All the votes are not in yet, but it does seem as if Barack Obama is on the verge of winning crimson red North Carolina. I’ve been saying this for over a year, but few believed it could be true. Will NC end up going blue? We’ll have to wait a bit longer to find out, but things are looking up. Exciting!
Since my wife and I have privacy blocking on our home phone, I usually don’t answer unknown calls after dinner time. I would have ignored tonight’s phone call too if it hadn’t been for the fact that the Red Sox were getting their can kicked by the Rays for the second straight night and I desperately wanted a diversion. So I answered the call, which was cool since it was a survey group collecting data for their latest political poll.
They asked me all kinds of questions. How familiar I was with the candidates for both President and North Carolina Senate, how likely I was to vote for them and how I felt about a range of issues. They also asked me some interesting questions about Dole and Hagan’s advertising, what I took away from the ads and what my overall impression of the candidates were based on what I had seen. Needless to say I was all too eager to voice my opinions on all of these subjects.
When it was over, the poll had taken about 10 minutes in which time the Rays had managed to score another 4 runs on the Red Sox so all and all I think it was time well spent. I look forward to seeing the latest polls at FiveThirtyEight.com and knowing that I did my bit to push Barack’s numbers just a tad bit higher for the week. I do what I can.
The election is still three weeks away, but Kay Hagan has taken a 15 point deficit and turned it into a 3-6 point lead in her race for Liddy Dole’s Senate seat. Her core message of Dole ineffectiveness combined with perfectly targeted poltical commercials, have completely destroyed Dole’s once commanding lead. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, North Carolina is poised to spring several blue-tinted surprises on the country come November 4th.
Last night saw some of the worst storms come through North Carolina in a long, long time. Around 8pm I first started paying attention to the weather and then around 11:15pm it got really, really bad. I live in Colfax, NC which is just north of the Piedmont Triad Farmer’s Market. We started listened to Britt Whitmire on 101.1 FM Talk after our cable TV went out shortly after 10:30pm and I have to say Britt did a great job of describing where the storm was heading and alerting people to the danger.
Shortly after 11pm the police scanner started really going crazy. The sky was almost constantly lit up from hundreds of lightening flashes, and the rain started coming in buckets. We did not see high winds where I lived, but on the scanner many vehicles all around us were being reported overturned. Lots of damage on Sandy Ridge road, officers going on foot door to door to make sure residents were okay. The section of Sandy Ridge they were talking about on the scanner was only 2 miles from us, so I knew the bad stuff was close. It wasn’t until this morning on the news we found out just how close.
The map you can click on here outlines the intersections that are closed off this morning due to multiple power lines down, trees and buildings and business that have been damaged. The authorities have set up a command post at the Farmer’s Market just to the south, but you can see from here just how close we were to where the tornado touched down. Even worse, my friend and co-worker Corey Marion lives between me and the red zone, so he was even closer to the damage.
I thank God that neither we, Corey or Talos (who also lives in my neighborhood) were in the path of this tornado. Planes (Fed Ex cargo planes, not Sesnas) at the airport were blown off the runway, 18 wheelers were overturned and some people even lost their homes. This is one storm I think the Triad will remember for a long, long time. Scary!
While watching the primary coverage last night, I was curious about the seemingly large number of delegates that were at stake here in North Carolina. As the Daily Kos reports, it turns out North Carolina received bonus pledged delegates from the DNC as a reward for playing it cool and going late in the primary process:
“To keep states spread out and not all clustered in February, the DNC offered bonus pledged delegates to those states that went late in cycle. Thus, instead of only getting 66 pledged delegates to the Democratic convention in Denver, Indiana gets to send 72. And North Carolina went from 89 delegates to 115. Those extra delegates put Indiana ahead of Tennessee and Maryland and gave it as much voting strength as Minnesota and Missouri. And North Carolina bypassed Massachusetts and New Jersey.”
So thanks to North Carolina’s willingness to wait our turn, not only did we most likely cast the deciding ballots in the race between Clinton and Obama, but our fine state will have more political leverage at the convention. Well done North Carolina, I always knew you were a class act!
14 percentage points and over 220,000 votes later, Barack Obama has won North Carolina. I’ve never been prouder to be in this great state than I am today. Today my fellow North Carolinians stood up and voted for integrity, change and hope, and for that, I thank them. I believe Barack when he says that when he’s the Democratic nominee in the fall, he will compete in the “swing” state of North Carolina. Would the same be true if Hillary was the nominee? Doubtful.
I look forward to the possibilities of a blue NC, but for now I’ll take our moment in the sun when we all decided to speak up, make a difference and vote against entitlement and politics as usual. Thank you North Carolina. Thank you.
No one would have expected when the presidential primary season started that little ol’ North Carolina would play such an important part in the selection process. Our state’s late primary has always been something of an “also ran” to the rest of the nation, but not this time. Now we’re center stage and I think I speak for North Carolinians when I say “Let’s do this thing!”
Like many of my fellow NC’ers I’m ready to get in there and vote in the Democratic primary and help elect Barack Obama as our party’s choice for President of the United States. I was speaking to my friends Anthony and Corey this past week at lunch and they both agreed with me that no matter what the outcome, they want to get the primary completed and get onto the general election. Hillary has made several calls to each of them and I could hear the impatience in their voice as we talked over lunch. As the large number of NC early voters reveals, they are not alone.
If the latest Zogby polls are to be believed, then Obama still holds at least a 9 point lead over Clinton as we start the week. Things are tighter in Indiana, but something tells me that Barack just may pull it out and finally, thankfully, put the nail in the coffin that is the Clinton campaign. But knowing Hillary and her “entitled” attitude, it would take nothing short of a miracle to get her to drop out of the race early. Something tells me if Indiana and North Carolina go the way I think they will, she’ll see a number of super delegates abandon her en masse.
I feel like North Carolina is that underused rookie sitting on the bench who turns to his manager and says with fantastic enthusiasm “Send me in coach!”. Our time at bat is almost here and for our sake, and the sake of our children, I hope we step up and hit a homer.
