North Carolina – Democrats

A TAPster unimpressed by the Hagan-Tillis debate says, “If you want to see a real debate, watch Jim Hunt debate Jesse Helms in 1984. That was like Ali and Frazier.”   Ah, take me back to those thrilling days 30 years ago. Here’s a link so you can watch two heavyweight champs. (This is the…

Candidates and their advisers spend a lot of time during debate prep thinking about how to address their opponent, so it was no happenstance that Tillis called Hagan “Kay” and she called him “Speaker Tillis.”   Tillis didn’t want to give her the benefit of incumbency, so he took the risk of looking sexist and…

The Senate race is all about sex. It is Supportive Mommy against Stern Daddy.   And the debate may make me amend my rule about how the most comfortable, confident and commanding person in the room always wins: Except when it’s a man against a woman and his “commanding” slips over into “condescending.”   Thom…

Several reporters have called to explore “what’s at stake” in tonight’s U.S. Senate debate and “what Hagan and Tillis have to do.”   Well, the answer is a lot simpler than we make it sometimes in politics.   The media will bravely try to focus on substance and whether either candidate “said something new.” (The…

WRAL’s Mark Binker says the claim that Senator Kay Hagan votes with President Obama 95 percent of the time is “something of karmic payback for Hagan, who benefited from a similar claim leveled against then-Sen. Elizabeth Dole in 2008.”   There is a little-noted back story to the Dole ad: It wasn’t really about voting…

As much as I respect Rob Christensen and the political experts he talked with in today’s column, I disagree with their conclusion that the money spent in the U.S. Senate race has had “little effect.”   In fact, I think the ads by Senator Hagan – and on her behalf – have painted Thom Tillis…

Republicans strode up to the plate in Raleigh with big bats and high hopes, then whiffed on three straight pitches.   Strike one was teacher pay. Their top goal was to stop the bleeding on education. But their so-called pay raise was so full of holes, questions and confusion that nobody is satisfied, teachers are…