|||
Why did we lose so many down ballot races here? We trust our readers everywhere will see the value of this report for your own states and local communities despite its being about our own situation in North Carolina. So please, read and heed.
We have received a number of inquiries from friends asking the same question. Here is how one friend put it: “James, How does your Dem governor win, and yet Trump wins NC?”
Frankly, we were stunned and very disappointed to see some of our NC state election results as we looked at the news the next morning. Of course, we all rejoiced that North Carolina—one of the seven critical “swing states” — had turned out big for Donald Trump.
But looking at our down ballot was another story. In my opinion, it had to do with two major factors—and several minor factors. First, it was not a factor that Donald Trump’s coattails were not long enough.
Lord knows, he did everything humanly possible to win the state for the presidency as well as promote the many good candidates we had for other statewide offices.
What were the chief factors for our embarrassing results at the state office level? First, our gubernatorial candidate, Mark Robinson, left a lot to be desired. And it had nothing to do with his race. And it had nothing to do with his platform.
Here is a snapshot of a voter guide put out by the Robinson gubernatorial campaign. We can agree almost 100 percent with Robinson’s platform.
Notice the peculiar line item on the placard photo above that is described as “Supports Israel.” Are you kidding me!? Josh Stein does not support “Israel?” That would be akin to saying Popeye does not like spinach.
Of course, our readers probably understand how and why Robinson does support “Israel.” It’s Romans 11:25 “…blindness in part is happened to [true] Israel…” and consequently blindness to all the world, including Black preachers. I am told by local Republican friends that Robinson was also a preacher for 30+ years.
His opponent, Josh Stein, has been the NC Attorney General under out-going Governor, Roy Cooper. Cooper is far Left and was touted as a possible contender for VP for Kamala, but he took himself out of it, we presume because he has higher aspirations and did not want to be linked to the sinking ship that Kamala was commanding. Smart on Cooper’s part.
We Constitutionalists abhorred Cooper’s tenure at the helm of NC. However, because the Republicans have had a supermajority (i.e., veto-proof, for those of you in Carthagena) in both the NC House and NC Senate, his damage was somewhat limited.
In 2022, we had also flipped the NC Supreme Court from a Dem-controlled majority to a 5-2 Republican majority.
The current make-up is still undecided whether it will remain 5-2. Funny, how they’re still counting ballots for that office and the Dem candidate has now caught up and surpassed the Republican candidate by 625 votes—yeah, cheat much…?
In any event, if it goes to the Dem, we will still possess the 5-2 majority instead of a potential 6-1 margin.
All that goes to reinforce the fact that the Republican majority has been strong the past few years, and was able to forestall many radical proposals by the minority Dems and radical Dem Governor Cooper.
But sadly, we not only lost key state office races on November 5th, but we also lost a few House seats so that Republicans no longer have a veto-proof majority. A majority but not a super-majority.
The opinions among my local Republican friends and office-holders is that if we thought Cooper was far Left, the incoming Governor Josh Stein is even further to the Left!
As I stated above, I and most other Republicans in our county (whom I meet with often) and statewide (as told to me by local GOP friends)—we all felt that we might lose the NC Governor’s race, but other than that, we felt we had strong candidates in the down ballot state office races.
We had Hal Weatherman for Lt. Governor. I’ve met him on several occasions. He is thoroughly Constitutional, has a strong resumé, and worked his tail off the past two years, traveling frequently among all 100 counties of NC in his motor home, getting to know voters and to buoy his support.
(Hal Weatherman speaking to Henderson County GOP Convention in March 2023. Photo by James Bruggeman)
His loss was a big shocker to me! Likewise with Dan Bishop losing the race for NC Attorney General to a very extreme Democrat. Dan left Congress after representing the 8th District (east side of Charlotte and counties east and south of it) as a strong Constitutionalist, applauded by Trump, and like Weatherman, seemed to have a strong campaign.
(Dan Bishop, August 2024; photo by James Bruggeman)
We also lost the NC Secretary of State and Superintendent of Public Instruction to Leftist Dems.
(Candidate Michelle Morrow. Photo by James Bruggeman)
Likewise, I had the opportunity to meet State Superintendent candidate Michelle Morrow as she shared with us how she is exposing the abominable books for children available in elementary schools. I showed the covers of some of them in my “Civic Activities” report linked here. She would have been a very righteous head of public education in NC.
So, on the state level, we had very disappointing results. Nevertheless, all of WNC counties remained and became increasingly red—except Asheville/Buncombe County.
Here in Henderson County, we have a 5-0 County Commissioner board. Plus, all four of our candidates won their races for the Henderson County school board. Unfortunately, the city of Hendersonville itself (pop. ~18,000, which is the county seat), the City Council is wholly Democrat.
Back to my autopsy of the statewide results. The down ballot losses are attributable to the initial weakness of our gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson, not in his platform, but by his bombastic and seemingly extreme positions.
For example, on the issue of abortion, instead of delicately phrasing the Christian position of abstinence before marriage, he shouted it (in a Southern Baptist preaching fervor-type of yelling at the congregation): you girls need to keep your skirt down!
True, but it was exactly the “red meat” that the Stein campaign (or his surrogates) latched onto as a “sound bite” to show Robinson’s “extreme” positions “against” women.
Not only that, but Stein had huge PAC donations from outside NC which flooded my mailbox (and presumably every other voter in NC) with big postcards taking advantage of Robinson’s bombastic speaking (preachy-yelling) personal style.
But the death blow to his candidacy came when CNN published a story over six weeks before the election stating that Robinson had posted many braggadocious statements on a porn site, (I am going from memory of the news) where he allegedly claimed to describe himself as the “black Hitler,” and other atrocious and disgusting things.
When that excrement from CNN hit the proverbial fan (airwaves), I knew immediately that Robinson’s not-so-inspiring-campaign-to-begin-with was now absolutely doomed. I did not believe the smears, nor did many of our local fellow Republicans.
(Mark Robinson, keynote speaker, on the big screen at the NCGOP Convention in May 2024. Photo by James Bruggeman)
I remember sitting around the table with six ladies at our September Republican Women’s Club luncheon. They initiated the conversation about the “porn” smear against Robinson. Eventually, they all chimed in that despite the smear, they would still vote for him, but they, too, sensed it would be a futile gesture.
Indeed, he lost to Stein by over 14 percent. But it was also too late for Robinson to react. He was like a deer in the headlights, stunned and paralyzed. He had only a day or two to decide to drop out and let another take his place. He failed to do that.
Then, after that deadline had passed, he filed a $10 million defamation lawsuit against CNN. He may win the suit, but the loss of the Governor’s Mansion in NC is immeasurable.
Among the many appointments made by the Governor is to the state Board of Elections. It has been controlled by the Dems under Cooper. That Board in turn appoints the county Boards.
Therefore, despite our very red county, we are stuck with a 3-2 Dem majority on our county Board of Elections. The Board of Elections is just one of many other examples of how the Dems playing dirty affect a raft of critical appointments and agencies on a state level.
Moreover, not only did the smear occur as perfect timing from the Dems’ dirty tricks department, but it also coincided with the Dems’ ability to cleverly tie the other statewide office races to Robinson’s doomed campaign.
For example, there were campaign yard signs all over the state for “Robinson-Weatherman,” and numerous TV clips with Weatherman, Bishop, and the other candidates speaking positively about Robinson…until the CNN smear hit.
Then, they obviously had to distance themselves because they also understood what I learned in my Public Relations 101 course at Ohio State; namely, the denial never catches up with the accusation.
So, whether or not, there was any truth to the porn charges against Robinson, the Dems could care less, even if it cost their pals at CNN millions later on. After all, remember what they did a few years ago to the Covington, Kentucky high school kid at the Right to Life Rally in D.C. who later successfully sued them for an undisclosed sum of probably in the double or triple digit millions.
To the Leftists, following Alinsky tactics sometimes means sacrificing your own to obtain or retain power in critical offices. So to them, it is the old Marxist maxim, “the ends justify the means,” and they will and they do, “by any means possible,” legal or illegal, grab all the power they can get.
The Robinson debacle is almost a carbon copy of what has just transpired with the Matt Gaetz nomination to be U. S. Attorney General. I did much internet research when the accusations against him for “sex trafficking,” etc. first came out several years ago.
I found that the details of how the dirty-trick operatives from two prominent intel agencies (CIA and FBI, if I recall) set up Gaetz were astonishing in their brazenness. The proof that it was all a set-up is in the fact that Biden’s DoJ under the radical Leftist Attorney General Merrick Garland did not press charges.
For if there had been even a scintilla of credible evidence, they would have prosecuted and taken him out of Congress then. But Gaetz understands how the game is played by the satanic Leftists at that level, and he essentially realized a couple days ago how harmful it would be to Trump’s agenda if he were to be “Cavanaughed” over the next month or more. Therefore he “took one for the team.”
Keep praying for righteousness to reign in our land, and in our government at all levels. And be active in your local community to the extent you are able.
END
