Two races and one issue appear likely to dominate election coverage

Aspiring political candidates in North Carolina have had to officially put themselves out there. Yesterday was filing day, and hundreds of candidates of both parties submitted their candidacies to the election boards in their respective counties. I was struck by the way that two races alone dwarfed every other candidate who filed to run for office. Sam Page and Roy Cooper dominated the vast majority of the coverage about filing day.

I am keenly interested in both of these races. And I agree with right-wing blogger Brant Clifton that the Page-Berger primary is actually a more significant and consequential race than Cooper’s race for U.S. Senate. Our Senate race likely will not determine control of the United States Senate. In addition, Cooper enters this race in a fairly comfortable position and it will take a change in the dynamics to make it a true tossup. Whereas the primary between Sam Page and Phil Berger is a fully unpredictable tossup that could topple a legislative leader in a way we haven’t seen since the “coup” against Speaker Liston Ramsey in the 1980s. The savvier political observers in our state will be paying close attention to the Berger primary.

But reading the coverage of filing day, what struck me even more was that Cooper and Page were the only candidates who received any significant coverage. It was as if there were no other marquee races getting started anywhere from the Appalachian Mountains to Roanoke Island.

And, with the exception of Anita Earls’s Supreme Court race, for all practical purposes there are not.

Jamie Ager’s challenge to Representative Chuck Edwards is serious and merits attention. I agree with national prognosticators who rate the race “Likely Republican.” But the district is too solidly Republican for Ager’s race to be considered a tossup right now. And across the rest of the political landscape there was nothing. The Republican General Assembly has so thoroughly annihilated competitive districts that we have no political competition for the legislative branch of government. The coverage below the Page-and-Cooper level was so sparse because Republicans, led by longtime enforcer Ralph Hise, have predetermined the outcomes of nearly every important election in the state. Our democracy has been ailing for 15 years and may eventually be pronounced dead.

I find it extremely unlikely that U.S. Senate Republicans will renew the expiring Obamacare subsidies. It would be an epic act of political self-sabotage to let them expire. But

Republicans deeply, fervently, and genuinely despise the Affordable Care Act and the concept of universal healthcare. This is something most of them feel so strongly about that they will probably be willing to sustain major electoral losses to avoid appeasing the Obama legacy.

Republicans have a principled, bedrock opposition to universal healthcare. They viscerally resent the idea of providing care to people who can’t access it because they think that would mean rewarding slothful and gluttonous people who refuse to take care of themselves. If you have, say, severe OCD and did nothing to deserve it…sorry. They believe that healthcare is a consumer commodity that must be earned by remunerative work and good lifestyle decisions. It just viscerally rankles them to provide coverage to the uninsured.

And it goes beyond their angry and cranky fixation on personal responsibility. (“If you want something, work for it!”) Most American conservatives take deep pride in the fact that the United States does not have a universal healthcare system like the programs that people in every other advanced industrialized country, especially Western Europe, take for granted. They see it as American Exceptionalism, a tribute to the country’s pioneer legacy of individual freedom. “Barack Obama wants to make us more like the rest of the world,” complained Marco Rubio. Cutting your medications and giving blood to make the money you need for a doctor’s appointment are the American way.

My feelings about conservative healthcare dogma hardly need to be explicated. While I stopped making political predictions after the 2016 election, though, I am willing to say that I do not think Republicans are likely to, after 15 years of bitter and often histrionic opposition, give a man some of their constituents accused of being the Anti-Christ the satisfaction of seeing the core of his greatest accomplishment survive another Republican majority.