There are only a handful of elections you can talk about decades later just by saying the year. Say “1994” to anybody who follows politics and they know what you mean.
I wouldn’t put 2006 in that category, nor even 2010 though that was obviously a huge change election in North Carolina. It’s simply that North Carolina had been moving in that direction for so long that all it took was a little nudge.
Yesterday, though, qualifies. Someday a Republican consultant is going to be asked how on earth his party lost a congressional seat drawn for Tim Moore, and all he’ll have to say is, “It was 2026.”
I wrote in today’s Observer column (read free with gift link) about how Republicans in Raleigh got a little too comfortable assuming that they could coast on what they’d accomplished a decade ago and count on a well-timed power play to take care of the rest.
Here I want to get into the returns themselves. I had braced for a bad Republican year. These seven things surprised me anyway.
