Political Wire

Massive Vote Fraud Suspected In North Carolina

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The Raleigh News & Observer looks at data on mail-in ballots in North Carolina’s 9th congressional district, where there are allegations of improperly collecting mail-in ballots and voters receiving mail-in ballots they did not request.

  • Across the 9th district, 24% of the requested mail-in ballots were unreturned. In Robeson County, 64% of mail-in ballots requested did not make it back to elections officials. In Bladen County, the figure was 40%.
  • The unreturned ballots are disproportionately associated with minority voters. More than 40% of the ballots requested by African Americans and more than 60% of those requested by American Indians did not make it back to elections officials. For white voters, that figure was just 17%.

California Republicans Didn’t See It Coming

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Politico: “It was one of several nasty midterm shocks for California Republicans: Internal polling described to Politico showed Knight and Reps. Dana Rohrabacher and Mimi Walters — all of whom lost — narrowly leading their Democratic opponents at the end of the campaign. Not only did the GOP get crushed in California, the party also got taken by surprise by the intensity of the backlash in the nation’s largest state, where Republicans projected confidence nearly all year before watching Democrats flip a whopping six House districts — and possibly a seventh.”

“The nightmare results were the end result of a toxic brew of overconfidence and presidential unpopularity, as some Republicans failed to recognize and reckon with the unprecedented negative reaction to President Trump in districts from Orange County to California’s agriculture-heavy Central Valley.”

AP Retracts Call of North Carolina House Race

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The Associated Press is retracting its call of a winner for U.S. House in North Carolina’s 9th congressional district.

The AP had called the race for Mark Harris (R) on Nov. 9, after Dan McCready (D) conceded the election but the North Carolina board of elections has delayed certifying the results, citing “claims of irregularities and fraudulent activities related to absentee by-mail voting.”

FiveThirtyEight: “Where do we go from here? It’s unclear. If the state board of elections finds that fraud did indeed taint the results, it has the authority to call a new election — even if the fraud wasn’t widespread enough to change the winner. And according to the U.S. Constitution, the soon-to-be-Democratic House of Representatives has the final say on the qualifications of its members; it could theoretically refuse to seat Harris until it’s satisfied that he won fairly.”

McCaskill Blames Democrats for Her Defeat

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Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) “blamed her defeat not on her own campaign, but on the Democratic Party for abandoning its moderate constituents,” Roll Call reports.

Said McCaskill: “This demand for purity, this looking down your nose at people who want to compromise, is a recipe for disaster for the Democrats. Will we ever get to a majority in the Senate again, much less to 60, if we do not have some moderates in our party?”

Historic Turnout Probably Helped Republicans More

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David Wasserman: “As bad as this outcome was for Republicans, it could’ve been worse: there’s strong evidence November’s universally high, historic midterm turnout actually aided Republicans more than Democrats. For example, on November 6, Rep. Troy Balderson (R-OH) received about 68,000 more votes than he did in the August 7 special election, while Danny O’Connor (D) received just 56,000 more.”

“Nationwide, there were 23 Republicans who won their House races by less than five points. Had the Trump base not woken up after the Kavanaugh fight, Democrats could have easily gained 50 seats.”

North Carolina House Race In Limbo

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“Mounting evidence of voter fraud in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District could indefinitely delay the certification of a winner, as state election officials investigate whether hundreds of absentee ballots were illegally cast or destroyed,” the Washington Post reports.

“The board is collecting sworn statements from voters in rural Bladen and Robeson counties, near the South Carolina border, who described people coming to their doors and urging them to hand over their absentee ballots, sometimes without filling them out. Others described receiving absentee ballots by mail that they had not requested. It is illegal to take someone else’s ballot and turn it in.”

Ryan Questions California Election Results

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“Weeks after House Republicans lost their majority, Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) on Thursday cast serious doubts about the “bizarre” election system in California, where it appears that seven GOP-held seats will flip to Democratic control,” The Hill reports.

Ryan said the California election system “just defies logic to me.”

He added: “We were only down 26 seats the night of the election and three weeks later, we lost basically every California race. This election system they have — I can’t begin to understand what ‘ballot harvesting’ is.”

Latest Win Gives Democrats Gain of 40 House Seats

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TJ Cox (D) officially defeated three-term Rep. David Valadao (R-CA), “giving Democrats a gain of seven House seats in California and 40 nationwide — the party’s strongest midterm showing since the Watergate era in the mid-1970s,” the Los Angeles Times reports.

“Cox clinched his victory more than three weeks after election day, when updated results from Fresno and Kings counties pushed his lead over Valadao to 529 votes. The contest was the country’s last remaining undecided congressional contest.”

North Carolina Won’t Certify House Race Result

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North Carolina’s board of elections “refused to certify the results of the 9th congressional district election after one board member cited what he called ‘unfortunate activities’ in the eastern part of the district,” the Charlotte Observer reports.

“It’s unclear what those activities involved or what the failure to certify might mean. The board discussed the matter in closed session.”

Unofficial results show Mark Harris (R) defeated Dan McCready (D) by 905 votes.

All That for Just One Senate Seat

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Nathan Gonzalez: “After two years of fighting, spending, and campaigning, and one party being handed a very favorable map, the U.S. Senate will be one seat different at the beginning of the 116th Congress than it was at the beginning of the 115th Congress. Republicans gained two Senate seats in the November elections, but lost the Alabama race in the Dec. 2017 special election. So the net change is minimal. The GOP majority shifted from 52-48 in Jan. 2017 to 53-47 in Jan. 2019.”

House Democrats Left with $18 Million In Debt

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The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is $18 million in debt from this year’s midterms, NBC News reports.

“It’s common for campaigns and party committees to finish election cycles in the hole as they throw everything they have — and then some — at an election, but the $18 million will have to be made up through fundraising before the new chairman can start building a warchest for the next election cycle.”

Democrats Again Overperformed In a Red State

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First Read: “In last night’s Senate runoff in Mississippi, appointed Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS) defeated Democrat Mike Espy by 8 points, 54% to 46%. That’s down from President Trump’s 18-point advantage in the state in 2016 and former Sen. Thad Cochran’s 22-point win there in 2014.”

“Indeed, Espy’s 10-point overperformance from the 2016 presidential results is close to the average of Democrats’ showing in the eight other major special elections of the 2018 cycle – from GA-6 to the Roy Moore vs. Doug Jones Senate race in Alabama.”

Nathan Gonzalez: “Republicans were fortunate that most of them took place in GOP-friendly territory or they would have lost more of them.”

Espy Would Need Unprecedented Swing to Win

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Geoffrey Skelley: “We don’t often see a runoff in a general election, but if Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith were to lose Mississippi’s Senate runoff on Tuesday, after the two Republican candidates combined to win a sizable majority of the initial vote, that would be even more unusual.”

“In the first round, Republicans Hyde-Smith and Chris McDaniel combined for a bit less than 58 percent of the vote, while Democrat Mike Espy and one other candidate from his party together won a little more than 42 percent. For Espy to win, the runoff vote has to swing more than 15 points more Democratic than the initial vote margin.”

“But if we look at the five Senate elections since 1990 where an initial round of voting was held on the national Election Day and two candidates advanced to a runoff, no challenger has ever come close to outperforming the previous round of voting by the kind of margin Espy would need to win.”

Despite Concession, McMurray Promises to Stay Active

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Nate McMurray (D) conceded his race against Rep. Chris Collins (R-NY) but promised he wasn’t going away, suggesting that his opponent’s indictment might create an opening, the Buffalo News reports.

Said McMurray: “So we’re going to do things like hold town halls. And whether Mr. Collins wants to do that, or not, we don’t care. He can show up to our town halls, if he wants. Beyond that, Mr. Collins’ future in Washington remains murky. He says that he will finish his term but, as we know, he’s not the best at keeping promises.”

He added: “When the time is right, I will run for office again.”

Taegan Goddard

Taegan Goddard

Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire -- which for more than two decades has been one of the nation's most influential political news sites.

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