Good morning. Four more days of this.
1. Orange County already surpasses its early vote total from 2012 .
You can still skip the line on Tuesday and cast your ballot early today and tomorrow. And well over two million people have already done that in North Carolina. Here’s how it’s breaking down, courtesy of University of Florida professor Michael McDonald:
Part of the reason that Democrats are finally beating their 2012 numbers (remember, Obama lost the state by just 2 in 2012) might be that Orange County is voting in droves.
Be like Orange County.
2. Clinton, Sanders, and Pharrell in Raleigh.
Hillary Clinton joined her challenger in the Democratic primary and Pharrell for a rally at Walnut Creek last night. We were there. The official count from the Clinton campaign was 5,130 people.
From the N&O:
“Do any of us have a place in Trump’s America?” Clinton asked a crowd of about 1,800 at the community college.
She noted that Trump had been accused of housing discrimination at his real estate properties in the past and had continued to declare the guilt of the Central Park Five, five black and Hispanic men, on assault and rape allegations, despite DNA evidence that exonerated them.
Trump “has spent this entire campaign offering a dog whistle to his most hateful supporters,” Clinton said, citing his tweets and endorsement by the Ku Klux Klan’s newspaper, before outlining facets of her own economic plan, including taxing the wealthy and making college more affordable.
“You deserve a candidate you can vote for, not just vote against,” Clinton said.
Sanders basically called Pat McCrory a coward:
For a quick recap, we were at this rally and livetweeted it.
3. Dallas Woodhouse loses his damn mind on national television.
Talking Points Memo:
Dallas Woodhouse, the executive director of the North Carolina Republican Party, was on MSNBC Thursday defending emails he’d sent about early voting in the state, but he quickly changed the subject. Woodhouse said that there was no “suppression vote problem in North Carolina” but that Democrats had a “depression problem.”
“You know why? It’s very simple their candidate – if elected–could have these on Inauguration Day,” Woodhouse said holding up the pair of handcuffs.
“You’re bringing props for our show here, Dallas?” MSNBC host Hallie Jackson asked. “Is this the kind of rhetoric you want to be saying five days out from an election?”
“You know she is accused of misdeeds with her emails, she is accused of problems with the Clinton Foundation. People in America don’t trust her. That’s why Democrats have a depression problem,” Woodhouse said.
the guy running it has said and done all of these things: At an October 11 debate, McCrory seemed to endorse racial profiling. When asked if implicit bias was a factor in policing, McCrory responded, “There’s bias in all of us, it’s not necessarily racial bias. There might be bias in how we dress, how we look, the environment that we might be in. Those are tools that police use to determine what action to take.”
[…]
Earlier this year, McCrory signed HB 972, a bill that restricts police body-camera footage so that only the police can decide whether or not to show the footage to anyone, even if the person requesting it is on the recording. The law—which critics worry will further erode trust between the police and African-American communities—also says that the footage can only be released to the public following a court order.
[…]
In 2013, McCrory signed the repeal of the Racial Justice Act, which eliminated the ability of death row inmates to challenge their sentences on racial grounds. When he signed it, he called that provision a “loophole.” Some examples of this “loophole”: In one 2012 case, brought by three condemned inmates, a judge found that racial discrimination in jury selection “is further supported by statements by attorneys and judges acknowledging that the practice continues and is visible.” In another the same year, a court found statistical bias in the use of the death penalty. Both cases were challenged under the Racial Justice Act.
In 2015, McCrory signed a bill that removes the requirement for a physician to be present during an execution and excluded the names of execution-drug manufacturers from public records. The death penalty is effectively illegal in North Carolina; the state has not executed anyone in a decade, due to legal challenges and the unwillingness of manufacturers to sell the lethal drugs, but McCrory wants to bring it back.
[…]
Over the objections of secretary of public safety Frank Perry, McCrory instructed Perry to renew a $3 million [private prison] contract with a political donor, Charlotte developer Graeme Keith. According to Perry, during a meeting with McCrory and Perry, Keith said that he had given a lot of money to candidates running for public office, and he was due something in return. McCrory said that he didn’t hear the comment: “Had I heard it, I would have walked out.”So yeah, we’re taking this one with a grain of salt.
5. Campbell student dies on campus.
There’s not much information out yet except it happened “in a fall,” according to the N&O.
Have a good weekend.
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