Carter Wrenn On NC Dem Money Woes

My good friend Carter Wrenn, longtime political operative, thinker, and trouble-maker, has an interesting view on the current money race in NC.

First, let me show you this.  It may be hard to understand, but Bev Perdue outspent Pat McCrory by a truly huge margin.  None of our local media objected, because that was how it was supposed to be.  Everyone knows that Dems are more popular... 

Now, Carter's observations...

The Democrats’ treasure chest has vanished. Year after year in elections, Democrats like Jim Hunt and Marc Basnight had war chests brimming with cash. Bev Perdue defeated Pat McCrory last election by outspending him by $7 million. But now the Democrats’ larder is empty. Phil Berger’s outraising Martin Nesbit (Basnight’s Senate heir) seventeen to one and Pat McCrory raised a million dollars more than Walter Dalton last quarter.

So, for Democrats, what went wrong?

 

The answer, I think, is that the Dem machine in NC was so corrupt that, once out of power, there was very little actual support for the candidates or the policies.  The Dems lived off theft for more than a century.

 

Now, to be sure, it is not clear that the Repubs will do anything different...  To be fair, the Dems never claimed that they were going to do anything else.  They took money from people who earned it, and gave the money to their friends, whooping and squealing about "the poor! the poor!" in the meantime.  The Repubs say they are going to cut, and then they just end up TAKING their cut.