The Southern Path to the White House

by Charles S. Bullock, III

In media reviews of the prospects for a change in White House occupancy, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin occupy center stage.  Had Donald Trump not knocked these states out of the Blue Wall, he would be firing reality show contestants rather than cabinet members.  Trump won the three states by a combined total of less than show up in most SEC stadiums for football games in non-COVID years.  If Trump loses these states in 2020, it is unlikely that he will win reelection and, accordingly, Trump and his surrogates are campaigning there. 

Lay of the Political Landscape: One For The Books: The Hagan – Tillis 2014 Senate Race

By Susan Roberts

Going into 2020, we are awaiting the outcome of the Trump-Biden showdown, but we need to remind ourselves that every single House and Senate race has its own story to tell.  Following last night's first debate between incumbent Republican Thom Tillis and Democratic challenger Cal Cunningham, here is a brief case study of 2014 race between then Democratic Incumbent Senator Kay Hagan and Republican challenger and Speaker of the N.C. House of Representatives Thom Tillis. If you skip the rest of the article, here are three takeaways that capture the tenor and substance of this race:

• One, the wave giveth, and the wave taketh away. 
• Two, follow the money. 
• Three, you can call North Carolina a battleground state or a swing state or a purple state, just call it competitive and critical.

My focus here is on the Hagan-Tillis race, but I can’t resist the temptation to begin with a few preliminary similarities between the 2014 and current 2020 North Carolina Senate races. Of course, I am speaking as if 2020 is over, but I think these distinctions will remain. Both elections were labelled “toss-ups” by Larry Sabato of Crystal Ball and The Cook Political Report. Both campaigns could capitalize on high presidential disapproval by tethering the incumbent, Hagan to Obama and Tillis to Trump. Both 2014 and 2020 were held during voting law confusion. And sadly, both campaigns were dealing with global health emergencies, Ebola in 2014 and Coronavirus in 2020. 

Early Voting Sites in North Carolina’s 2020 Election

By Chris Cooper

The hangover from the 2000 election took a while to get over. A full year later, folks were dressing up as “hanging chads” for Halloween and “Palm Beach County” soon became known less as a popular retirement destination and more as the home of the “butterfly ballot.” No amount of Goody’s headache powder could save either side from the hangover of the most contested and contentious election of the previous century.

But hangovers aren’t all bad—they usually remind you that you should take better care of yourself. And, for Americans after the 2000 election, the thing we could do to take better care of ourselves was to pay more attention not just to the candidates in the election, but to the process of how we conduct elections—how we design ballots, how we train poll workers, who counts ballots, and where we put polling sites. And, in case the effects of that 20-year-old hangover were beginning to fade, along comes to 2020 to remind us that attention to election administration is key to a well-functioning democracy.