#dan mccready

Great article by Dan McCready, a Democrat who ran in 2019 for North Carolina’s Ninth Congressional District against a Republican opponent who tried to fraudulently win the election. But Republicans didn’t seem to care.

Republicans use this issue to make it more difficult for likely Democratic voters  to exercise their right to vote. 

It is critical that we Americans do not let certain Republicans use their exaggerated concerns about “voter fraud” as a way of disenfranchising countless voters in the November election. 

As Dan McCready pointed out, it is imperative that “universal voting by mail” and supplementary state election funds be included in the next big Congressional Covid-19 spending bill.

Some of you know there’s a 2018 election redo after the GOP ballot theft scandal for North Carolina District 9. Election Day is September 10th. There’s a very little known piece of information about this election concerning Native Americans.

The 40,000 voting-eligible Lumbee tribal members living in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District could swing the special election for the tightly contested U.S. House race pitting Republican Dan Bishop against Democrat Dan McCready.

Ahead of next Tuesday’s vote, tribal members have been knocking on doors to encourage their neighbors to get out to the polls. Working with the Native voting-rights group Four Directions, more than two dozen members of the Lumbee tribe have been hired to visit every home on the reservation, and to even drive people to the polls if necessary.

I encourage you to donate/follow Four Directions (@4directionsvote), the grassroots that fight against Native American voter suppression.

I donated just now. This is my receipt. I have little to give but every little bit helps.

The certification of a winner for  North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District cannot be determined due to an ongoing fraud investigation.

State election officials are investigating whether hundreds of absentee ballots in Bladen and Robeson counties were illegally cast or destroyed, according to a Washington Post report.

The North Carolina State Board of Elections and Ethics Enforcement determined in a board meeting Friday that there are no plans to certify the victory of Republican Mark Harris.

Harris reportedly had a 905-vote victory over Democrat opponent Dan McCready; however, investigators are collecting evidence that may point to wrongdoing.

The board is collecting sworn statements from voters, detailing people coming to their doors and collecting their ballots.  Other voters said they received absentee ballots in the mail without requesting them.

It is illegal to turn in another person's ballot.

Bladen County voter Datesha Montgomery attested in a sworn statement, that on Oct. 12 a young woman came to her door and asked for her ballot, stating that she was collecting people’s ballots in the area.

“I filled out two names on the ballot, Hakeem Brown for Sheriff and Vince Rozier for board of education,” Montgomery wrote in the affidavit.  “She stated the others were not important.  I gave her the ballot and she said she would finish it herself.  I signed the ballot and she left.  It was not sealed up at any time.”

Aside from the sworn statements, the numbers are also be scrutinized by investigators.

In the primary elections, Harris won 96 percent of all absentee ballots in Bladen, a far higher percentage than his win in the county overall – which then prompted a fresh look into fraud accusations.

The election board’s spokesman, Pat Gannon, declined the Post's request for comment, citing the ongoing investigation.  While a spokesman for Harris, Andy Yates, did not respond to telephone and email inquiries made by the Post.

McCready released a statement Friday via Twitter saying, he respects the decision to delay certification.

"The right to vote is the foundation of our democracy," McCready said.  "Any effort to rob a person of that right should be met with full force of justice."

Republican state senator Dan Bishop, who sponsored the anti-LGBTQ law HB 2, narrowly defeated Democrat Dan McCready in a special election last night in North Carolina’s Ninth District, a sprawling gerrymander that stretches from the Charlotte suburbs to Robeson County.

Bishop, a funder of the white-supremacist-favorite social media site Gab, prevailed by about 2.1 percentage points, or roughly 4,000 votes out of nearly 190,000 cast, according to the state Board of Elections.

The closely watched election was a do-over, after the Board of Elections refused to certify the results of November’s congressional election following widespread election fraud benefitting the Republican candidate, Mark Harris.  The BOE’s final tally in that race had Harris leading McCready by just 905 votes.

So Bishop marginally improved on Harris’s performance — with the caveat that this was an odd-year election with significantly lower turnout — after spending millions of dollars and bringing in both the president and vice president to rally on his behalf.

Guess who rushed in to take the credit.

[tweet from Donald Trump: “Dan Bishop was down 17 points 3 weeks ago. He then asked me for help, we changed his strategy together, and he ran a great race. Big Rally last night. Now it looks like he is going to win. @CNN & @MSNBC are moving their big studio equipment and talent out. Stay tuned!”]

Bullshit.

No poll had Bishop down seventeen points — at least, no public poll.  Since May, every public survey has had the Dans more effectively tied.  The most recent had McCready up three.  The one before that, tied.  Before that, Bishop up one.  And so on.

It’s possible, perhaps, that the RNC’s internals had Bishop down seventeen — and somehow, no panic set in and these numbers never leaked — and Trump came riding to the rescue and saved the day.  It’s more likely, however, that the public polling was right, and Trump is living in his own fantasyland.

Which isn’t to say his rally didn’t make a difference.  It probably did.  In close, off-year, low-turnout elections driven by base turnout, Trump flying to Fayetteville and shouting his way through the MAGA Greatest Hits might have been worth a few thousand votes.  It wasn’t worth seventeen percentage points worth of votes, but hey, Bishop won.

Except a win isn’t always a win — particularly when it won’t change the balance of power, and when it should send warning flares, but those signals will be ignored because the president has evidently convinced himself that he saved the day, so there’s no need to change course.

It’s worth remembering that, in 2016, Donald Trump won this district, which has been in Republican hands since 1963, by twelve points, eight points better than he did in North Carolina as a whole.  And while the GOP is spinning as best it can — “President Donald Trump’s strong leadership, record-breaking economy and his vision for the country is clearly resonating with North Carolina voters,” said the statement last night — if the state acts in 2020 like the Ninth did last night, the Democratic nominee will win going away.

If Trump loses North Carolina, it’s game over.  (Of course, recent polls from Gallup, CNN, and The Washington Post all have his approval ratings below 40.  If he stays in that range, he has no chance of being re-elected.)

Also worth remembering, if you’re eyeing next November, is that there are thirty-four congressional districts currently held by Republicans that are less red than the Ninth.  Lots of these districts are in the suburbs, which is part of the reason some Texas Republicans are retiring.

Guess where McCready overperformed his 2018 numbers?  Suburban Mecklenburg County.

Last year, he won it by ten points; last night, thirteen.

The GOP bloodbath in 2018 was driven largely by wealthy suburban voters, who had backed Trump in 2016 but grown tired of his antics even in a growing economy.  If last night’s results in Charlotte are indicative, that’s still the case — and that augers poorly for Republican hopes of retaining power in 2020.

One warning sign for Dems, too: While McCready did well in the Charlotte suburbs, he underperformed everywhere else in the district, and got destroyed in Robeson County.  White rural areas have been Trump’s strongholds, but Robeson, which has a large Lumbee population and four times as many registered Democrats as Republicans, voted for McCready by almost fifteen points last year; this year, he lost it by more than four points.  

Perhaps that owes to the race’s special circumstances — the redo, the September general election — but for whatever reason, North Carolina Democrats seem to be leaving gettable rural votes on the table.

Contact editor in chief Jeffrey C. Billman at [email protected].

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Li Zhou at Vox: 

Dan Bishop, a North Carolina Republican known for writing the state’s controversial “bathroom bill,” narrowly beat out Democrat Dan McCready to win a House seat in the state’s Ninth Congressional District, according to Decision Desk HQ.

His victory comes in the wake of a massive scandal that plagued the district’s election last fall, and suggests that Republicans still have a lot to worry about in 2020.

North Carolina’s Ninth is, after all, a staunchly conservative district that’s been electing Republicans since the 1960s, and one President Donald Trump won by 12 points in 2016. Bishop’s win should have been relatively easy, but was overshadowed by the previous Republican candidate fielding allegations of ballot fraud and suburban voter pushback toward Trump. The fact that Bishop held onto the seat for Republicans will surely be a relief for the party.

Still, Republicans looking ahead to 2020 might worry about similar districts; the tight margin doesn’t bode well for competitive seats in suburban districts across the country. If anything, Bishop’s race suggests GOP candidates in these places should be concerned about maintaining any existing advantages they currently have.

Bishop stepped in after the previous candidate was consumed by a major scandal

Bishop won the Republican primary for September’s special election after Mark Harris, the previous GOP candidate, declared that he wouldn’t pursue another run.

Harris, who had come out ahead of McCready by less than 1,000 votes last fall, was never certified as the official winner of the race due to allegations that emerged about absentee ballot tampering. 

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