Mercury Midweek

Election integrity, new polls and links aplenty

Via Catawba College/YouGov

Good Morning and welcome to the midweek edition of whatever this is. The firehose of elections and politics news continues to firehose.

If you missed Monday’s morning post note that there’s a lot of not-yet-stale news in it as well as a look at competitive (and not-so competitive) state legislature races and what the election will mean in the way the General Assembly operates. You wanted to know where the action is, so check it out.

Meanwhile, [Cue the Speedwagon] Let’s get rolling

Catawba College/YouGov — More Than 7 Out of 10 North Carolinians Express Confidence in 2024’s Election, but Concerns About Voter Safety Exist

I’ll probably dedicate a whole post on the series of Catawba/YouGov polls coming out over the next few weeks. These look like some well put together polls with a fairly large sample (scroll down and click the methodology tab).

The first one is a deep dive into voters’ perceptions about the validity of election results, election security and safety. As the recent Elon Poll also noted, safety and election integrity is very much on the mind of voters here.

Given all the mistrust being whipped up, it is impressive that a large majority or respondents to the poll said they were confident in the integrity of local and state elections. The numbers shift around some when it comes to whether they believe in the integrity of absentee ballots, mail in voting and other specifics, but the overall numbers remain fairly high.

Still, throughout the poll you can see a fairly consistent level of mistrust with about a fifth of those interviewed saying they did not have confidence in the elections process.

Here’s Lynn Bonner’s story on the poll for NC Newsline

Professor Michael Bitzer on the poll results

RFKjr’s day in court — WRAL is following today’s hearing on the candidate’s suit to get off the NC ballot. The presiding judge said she expect to rule on the challenge today.

ECU Poll — The toplines are, you guessed it, very close in the presidential and Stein well ahead of Robinson in the gov race. Interestingly, the survey included every third party candidate except RFKjr. Top line and full results here.

INDY on dudstock — Just enough people showed up to look like a crowd with the right camera angles. Whoever it was that did whatever that was got their clicks and clips, so in the world of political make-believe it was a raging success. Back here on Earth, Flagstock was just asking for a write up like this:

“But it wasn’t “frat party” fun as much as “your uncle bought you and your friends some beer and also invited his friends and don’t worry he got a permit from the county and hired security people so you can’t use your fake ID because Alcohol Law Enforcement is here and if you do anything dumb there are a dozen journalists with cameras and if you even go to the party then people on campus will be mad and you’ll be hungover for class tomorrow and most of the beer actually isn’t free” fun.”

Race for U.S. Senate — Center for Politics’ Kondik and Coleman on the GOP’s chances of taking the Senate and the difficult path for Dems to hold it.

Harris on Housing — Cardinal & Pine on the Harris housing plan and what it could mean for NC.

Axios on the skirt ad — Lucille Sherman on why one set of Robinson’s long list of comments stands out.

The ‘skirt’ ad has been the most effective messaging point against Robinson to date,” said longtime Republican political operative Paul Shumaker, who also served as a campaign adviser to one of Robinson’s primary opponents, “because it speaks beyond the issue of abortion. It speaks to the issue of blaming women.”

ICYMI — From last week, here’s MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki’s primer on NC’s political geography: