“As the year winds down and we look toward 2019, I’m asking you to make a commitment: find something you want to change in your community and take the first step toward changing it. If you need some inspiration, take a look at some of the young leaders who inspired me this year.”
— Barack Obama, on Twitter.
“The Democrats who captured the House by flipping 43 districts from red to blue received on average just over half of their large-dollar campaign funds from outside their states, another example of the nationalization of the November election that was a rebuke to President Donald Trump,” USA Today reports.
“The defeated Republicans in those districts, by contrast, collected only about one-third of their itemized funds from outside their states.”
“Outgoing Maine Gov. Paul LePage (R) finally certified the victory of Rep.-elect Jared Golden (D) in the state’s 2nd Congressional District on Friday, nearly two months after the Nov. 6 election — but not without taking one last dig at the state’s new ranked-choice voting process, which he and other state Republicans have long refused to accept,” the HuffPost reports.
“In the photo of his certification, the governor appears to have written ‘stolen election’ next to his signature, referring to his complaints about ranked-choice voting.”
Incoming House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said Friday that Democrats next week will not seat a North Carolina Republican amid allegations of election fraud in the state’s 9th Congressional District, the Washington Post reports.
Said Hoyer: “Given the now well-documented election fraud that took place in NC-9, Democrats would object to any attempt by Mark Harris to be seated on January 3. In this instance, the integrity of our democratic process outweighs concerns about the seat being vacant at the start of the new Congress.”
Raleigh News & Observer: “A surprise court order triggered a last-minute move Friday by Gov. Roy Cooper to continue the state election board’s probe of fraud allegations in the 9th District congressional race, even as Harris demanded to be named the winner.”
A new AP/NORC poll finds that 16% of those who “somewhat” supported President Trump’s job performance decided to vote for Democratic House candidates in the November midterms. That’s compared with 6% of those who self-identified as Trump’s “strong” supporters.
That difference helped Democrats capture the House majority, picking up 21 of their 40 new seats in districts Trump carried only two years earlier.
A good piece from our friends at the Cook Political Report.
“Republican state lawmakers in North Carolina have passed legislation that would allow the party to ditch Mark Harris in a new primary election for the 9th District seat if the state board of elections there decides to toss out the results of the Nov. 7 midterms,” Roll Call reports.
“Now the bill sits on Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s desk.”
First Read: “The silver lining for President Trump’s standing in the new NBC/WSJ poll — 43% job approval among all adults, just 38% of voters who say they’d re-elect him — is that this isn’t far off from where Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were after their midterm drubbings in 1994 and 2010.”
“And both Clinton and Obama won re-election. Convincingly.”
“But there’s one difference between Obama and Trump in the poll: A sizable number of Americans thought the former got the message about the midterms and tried to make adjustments, while just one-in-10 feel the same way about Trump after the GOP’s losses last November.”
“North Carolina congressional candidate Mark Harris (R) directed the hiring of a campaign aide now at the center of an election-fraud investigation, according to three individuals familiar with the campaign, despite warnings that the operative may have used questionable tactics to deliver votes,” the Washington Post reports.
“Harris sought out the operative, Leslie McCrae Dowless, after losing a 2016 election in which Dowless had helped one of Harris’s opponents win an overwhelming share of the mail-in vote in a key county.”
“As evidence mounts of potential election fraud in Bladen County, WECT has learned this may not be an isolated problem.”
“About a third of the absentee ballots that were requested in Columbus County during the 2018 general election never got returned to the Board of Elections. That’s an even higher percentage of missing ballots than the unreturned ballot numbers that raised the red flags in Bladen County.”
“The North Carolina Legislature on Wednesday approved a bill requiring new primary elections if the state elections board calls for a second vote of a congressional election. The measure opens the door for Republicans to consider replacing Mark Harris, their candidate in the disputed race in the Ninth Congressional District,” the New York Times reports.
“The bill, backed by substantial majorities among both parties, could eventually place Republicans in the awkward position of choosing whether to stick with Mr. Harris, who appeared to have narrowly won a primary and general election — both now buffeted by allegations of irregularities including tainted absentee ballots — or replace him on the ballot.”
Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that she does not plan to run for elected office again after she leaves the Senate next month.
“McCaskill said she may teach and will remain involved in Democratic politics in Missouri after a new Congress is seated in January. She views Missouri’s heavy tilt toward Republicanism as a function of President Trump’s appeal to disaffected Missourians and failures by her own party to deliver on change.”
“McCrae Dowless, the man whose ‘get-out-the-vote’ activities are the center of the election fraud investigation in North Carolina, told a local political campaign volunteer that he was holding onto 800 absentee ballots,” according to a new affidavit obtained by NBC News.
“In the signed statement, Kenneth Simmons said that he met Dowless at a local Republican Party meeting in the small town of Dublin. Dublin is located in Bladen County, the epicenter of the election fraud investigation involving absentee ballots. During that interaction, Simmons wrote, he and his wife saw Dowless with a large number of absentee ballots ‘in his possession.’”
First Read: “To us, there’s a more fundamental takeaway to yesterday’s Thunderdome in the Oval Office: It appears Trump still hasn’t accepted his defeat from the midterms and what that means for his agenda beginning next year.”
“It was the same kind of ‘thumping’ that George W. Bush recognized back in 2006, and similar to the ‘shellacking’ Barack Obama admitted receiving in 2010. But Trump has yet to concede what really happened in the midterms and how that means divided government in 2019-2020.”
“And that divided government takes away leverage he might have in any shutdown fight. As Schumer explained to reporters after the meeting, if there’s a shutdown, House Democrats next year can pass a clean continuing resolution to fund the government — and dare Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to oppose it.”
James Hohmann: “It’s remarkably easy for people to get under Trump’s skin. Chuck and Nancy, as Trump refers to the Democratic leaders, needled him on the economy and the election. And his response illustrated why this was the first meeting between the three leaders in more than a year. Indeed, the president has rarely put himself in positions of being directly challenged over the past two years.”
Ron Brownstein: “Cracks have emerged in Donald Trump’s hold on his core constituency of white working class voters, new data from the 2018 election reveal.”
“Though Republican candidates almost everywhere registered large margins among white voters without a college degree, Democrats ran much more competitively among the roughly half of that group who are not evangelical Christians.”
“Democrats, the analysis found, ran particularly well this year among white working-class women who are not evangelicals, a group that also displayed substantial disenchantment in the exit poll with Trump’s performance. Those women could be a key constituency for Democrats in 2020 in pivotal Rust Belt states such as Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, where relatively fewer blue-collar whites are also evangelical Christians.”
“The North Carolina Republican Party said Tuesday that a new election should be held in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District if a new allegation regarding the leak of early-voting results before Election Day is proven,” Politico reports.
The Charlotte Observer reported that early voting totals from Bladen County may have been leaked. A witness who signed that vote tabulation wrote in a sworn affidavit that the totals were “viewed by officials at the one-stop site who were not judges.”
“I know that I’m not done to elected office. There’s something in me that still says I have a role to play going forward as a policy maker.”
— Failed Florida gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum (D), in an interview with McClatchy.
Washington Post: “Mindy Myers, who was one of the primary architects of Warren’s political rise and has remained one of her close advisers, had been expected to play a senior role in the senator’s campaign. But she has been in talks with several rival campaigns and is planning to meet soon with Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-TX), who is considering a presidential run.”
“Myers ran Warren’s 2012 U.S. Senate campaign and then served as her senate chief of staff, giving her a deep understanding of Warren’s strengths and weaknesses.”
First Read: “So yeah, Beto is starting to look very real for 2020. And maybe more than that, whether he runs or not appears to have frozen the Dem field. Think about that: His decision might be the biggest shoe to drop in the 2020 Democratic race.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.
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