The list of candidates for Congress from NC is now final, with D and R candidates in every race.
- David Price (D-NC-4), Virginia Foxx (R-NC-5), and Mike McIntire (D-NC-7) are the only incumbents without primary challengers.
- There are 11 Republican candidates for the NC-9 seat that Sue Myrick is walking away from. It ought to be fun seeing who can get the farthest to the right in that crowd. The same can be said for NC-11 (Shuler), which has 8 Republican candidates.
Even with a gerrymandered map, we got Democratic candidates in every race.
The Republican efforts to pack loyal Democratic voters into as few, highly concentrated legislative districts as possible is underway. Their proposed VRA districts have been released.
A North Carolina lawmaker doesn't think it was right for his daughter and her third-grade class to write to him and other elected officials protesting possible cuts in state education spending.
Republican state Rep. Mike Stone says his daughter asked in her note to "please raise the budget, dad" and help keep two teacher assistants employed.
Stone told WRAL-TV: "As I read through this (letter), anger completely shot through me, and I was trying to hold myself together. (It's unconscionable) to know any education system would use a daughter against her father."
He went a step further on Twitter, blaming the entire political opposition, when he wrote in response to WRAL's story: "The NCAE, Democrat Party & Bev Perdue have hit a new low."
In the wake of Republican candidate Carl Mumpower's suspension and resurrection of his campaign, the Republican organizations of three counties in North Carolina's 11th district are formally severing ties with the "unique" candidate:
Rep. Patrick McHenry (R) pre-empted an embarrassing cash-on-hand tie with his unknown general election opponent late last month, loaning his campaign $175,000 on June 30, the last day of the quarter.
In surprisingly blunt language, U.S. Rep. Heath Shuler complained this week of "a lack of maturity" in the U.S. House.
The North Carolina Democrat accused some of his fellow lawmakers of thinking they're "Hollywood stars" and said many of them spend more time playing politics than doing what's best for the country.
Voters in the mostly working-class precincts of south-central North Carolina that connect Charlotte and Fayetteville were faced with a study in opposites in their candidates for Congress last year. The Democratic challenger was Larry Kissell, a social-studies teacher who also spent 27 years in midlevel jobs in a hosiery mill. The Republican incumbent was Robin Hayes, a millionaire hosiery mill owner and descendent of one of the region’s founding families. Despite being outspent 3-to-1 and being cut off from support from party headquarters in Washington, Kissell managed to come within 329 votes of one of the year’s biggest upsets — and created the second-closest House race in the country.
This time around, Democrats are betting heavy — and betting early — on Kissell.
CQPolitics.com’s first roundup of the 2008 Senate races — with earliest-ever Election Forecaster ratings by the CQPolitics staff — is based on this increasingly irrefutable principle: the concept of the “off-election” year is now an anachronism for Senate incumbents and candidates.
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