Primary elections deliver a sucker punch to our state
Published March 17, 2016
by Doug Clark, Off the Record, Greensboro News-Record, March 16, 2016.
North Carolina was sucker-punched by our own state legislature.
Our early presidential primaries didn’t turn out the way Republican lawmakers thought when they decided back in 2013 that North Carolina needed to move up in the selection process.
Primaries would have been held in May.
“Too late,” said legislators. “Everything will be settled by then. North Carolina can be a bigger player by adding its voice earlier. And candidates will bring their campaigns, spending millions of dollars here.”
It happened, but not as much as hoped. And, in other ways, Tuesday’s primaries were a disaster.
North Carolina didn’t draw nearly as much national attention as did the make-or-break Republican primaries in Ohio and Florida. Those states awarded all their delegates to the winners, while North Carolina’s distribution was proportional. Less was at stake here.
True, Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders made a number of appearances for a week or so before the balloting, Mario Rubio and John Kasich did not. They had more critical places to be.
Spending on TV ads was a trickle compared to what poured into South Carolina before its primary. Otherwise, candidates flew in and out with barely time for a barbecue sandwich.
All for outcomes that were exactly what was expected: wins for Trump and Clinton.
We could have done without at least one of Trump’s visits. The ugly incident at his Fayetteville rally gave North Carolina a black eye. Sheriff’s deputies appeared to ignore a sucker punch delivered by a white Trump supporter to a black demonstrator being led out of the arena.
Only the next day, after video of the assault was seen by tens of millions of Americans, was the attacker, John “Quick Draw” McGraw, charged. And then McGraw expressed pride in decking Rakeem Jones, telling “Inside Edition,” “The next time we see him, we might have to kill him.” Is this redneck now the face of North Carolina?
Trump’s victory in North Carolina happened in part because no leading Republicans spoke out against him who threw much support behind any of his rivals. State Senate leader Phil Berger waited until Monday to endorse Cruz, but also praised Trump. Sen. Thom Tillis quietly endorsed Rubio, although almost nobody noticed. Sen. Richard Burr was silent. Gov. Pat McCrory meekly pledged to support the party’s nominee in the fall. He stayed out of the primary, declining to endorse another Republican candidate as South Carolina’s Gov. Nikki Haley did.
Haley also mentioned the Fayetteville incident last week when she accused Trump of inciting dangerous divisions. Good for her. McCrory said nothing. Is he really going to stick with Trump through the summer and fall? Can we get Haley to be our governor, please?
The primaries were a fiasco for more reasons than the presidential contest. Our legislature recently was slapped by a panel of federal judges who struck down the gerrymandered congressional districts Republicans drew to help their party win a disproportionate number of seats. So the legislature had to hurriedly create a new set of districts and set up another primary on June 7 for congressional candidates, who can begin filing today.
Yet we still voted Tuesday for congressional candidates in the old districts, although those votes didn’t actually count. Maybe the winners can call themselves phantom congressmen in the spirit of old Elbridge Gerry, the man who originated gerrymandering and who still haunts our politics more than two centuries later. His ghostly presence was felt here Tuesday.
Also derailed by a successful legal challenge was the legislature’s scheme to eliminate a contested election for a seat on the state Supreme Court. Lawmakers forgot to check with the N.C. Constitution about that idea, so now they’ve had to schedule a real election after all. Filing for that office opens today.
Let’s not forget the local impact of election tinkering by our legislature. It gave us a partisan Guilford County Board of Education for the first time. In case no one noticed, we had several school board primaries. Two of them determined the ultimate winner because only one party fielded candidates. Yes, some school board seats were filled in the middle of March with voters of just one party weighing in.
The 2016 election is already a fiasco, and it’s far from finished. With congressional primaries coming up, Republican candidates can divide themselves into pro-Trump and anti-Trump factions. Watch out for more sucker punches to come.
