All tagged gop

John Hood: GOP Still Ahead on Key Issues

RALEIGH — A little over a year ago, I penned a column using polling data to explore why North Carolinians appeared to favor Republicans over Democrats in generic-ballot tests.

“No, it isn’t just because of unfair redistricting,” I wrote. “Nor is it a lack of resources. North Carolina Democrats have raised and spent lots of money on races they still ended up losing. What I mean is that, on many of the public’s top concerns, Democrats lack credibility with the swing voters they need to prevail.”

Ukraine invasion claims voter attention

Over the past couple of weeks, North Carolina politicos have focused intently on the outcome of the state’s latest redistricting saga. After the GOP-majority General Assembly saw its original set of electoral districts thrown out by the courts, lawmakers tried again. Their new legislative maps were accepted. A three-judge panel rejected the Republicans’ newly crafted congressional districts, however, and enacted a “remedial” map for the 2022 cycle.

John Hood: Polls underestimate GOP support

Just before the 2020 elections, the RealClearPolitics.com polling average had Joe Biden leading Donald Trump nationwide by 7.2 percentage points. Biden did end up winning the popular vote, yes, but by 4.5 points. There were even larger gaps between pre-election surveys and vote totals in some battleground states.

Due to GOP tax policy over the past decade, in other words, North Carolina’s state sales-tax burden went down, not up, by hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Alas, some of this effect was offset by increases in county sales taxes. Who is responsible for those hikes? Democrats, overwhelmingly. Democratic politicians authorized those sales-tax referenda and Democratic voters were most likely to favor them.