President '08

Hagan casts her first vote

ryanteaguebeckwith — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 12:17:50 -0500

Sen.-elect Kay Hagan has already cast her first vote.

Although the incoming freshman senator has not yet been sworn in, she was allowed to vote as part of the Senate Democratic caucus Tuesday.

The question: Should Sen. Joe Lieberman be allowed to remain chairman of the Homeland Security committee?

Some had argued that the Connecticut independent should be stripped of his chairmanship for making disparaging comments about President-elect Barack Obama and supporting Sen. John McCain. But Hagan said he should keep the post.

"We've gone through a rancorous campaign not only in North Carolina but across the country," she told Dome. "I am not here to divide people and parties, and I want to work across party lines. I think the worst thing to do would have been to kick somebody out of the caucus on the first day of business."

The caucus decided in a secret 42-13 vote to keep Lieberman in place but issue a statement condemning his remarks.

Hagan would not share any details about the discussion, which was held behind closed doors, but she did say it was "the most fascinating caucus" she's ever attended.

Barr was a spoiler after all

ryanteaguebeckwith — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 10:38:59 -0500

Bob Barr was a spoiler in North Carolina after all.

Though the Libertarian presidential candidate made only token appearances in the state and received a miniscule number of votes in November, he still got more votes than the margin of difference.

Barr's 25,722 votes were more than one and a half times the 14,192 margin that made Barack Obama winner of the state over John McCain. Put another way, Barr had about 0.6 percent of the vote, while the margin was about 0.3 percent.

That puts Barr into elite company in North Carolina.

As previously noted, there have been five third-party candidates who earned enough votes to affect the race between the Republican and Democrat in North Carolina since 1908.

They are: George Wallace in 1968, Teddy Roosevelt in 1912, Ross Perot in 1992 and in 1996 and John Anderson in 1980. (Technically, Roosevelt did not earn more than the margin of Woodrow Wilson's win, but he came in second so we count him.)

However, Barr earned the smallest percentage of any of the other spoilers, and the number of write-in votes was close enough to the margin this year to almost qualify on its own.

Update: Greensboro blogger Ed Cone called it in mid-May.

Obama's final margin: 14,912 votes

ryanteaguebeckwith — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 10:24:13 -0500

President-elect Barack Obama carried North Carolina in a squeaker.

With all the provisional votes counted, Obama broadened his narrow lead over Republican John McCain in North Carolina, Rob Christensen reports.

President-elect Obama carried the state with 49.7 percent to McCain’s 49.38, a difference of 14,192 votes, according to the final count by the State Board of Elections staff. Before the provisional votes were counted Obama had a lead of 13,746 votes.

The vote won’t become final until the State Board of Elections meets Tuesday in Raleigh.

Obama won 2,142,649 votes, compared to 2,128,457 votes after the provisional ballots were counted. Bob Barr, the Libertarian candidate won 25,722 and there were 13,942 votes cast for write-in candidates.

This was the first time that North Carolina had gone Democratic since 1976, when Democrat Jimmy Carter defeated Republican Gerald Ford.

Obama's uphill win led by campaign vet

ryanteaguebeckwith — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 09:19:44 -0500

Barack Obama's uphill win in North Carolina was led by a veteran operative.

Marc Farinella, 50, grew up in New York and Chicago, entering the latter city's politics with a reputation as an egghead. He became campaign manager and chief of staff to Missouri Gov. Mel Carnahan, who defeated Sen. John Ashcroft in 2000 despite dying weeks earlier.

He worked as a strategist for Erskine Bowles' unsuccessful Senate campaign in 2002 and Lt. Gov. Beverly Perdue's re-election campaign in 2004.

He started 2008 working for Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh, who decided not to get into the race, then came to North Carolina for Obama in July.

The Obama organization had about 50 offices and 23,000 volunteers. Farinella spoke to former Gov. Jim Hunt as often as twice a day.

He said he is considering moving to North Carolina. (N&O)

Whistling past North Carolina, part III

ryanteaguebeckwith — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 09:10:14 -0500

Thomas Schaller says North Carolina is not yet really blue.

The author of "Whistling Past Dixie" tells Dome that he thinks Barack Obama's impressive ground game and the "atmospherics" of this election had more to do with his win here, a state he had urged the Democrat to ignore.

"It may stay for Obama again next cycle, but I don't think it's tipped permanently," he said. "Almost every advantage was for the Democrats, and it was still a very close win. If I were a North Carolina Democrat, I wouldn't rejoice too soon."

Schaller said Obama could win the "New South" — an area he defined as influenced by high-tech jobs in places such as the Research Triangle Park and high rates of non-native Southerners moving here. He said Obama's coalition was Northern transplants and black voters.

"This wasn't a Nascar victory," he said. "It was a decidedly New South victory."

Whistling past North Carolina, part II

ryanteaguebeckwith — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 09:03:09 -0500

Not surprisingly, Thomas Schaller was surprised he was wrong.

The author of "Whistling Past Dixie" wrote on Salon Monday that he was "somewhat surprised" that Barack Obama won North Carolina, a state he had earlier urged the Democrat to ignore.

"It's clear that the 'new South' is arriving faster than I anticipated, or perhaps more accurately, that Obama was able to deliver it faster," he writes.

He also noted that the three Southern states Obama won were among those with the highest median incomes for the region, except for Georgia. He also notes that the 22 counties where Obama did less well than John Kerry were in the rural and Appalachian South.

"It was a 'new South' victory won on the backs of votes cast by a lot of non-native Southern transplants," he writes. "It was not a rural Southern victory."

Next, we talk to Schaller directly.

Whistling past North Carolina, part I

ryanteaguebeckwith — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 08:55:47 -0500

Thomas Schaller urged Barack Obama to write off North Carolina.

In a guest column in The New York Times on July 1, the author of "Whistling Past Dixie" argued that the then Democratic presidential nominee might find Virginia within reach, but not North Carolina and Georgia.

"Mr. Obama can write off Georgia and North Carolina for the same reasons that Mississippi is beyond his reach — although the math in those two states is slightly less daunting," he wrote.

He argued that black voters already cast their ballots at a relatively high rate, and said the "white vote" would serve as a "formidable counterbalance."

Schaller, a professor of politics at the University of Maryland at Baltimore County, was wrong about Obama's chances here, as it turned out.

Next, we'll see what he says now.

Guillory: Seaboard South is different

ryanteaguebeckwith — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 16:45:32 -0500

Ferrel Guillory says the "Seaboard South" is different.

The head of the Program on Public Life at UNC-Chapel Hill says that Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia and Florida have moved away from the rest of the South in recent years.

He said the increased focus on high-tech jobs in Research Triangle Park and banking in Charlotte as well as the strengthening of the state's university system has led to a demographic shift that made the state more open to Democrat Barack Obama.

"Economically and demographically, the South has split in two," he said. "The 'Seaboard South' states — with the exception of South Carolina — have been growing robustly. They have moved more speedily into the newer economy and their metropolitan areas are burgeoning."

He said Obama found a pool of "persuadable voters" in the metro suburbs of North Carolina.

"Obama campaigned on a theme of change, but it was the change that was already here that put him over the top," he said.

Guillory made a similar argument in the biannual "State of the South" report in 2007.

The Shallow South?

ryanteaguebeckwith — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 10:10:23 -0500

Has North Carolina seceded from the Confederacy?

The aftermath of last week's historic presidential election has led many national commentators to speculate that North Carolina and Virginia are no longer part of "the South."

The latest example comes from the New York Times today, which not-so subtly credits all those former New Yorkers moving to places like Cary for Barack Obama's wins here.

Along the Atlantic Coast, parts of the "suburban South," notably Virginia and North Carolina, made history last week in breaking from their Confederate past and supporting Mr. Obama. Those states have experienced an influx of better educated and more prosperous voters in recent years, pointing them in a different political direction than states farther west, like Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi, and Appalachian sections of Kentucky and Tennessee.

A similar urge to separate Tar Heels from their Confederate brethren has long been at work in the move to redefine the South Atlantic states (give or take a few neighbors) as "the Southeast."

Dome has always thought of the region as "the Shallow South" — the opposite end of the pool from the Deep South.

Ross, Silver take the gold in punditry

ryanteaguebeckwith — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 08:58:47 -0500

Two liberal bloggers came the closest to predicting North Carolina's presidential race.

Nate Silver, a statistics nut who runs the Web site FiveThirtyEight.com, and Kirk Ross, who writes the Exile on Jones Street blog about the legislature, both predicted Barack Obama would win the state. Silver said by 0.6 percentage points; Ross by 0.5 to 1.5 points.

The actual margin, according to uncertified results from the State Board of Elections, was 0.3 points.

The two were among 16 bloggers, pundits, professors and consultants who predicted an Obama win in the Tar Heel state, according to an informal tally by Dome the week before the election.

Because of the narrow margin, the 13 who predicted a McCain win (including the Eight Ball) shouldn't be too ashamed, except maybe the four conservatives who predicted a win by three or more points — Sen. Richard Burr, Red State editor Erick Erickson, blogger Ed Morrissey and editor Fred Barnes.

And no points go to the five mainstream sources who refused to make a prediction (Rothenberg Political Report, Congressional Quarterly, Cook Political Report, New York Times and MSNBC.)