Dem
47
GOP
53
"Election news?", you might be saying. "Already?" Yes, indeed. And, like a political version of A Christmas Carol, there is actually news of elections past, present and future.
That seems the right order in which to proceed, so let's start with elections past. As readers will recall, Associate Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court Allison Riggs, a Democrat, was appointed to her seat by then-governor Roy Cooper (D) and, in November, won election in her own right. Her margin of victory was razor-thin: only 734 votes out of 5.5 million ballots cast. Still, it just takes one more vote than your opponent for it to be a victory, and Riggs' lead stood up on a recount.
Once GOP challenger Jefferson Griffin's loss was twice-certified, he raised a very important and salient point: I don't wanna lose. So, he cooked up a claim that 60,000 ballots should not be counted. He's challenging all kinds of ballots—some that he claims came from voters who did not include a driver's license number and/or last four digits of their social security number with their registration, others that came from various classes of overseas voters.
Griffin's challenge holds no water. First, the claims he makes are largely rehashings of arguments that other Republicans have made that have already been shot down. Second, the time for challenges has come and passed. Third, either the ballots are valid or they are not. They cannot be valid for some offices and not others. And if they were to be thrown out, then other elections would potentially be affected. Those elections involve people who have already been sworn in and have taken their seats. For all of these reasons, the North Carolina State Board of Elections rejected Griffin's claims. So, he ran to court.
And that brings us to the actual news, which is that the North Carolina Supreme Court decided yesterday that Griffin's case has enough merit that certification of Riggs' win should be postponed. The vote was 4-2, with four Republicans in the majority, one Republican and one Democrat in the minority and Riggs abstaining.
The general consensus is that the four conservatives really, really want to add a like-minded colleague to their ranks, and are ready to bend over backwards to make that happen. Certainly, their willingness to assign merit to arguments that are meritless (and have been so adjudged, by the people whose job it is to do the judging) does not argue against that. So, the ruling is seen as a setback for Riggs.
That said, you can never know what a court will do until it actually does it. Further, the North Carolina Supremes might not actually get to be the deciders. Until Monday, the case was in federal court. Then, Judge Richard Myers—a Donald Trump appointee—remanded it back to state court. An appeal of Myers' decision is already underway, so the case may be returned to federal court, where Riggs is likely to face much better odds.
So, that's elections past. On to elections present. Yesterday, Virginia held special elections for three seats in the state legislature. Rep. John McGuire (R-VA) resigned the state Senate seat representing SD-10 when he was elected to the House. Meanwhile, Rep. Suhas Subramanyam (D-VA) resigned the state Senate seat representing SD-32 when HE was elected to the House. Then, state Del. Kannan Srinivasan (D-VA) resigned the state House seat representing HD-26 so he could run for Subramanyam's vacant state Senate seat. So, that's two open state Senate seats, one open House of Delegates seat.
These elections were significant because, had they all gone the Republicans' way, then the Democrats would have lost their majority in both chambers, and there would have been a need for some sort of power-sharing agreement, since the Senate would have been 20-20 and the House of Delegates would have been 50-50.
The punditry also suggested that these elections were VERY IMPORTANT for a second reason. See, SD-32 and HD-26 are both majority-minority. So, if the Democratic candidates performed poorly, or lost, this would be OUR FIRST CLUE that the gains that Donald Trump made with minority voters are real, and that the 2024 election was a realigning reelection.
This supposition is, to use a technical term, stupid. It's a special election, and special elections are always wonky. And, for that matter, it was a special election for the state legislature, which is lower-profile than Congress. So, wonkier still. Oh, and there was a blizzard yesterday. Even more wonky. In the end, about 30,000 people voted. You cannot possibly draw meaningful conclusions about what tens of millions of voters will do in 2 years, or 4 years, based on the actions of the 30,000 hearty souls in one part of Virginia who were willing to brave a blizzard.
In any event, the votes turned out as a near-duplicate of the 2024 presidential results. In SD-10, Luther Cifers (R) won, 58.8% to 41.2%. Donald Trump took 61% of the vote there in 2024. In SD-32, Srinivasan won, 61.3% to 38.7%. Kamala Harris took 59% of the vote there in 2024. In HD-26, JJ Singh (D) won, 61.6% to 38.4%. Harris also took 59% of the vote THERE in 2024. So, Cifers did a shade worse than Trump, Srinivasan and Singh did a shade better than Harris. And what that tells us about future elections is, again, absolutely nothing. Get back to us when Virginia elects a new governor in November, perhaps, or when there are special elections in June 2026.
And that's a nice segue into elections future, where the news is much briefer. Yesterday, just a week removed from the release of a House report suggesting he is an abuser of illegal drugs, a procurer of prostitutes and a rapist, former representative Matt Gaetz announced that he's seriously thinking about a run for Florida governor. "I have a compelling vision for the state," he decreed. "I understand how to fix the insurance problem, and it's not to hand the keys to the state over to the insurance industry. If I run, I would be the most pro-consumer candidate on the Republican side." What he's talking about here, in case you don't know already, is that it's very hard these days to get hurricane insurance in Florida. Something about all the devastating hurricanes occasioned by climate change.
Anyone who believes Gaetz has solutions to ANY problems, much less something as tricky as hurricane insurance, is smoking something. Anyone who believes Gaetz would not climb right in bed with Big Insurance, which is a major source of campaign funding in a state without donation limits, is smoking something really, really primo. In any case, the news here is that Gaetz isn't going away, which means the Democrats have a real shot at the Florida governor's mansion in 2026. Gaetz is just like Kari Lake; popular enough to get a nomination, not popular enough to get a win. (Z)