2024 Raleigh Endorsements

North Carolina's capital city has continued gentrifying to the point that it's officially become the fourth least affordable city nationally for singles, which might as well apply to various other demographics. Other key issues have involved the relocation of the Red Hat Ampitheater and overhauling the City Council. 

On the latter, vested interests like Eric Braun (hat tip ex-City Council candidate Kristen Havlik) made the recommendation to stagger the terms of the Raleigh City Council and to expand said terms from two to four years. The problem? This was done without any public input, and the working group Braun was a part of also nixed a proposal that would have added three district seats. These vested interests (which are not unlike the various political factions in Greensboro) have help made Raleigh unaffordable to anyone who isn't a part of the professional managerial class--different from my days as an NC State student.

As for the former, the amphitheater is being forced to relocate because the convention center is being expanded. This caused a lot of consternation throughout the summer and early fall as threats to take live music out of Raleigh were mentioned. I just don't see the need for the convention center to take up two blocks when Red Hat could have been converted to a downtown arena at its current site.

Mayor

Mary-Ann Baldwin is stepping down after two terms due to simultaneous cancer diagnoses to her and her husband. She's largely responsible for the gentrification. Five candidates are running to replace her. 

Paul Fitts is an automatic no-go. In addition to his Republican affiliation, his extreme pro-police stance disqualifies him from consideration for any contest. He's the reason why ex-Mayor Nancy McFarlane was forced into a runoff seven years ago.

James Shaughnessy IV has ties to pro-Ukrainian groups, which would have made him a good fit on the previous City Council. No thanks.

Janet Cowell is the undisputed frontrunner in this race. As a major note, I voted for her as a student when she ran for the At-Large seat twice and years later during her successful runs for State Treasurer. Why the change? She was the progressive in the early 2000s but after her simultaneous promotions to the NC Senate and NC Treasurer, Cowell is now a face of the Democratic establishment in NC with Roy Cooper term-limited and likely focused on 2028 or 2032 and Josh Stein likely the next governor. Both ex-Mayors Charles Meeker and McFarlane have already backed her.

In the end it's Eugene Myrick over Terrance Ruth for me.

District A

Whitney Hill, like Fitts, is extremely pro-cop and Republican.

Mitchell Silver is the city's former planning director and has firm establishment support lined up behind him. 

This makes reelecting Mary Black a very easy choice.

District B

I empathically support Megan Patton for reelection in Northeast Raleigh.

District C

Corey Branch was forced back into defending his seat after it became clear that various groups in Southeast Raleigh were going to back Cowell in the mayor's race and that there was very little to no confidence in any of the six people aiming to replace him. Given that he's a status quo face on the current City Council, he's a no-go for this blog.

Tomara DeCosta pretty much disqualified herself the moment she said that she was a conservative Republican.

Tolulope Omokaiye has the official Wake County Democratic Party endorsement, making her the establishment's pick (sorta).

Out of the other four, Daniel Grant-King gets the nod over Portia Rochelle, Daquanta Copeland and Jared Ollison.

District D

Jane Harrison is running unopposed, but the fact that she supported the failed ceasefire resolution is a green light for me.

District E

Christina Jones deserves another term even though NC State alum and 9/11 hero John Cerqueira is also in this race.

At-Large

Stormie Foote and Jonathan Melton do not deserve to be reelected--and I'll leave it at that.

James Bledsoe is aligned with Andrew Yang's Forward Party.

Robert Steele, Jr. lost his fiancée in the October 2022 mass shooting in East Raleigh's Hedingham neighborhood.

Reeves Peeler is endorsed by the NC Triangle DSA, but there's one major problem that prevented me from endorsing him: The Red Hat Ampitheater. On September 24, Peeler was one of the five votes on the Planning Commission that went against the City Council's decision to close South Street between Dawson and McDowell Streets. Ultimately, the Planning Commission's decision didn't matter but if it did, Peeler would have been blamed for Downtown Raleigh being less lively.

As a true socialist and the only Green Party member running in the capital city, Joshua Bradley is the only choice for this contest.

In a shock to no one

The four members of the Raleigh City Council who voted for the ceasefire resolution were the four I endorsed while the other four voted to kill it. Of course, the latter four were the same ones endorsing Ukrainian Nazis and lighting up Downtown Raleigh yellow and light blue just a couple of years ago as part of the previous City Council. 

Raleigh--just like Greensboro--endorses genocide.

Downtown Greensboro news

Triad City Beat | EDITOR’S NOTEBOOK: The Assembly, and collaboration (triad-city-beat.com)

Let's hope that this new collaborative effort isn't going to suck up to the political clans that run the city and have gentrified downtown. Hope to REAL journalism since the daily is a zombie publication and the others have pretty much given up any type of investigative work.

Triad City Beat | Greensboro’s Mayor Nancy Vaughan will not seek re-election in 2025 (triad-city-beat.com)

First up, good riddance. Second, now is the time the groups that I previously mentioned to put up or shut up. Either they come together to start fielding a real antiestablishment slate, or they'll forever give up that shot as the city is forever stuck in a loop between establishment hacks and right wing nutjobs because 2029 will be too late.

NC Rants

• Greensboro's lack of a food hall is a new low for an area already known for being a national laggard and the fact that ROAR was converted to an event space four months ago shows that the Triad is moving in the opposite direction as the number of food halls is once again reduced to one
• What's happening to Triad Stage speaks for itself--namely, that Greensboro is taking yet another step to conceding the arts to Winston-Salem
• Meanwhile, a couple of hours to the east, the Raleigh City Council is making even more bonehead decisions as it decided table a proposal to add three seats while also introducing staggered four-year terms in 2026 without even putting it on the ballot like Greensboro did in 2015
• Speaking of Raleigh, the previous City Council reduced the hours of hot dog carts from 3 am to 1:15 am while doing nothing to curtail gentrification. In the two decades since I left the city, Downtown Raleigh has gone from a ghost town when I graduated to a place that has become unaffordable
• The election to replace Mary-Ann Baldwin is not looking too promising

Trouble in the Ballpark District

At the beginning of the year, the City of High Point decided to split ways with Elliott Sidewalk Communities. Out of the four parcels, only Parcel C was developed (into the food hall). Parcel A is still a parking lot while the other two never got developed.

I will not blame this on the city as yet another example of it being resistant to change. This is all on Elliott Sidewalk. They had six years and only developed 25 percent of the land given to them so if the Ballpark District ends up undercooked, it's all ESC's fault.

Source 1

Source 2

Cardiac Pack 2.0

I'm forever grateful that the Wolfpack men's basketball team turned it around when it was almost a certainty that a coaching change was inevitable prior to the start of the ACC Tournament in D.C. While I treated the Final Four run as an extremely pleasant surprise, I'm hoping that this is the beginning of a new era of success.

A pattern of the team's three ACC Championships in the multi-bid era (from 1975 on):

Every postseason game that the Original Cardiac Pack played in except the Sweet 16 against 10-seed Utah was a nail-biter.

The previous team to win an ACC title won every game in that tournament by single digits.

Most of this year's ACCT games as well as a couple of NCAAT games were close too.

Meanwhile, notice a glaring difference between the '24 team against the other two championship teams:

Can anyone say unprecedented?

No one gave this year's team much love whereas the '83 team was hampered by Dereck Whittenburg's injury before Cardiac Pack 1.0 went on that Cinderella run once he returned from his injury. The '87 team started the season as an NCAA Tournament caliber team before it fell off in the middle of the season and had to rally in Metro D.C. just to get into the Big Dance.

Stunted City Redux

Well, it looks like this prediction from almost seven years ago is coming to pass--albeit slowly:

Durham and Winston-Salem traded the #4 and #5 positions between 2007 and 2012 before the Bull City pulled away from the Twin City. Given the stagnant growth around the Gate City, it's plausible that Winston could leapfrog it for #3 or rather Greensboro falls to #5 some time around the 2020 Census or afterwards.

As it turns out, the Rhino took notice of Greensboro's stagnant growth, which is reaching zero population growth territory.

It looks like the Gate City will fall to fourth place in no time and may even fall behind Winston-Salem by the 2030 Census. Consider the evidence:

The bad news is that the growth in two years was only 2,394 or 0.8 percent, which compared to Greensboro’s peer cities in the state is anemic...The latest figures show that by 2022 the population in Durham had grown to 292,939. The population growth during that period was 9,432 or 3.3 percent...Even Winston-Salem right next door grew in population more than twice as fast as Greensboro. Winston-Salem’s growth rate was 1.9 percent to a 2022 population of 254,200.

Given that Durham has recently had its own issues, what's happening to Greensboro represents a precipitous fall as it far outpaced Raleigh for second place in 1960 and is staring at a possible fifth place showing in the near future. As a friend said last year, Greensboro has lost its way.

Bernie and the Failed Revolution Eight Years Later

After eight years of witnessing the scuttled political revolution of Bernie Sanders, I can logically draw one conclusion: It was a failure. Taking over the Democratic Party and reforming from within was never going to work when varied interests are so entrenched that the party bosses would much rather go the way of the Whigs than halt its continued rightward drift. I am so happy that I gave my money to a short-lived art event known as the Ruby Slipper Festival instead of Bernie's campaign when he came to Winston-Salem.

Here's a list of all of the issues that I have with these progressives and why organizing outside of the two-party system is a much better solution:

• During the ’20 Senate race in Maine, most progressives were either silent on Lisa Savage or all in for Sara Gideon despite it being the first time the state used ranked choice voting

• The Force The Vote debacle

• The Squad foregoing fighting for Medicare For All in favor of committee assignments. Instead, AOC got kicked off a committee by a 46-13 vote in favor of a New Democrat that the NY delegation hated but national leaders liked

• A $15 minimum wage was also cited for skipping FTV but progressives did nothing to boost that issue

• Ayanna Pressley possibly sabotaging The Squad by saying that each member voted alone rather than as a bloc

• Progressives in Seattle tone policed former councilwoman Kshama Sawant when she called out progressive Dem members of the city council for being a roadblock to progress

• Congressional progressives ignoring the Marches For M4ALL, which were held in 56 cities in mid-2021

• Squad members and the Working Families Party conducting a sham rally on extending the eviction moratorium at the U.S. Capitol while failing to hold their fellow Congress members accountable

• PMCs finding ways to defend Squad members when they took indefensible positions—Iron Dome, breaking the rail strike, funding Ukraine unconditionally, the list goes on

• After The Squad came into existence, the Democratic Party establishment readjusted its strategy. After Nina Turner’s first congressional campaign, progressives didn’t

• Turner’s opponent, Shontel Brown, being allowed to join the Progressive Caucus two months after she joined the New Democrat Coalition

• AOC and Ilhan Omar pretending to be arrested at an abortion rally outside of the SCOTUS building in July 2022

• Progressives rallying behind John Fetterman despite his troubled past and his own declarations that he was a Democrat and not a progressive

• Ilhan Omar coming within two points (50.3-48.3) of losing her primary two years ago to a Minneapolis City Council member backed by the status quo because her fellow Somalis had a falling out with her over the congresswoman’s support of imperialist policies in their homeland

• The CPC folding on keeping the infrastructure bill and Build Back Better together and its letter to Biden urging a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine a year apart

• Marianne Williamson’s failed slate of candidates in the ’22 election cycle 

• Last year, AOC sneered at the House Freedom Caucus’s FTV tactic with Kevin McCarthy and said that The Squad doing the same thing to Nancy Pelosi would have caused “irreparable institutional harm”

• The Bernie movement created a lot of careers but not a lot of legislative success

• Now, the organizations that spawned from 2016 are in tatters. Justice Democrats laid off nearly half of its staff and are playing defense this year, taking on no new candidates. Our Revolution started out with dark money and began supporting non-progressive candidates as early as 2021. As for Brand New Congress, it’s out of business

• Kyle Kulinski let the cat out of the bag last fall about Justice Democrats’ true mission (fighting Trump, not the Democratic Party establishment), and it explains why Squad members rarely fought the establishment (unless they were named Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema)

• Ryan Grim’s new book was all about simping made easy as he consistently ran cover for the Fraud Squad (like that time all of them except Rashida Tlaib voted to block the rail strike)

• Progressives (except for Marie Newman—and look at what happened to her) didn’t end the rightward shift. If anything, they moved to the right themselves in some instances (*cough* foreign policy)

• In Nevada, a slate of DSA-backed progressives ran the state Democratic Party from ’21 to last year and got sabotaged by the Harry Reid Machine. Instead of supporting his proteges, Bernie actually condemned them

• Brandon Johnson’s in Chicago last spring was a stay of execution—not validation—of working within the Democratic Party. As his woes demonstrate, he’s already susceptible to losing in a rematch against Paul Vallas in 2027 or someone who’s actually worse than Vallas

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Early Election '24 Thoughts

• Here in my hometown, six Republicans--including ex-High Point Mayor Jay Wagner--have filed to replace Kathy Manning in the 6th Congressional District...and that's it--no Dems, no Greens, no Libertarians. It's going to be a long year because the winner will be the next representative
• Compared to the working class issues that would-be independent candidate Kent Garrett brought up in 2022, good luck getting any of the current candidates running to discuss them on the record. Mind you, the outgoing congresswoman is part of Greensboro's one percent--meanwhile, these six people will happily do the bidding for that same one percent in Washington
• Speaking of members of the previous High Point City Council, At-Large Councilman Britt Moore has already plotted out his future. During last fall's election, I privately said that there were two possible reasons for him giving up his political independence: ambitions for higher office or him being that triggered by the 2020 uprisings. Now, it can be confirmed that he's running to replace a retiring John Faircloth--he himself an ex-city councilman--in another crowded Republican field in State House District 62
• The second most bitter contest in North Carolina (after the governor's race, duh) will be the race for the open Attorney General seat between 14th Congressional District representative Jeff Jackson and 8th Congressional District representative Dan Bishop
• The Libertarian Party of North Carolina has 46 candidates running in 44 races (and a well-organized website)
• The Greens are only recognizing one congressional candidate and Josh Bradley running for Raleigh City Council despite another congressional candidate and a gubernatorial candidate declaring themselves as Greens
• The Constitution Party is still trying to get back on the ballot
• No Labels is talking about a unity candidate for president but it has yet to make a commitment. The party is totally absent on the downballot races