Decades of data tell us that political primary voters are the most motivated, and ideologically strict- of all registered residents in any given district.
This is all the more so in gerrymandered districts, where, once a party has chosen and stuffed its nominee into office, voting becomes a ritual act for years- sometimes decades- thereafter.
North Carolina, for example, has ten Republican members of Congress despite routinely winning only half the vote. David Lewis, the chief gerrymanderer in the General Assembly, was candid in a 2016 presser: after federal courts struck down his plan for stacking minority voters in a few districts, he just redrew the lines to stack Democratic Party voters in a few districts.
Po-faced, Lewis said his plan rigged ten Republicans in place only because he couldn’t make it rig eleven.
The one hazard to gerrymandering is when a party long unused to competing picks bad candidates. NC Republican voters did that when they elected Robert Pittenger, a Campus Crusade for Christ organizer from Texas who found he’d rather harvest real estate than souls.
Pittinger barely won his seat in 2012, was unopposed in 2014 and won his 2016 primary by 134 votes. His stalker was Rev. Mark Harris, a Charlotte theocrat who promptly started running for 2018.
Humorless, self-regarding, and proudly homophobic, Harris was straight out of evangelical central casting, even preaching sermons telling women their job was to be a man’s “servant-lover.”
He spent vast sums to swing that 1000 votes he needed to defeat Pittenger, and then Democrat Dan McCready, in 2018; he just spent a lot of it on a vote rigging and suppression campaign in two rural counties at the eastern end of the Ninth.
Pittenger famously claimed “Jesus is my only constituent,” and there may have been something to the assertion. After the election, Harris developed a septic infection, then suffered two strokes he concealed until he got caught out lying about his knowledge of the corruption in his campaign. His avenging angel was his son, an assistant US attorney.
Suddenly Harris cited strike-induced memory lapses while under oath, and the state board of elections ordered a do-over of the whole vote.
Republicans spent decades in the congressional minority, collecting big paychecks and opposing everything because they couldn’t pass anything. They created the Fox News audience giving incendiary speeches in the empty House chamber at night on C-SPAN. After two years of controlling all branches of government under President Trump and still getting nothing done, they lapsed back into the minority last fall.
Little wonder, then, that ten Republicans filed to snag Pittenger’s empty House seat this year: it’d be inside work and no heavy lifting, just taking selfies at patriotic events in the district and angling for guest slots on Fox News. They included a Republican-turned-Democrat who ran for the supreme court last year; a man for ran for governor as a Democrat and a Republican; a former GOP legislator and failed gubernatorial candidate, and a doctor who has run for Congress every few terms since the 1980s without ever getting the voters' message.
Half of them don’t even live in the district.
Well, yesterday NC-9 Republicans spoke, and out of the ten hate-mongers in the buffet, they picked the worst.
NC State senator Dan Bishop of Charlotte promised he’d be Trumpier than Trump, would build Trump’s wall, and defeat the bogeyman of socialism who’d been hiding under everyone’s bed since the fall of Communism.
In Raleigh, Bishop was a zealot among zealots. As one account put it,
Shortly after he was sworn in..., he pledged to introduce legislation that would criminalize protesting against former elected officials, citing “ubiquitous leftist rioters” who had chanted “Shame!” at ex-Governor Pat McCrory for having signed the Bishop-sponsored HB2 into law. Then, in the wake of a series of student protests against alt-right speakers on the UC Berkeley campus, Bishop introduced a “campus free speech” bill that would have made it easier to punish students at publicly funded colleges for demonstrating on campus, while simultaneously rewriting the definition of “harassment” on college campuses in a way that would make it legal to discriminate against minorities, women, and individuals who identified as LGBTQ. And this spring, he sponsored a bill that would have both armed public school teachers and give them the authority to arrest their own students.
Bishop also got outed as an investor in the online chat app Gab, a haven for American Nazis and domestic terrorists like Pittsburgh synagogue shooter Robert Bowers.
Bishop responded that he was the real victim, wondering why a British tabloid was going after him for taking a $500 flyer on a website whose content was a mystery to him despite his listing it as a follow on his Twitter account (he also tweeted that he bought into Gab because he was tired of “the Silicon Valley thought police.”)
But Bishop’s legacy is that he was the author of HB2, North Carolina’s infamous Bathroom Bill of 2016. It’s most discriminatory parts are still on the books, but Bishop says that’s all old news, we need to move on to new ideas and groups to hate on (oddly, Bishop failed to promote his support for the Trump Tariffs: having cost the state billions in lost business and reputation, he’s a natural for cheerleading the economic pain his and Trump’s trade wars will inflict on rural NC).
Having last chosen Mark Harris, who tried to ride a 2012 antigay state referendum into a 2014 US Senate election (he lost to the human weathervane, Thom Tillis), 9th district Republicans knew a winner when they saw one. Last night they picked Bishop, awarding him 47.7% of their votes.
24,677 Republicans turned out: about 10% of registered GOP voters. 7 of ten were over 65.
Among the also-rans- seven of the ten candidates won less than 1000 votes- number 2 was Union County commissioner Stony Rushing, a Dukes of Hazzard’s Boss Hogg impersonator anointed by Mark Harris and a Second Amendment evangelical.
Third place went to Matthew Ridenhour, a Mecklenburg County commissioner turned out of office last fall. His slogan was, “It takes a Marine to beat a Marine,” (the Democratic candidate, Dan McCready, was one) and it sounded both clever and butch until a radio debate last week in which an audience member asked, if that was true, why did he lose his council seat to “a female academic”?
(A side order of misogyny with an anti-intellectual glaze? Yes, please!)
Having raised scads of cash from members, Brown rebranded herself as a gun-totin’, gated communities, North Carolina values conservative and held out her hands to her PAC. The realtors ladled $1.3 million into Brown’s campaign.
Another realtor-candidate, Kathie Day, must be sooo pissed.
Leigh Brown blanketed Mecklenburg County with TV ads (three of four voters in the district live there and in Rushing’s adjoining Union County). She was so ubiquitous she started to crowd out the car dealers on the evening news.
And yesterday, Leigh Brown received 2,624 votes.
The Realtors spent $495.42 per vote on her race, which is something to ask about the next time you’re negotiating one's commission.
See y’all in November!
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