able to keep the interest rates lower and you're able to pay this stuff off. Like that's the only reason that we're still like treading water here because of growth. Stock market was almost 20,000 points higher and income was $ 14, 000 higher than it was during the 2022 midterms. And that's when Biden stopped the red wave during that election. Inflation was at a record 9.1% and gas prices were what they are now. So Trump's economy in 26 is better or at worst the same as in 2022 under Joe Biden. What's the difference? What have I always said? Elections are about what media make them. Glenn Beck points this out. that in 2022, the media did not focus on the economy. They insisted Biden did a great job getting us out of the COVID era and the high gas prices due to the Ukraine war were all worth it. Where do media get their stories from? Like reporters, journalismers, where are they getting stories from? Oh, I know that, you know, this antiquated idea of they're working their sources, whatever. Now they're getting it from Twitter and social media. They're getting story ideas of what are the people thinking? What are real people thinking on social media? So if you have an army of influencers that are hammering away at the inflation or the affordability message that then permeates into the mainstream media, that becomes what the election is about in 26 when it was not about that in 2022. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. 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