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Shorts: A few odds and ends to cap off the primary elections
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Published: May 11, 2008
RALEIGH -- There's no central theme to the column this week, just a few short stories.
□ In what has to be the strangest result of Tuesday's primary, former Republican House co-Speaker Richard Morgan was nominated by his party's voters to be their candidate for superintendent of public instruction.
Morgan is a pariah to elements of the Republican establishment and state headquarters has been openly hostile. He lost a bid for re-nomination to his House seat two years ago to a fellow who lost in his bid for re-nomination Tuesday due to a drunk-driving arrest.
Yet, Morgan runs statewide and wins. How to explain?
One of his few remaining friends in the General Assembly provided this explanation on Wednesday: Voters don't know who they are voting for.
Morgan, who gets mentioned in almost every story about former House Speaker Jim Black's conviction for buying the vote of former Walkertown Rep. Michael Decker, has great name recognition. That carried him to victory on Tuesday because people knew his name, even if they didn't remember why.
Doesn't say a lot about our democracy, does it?
□ This has been a bad year for pollsters. There was the debacle in New Hampshire where they got everything wrong, and now they missed pretty significantly in the presidential races Tuesday.
By the time of the vote, the pollsters were saying that Barack Obama would carry North Carolina by as little as four, and maybe by as many as nine, points. Hillary Clinton's victory in Indiana would be five or more points. So Obama wins by more than a dozen points here and Clinton barely gets the win in Indiana.
How to explain?
The pollsters don't have their calibrations set correctly yet on young voters with cell phones. Nor are they good at gauging unusually strong turnout by one segment of the population, in this case, blacks. That's my guess.
□ The best story of the vote had to come in Wake County's 40th House District. There, Stan Morse filed to run for the Democratic nomination only to learn that Sam Hart Brewer had also filed. Morse said he didn't really want to be a legislator anyhow, so, after talking with Brewer, he endorsed Brewer and voted for him. He made this public.
He even issued a concession speech on Monday saying he'd call for a recount if he won.
Then he won, 54.2 percent to 45.8.
While there are a number of possible explanations for a guy winning when he wanted to lose -- maybe see item one above -- here's mine: Voters were enchanted by a candidate who didn't see winning as the be-all and end-all of life.
□ Here's a story from a friend: She'd been a Clinton backer for the entire campaign, but changed her mind Monday. She decided to vote for Obama. Then on Tuesday morning, she changed her mind again, voted for Clinton and went to work. At lunch, in downtown Raleigh, she ran into Obama, shook his hand, then felt awful that she hadn't voted for him.
So she called her mom, who had planned to vote for Clinton. They worked out a deal to swap votes. Mom would vote for Obama later in the day.
But after voting, her mom suddenly got upset with herself for not voting for Clinton and she let her daughter know it.
The moral: Never mix family and politics.
□ A postscript: Thanks to those who sent their prayers and best wishes for my nephew. I mentioned a few weeks ago that he was serving in Baghdad. Good news: He got home safely eight days ago. My sister was greatly relieved -- for all of two days.
On Monday, he hopped on his new motorcycle -- he'd bought it via the Internet while in Iraq and had it delivered to her house. He'd never ridden before. Now my sister has something new to worry about.
■ Paul O'Connor writes for the Journal from Raleigh. He can be reached at
poconnor@wsjournal.com.
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