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Speaker 1: As we do.
Speaker 2: Every Tuesday at noon, we talk with Andrew Dunn. He
is the publisher of long Leaf Politics. That's longleafpol dot
com and he's also a contributing columnist to the Charlotte Observer,
but we don't hold that against him.
Speaker 1: Andrew Dunn, Welcome sir, how are you.
Speaker 3: I'm doing great, Good to be with you.
Speaker 1: Good, good to have you here again.
Speaker 2: So yesterday I covered the Jefferson Griffin Allison Riggs still
unresolved election race. And so your position, you say on
this was that all of this should have ended months ago.
So why do you say that? And then we'll get
into where it goes from here.
Speaker 3: Yeah, thanks for the question. It's been pretty clear and
consistent that I believe that the State Board of Elections
has done a lot wrong. They've made a lot of mistakes.
They have not enforced the law, and that does need
to be rectified. However, I'm glad that this case is
coming up because I think now the State Board of
Elections is going to make those changes and is going
to fix it. However, I don't think it's right to
retroactively go back and throw out sixty thousand plus votes
in an election. I don't think that's the right remedy
for this because a lot of these voters are actual
legitimate voters. They did show voter ID at the polls
this year, and they followed the rules that were laid
out by the State Board of Elections. There was not
really anything that they could have done differently. So I
do want to punish. I want to punish the right
person for this mistake. And I think the group that
punishes the State Board of Elections and not the individual voters.
Speaker 2: Right and we and I said this yesterday, I completely
agree that the Board of Elections has royally messed up,
and they've been doing so for a long time. And
the sixty thousand voters, these are people that don't have
social security last four digits of the social security number
attached to their registration profile, or they don't have a
driver's license attached to that profile, and they were supposed
to be given you a personal identification number, and I
guess some of them didn't even get that. It's all
just a mess. And the Board of Elections has known
this for twenty years. They and they were alerted to
this deficiency before the election and still couldn't couldn't adapt.
And at some point I start wondering, is this willful
or incompetence? And the longer it goes on, I got
to believe it's more intentional.
Speaker 3: It may be, or maybe they just don't care. I'm
not entirely sure what's happening there. Yeah, for most of
the voters here, it was because the form, the registration
form was incorrect. It basically said that it was optional
to put in your social Security number or driver's license number,
when it wasn't optional. I mean, that's kind of egregious
and inexcusable. I don't know why that would happen. I mean,
the form is updated now, but I'm not sure what's
going on. I don't know how much time you've spent
getting into the State Board of Elections data. But it's
a complete mess. I don't know if they just haven't
invested in it or haven't made it a priority. I
will point out that the State Board of Elections has
been run by Democrats almost exclusively over those last twenty years.
Speaker 2: Uh yeah, and yeah, so these the problems. I've full disclosure.
I have not spent my free time delving into the
data the Voard of Elections. I leave it for people
like you to do that because you know what you're
looking for. But I know, I mean, you know, the
guy Jay Delancey from the Voter Integrity Project and his
group and others like his, they have been hammering the
Board of Elections for you know, two decades on their
list maintenance procedures. And yeah, again, like I'm I fail
to understand why this is so often overlooked when it
is so vital to inspiring confidence in the system and
it all, and then it leaves them exposed to the
attack that they do this stuff on purpose in order
to allow fraud to occur. And I have no response
to that argument because otherwise, like, why would you do this?
Speaker 1: It doesn't make any sense.
Speaker 3: Yeah, now, I completely agree, and it doesn't seem I mean,
I haven't seen any evidence that fraud was involved in this.
I tend to, you know, anything related to government. I
tend to believe the explanation is incompetence rather than malevolent,
and so I haven't seen anything here that leads me
to believe otherwise. However, you know, maybe we need to
get State Auditor Dave Bollock on the case and figure
out what's going on here.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, No, it's a fair point. And the other
one was the never present voters, which in reading through
the dissent that came down on Friday from the Democrat judge,
he actually raises I think completely valid points, which is
that if you're a kid and you're overseas with your parents,
you grow up in a foreign country. But they were
last domicile in North Carolina. That transfers to you until
you choose a new domicile and like. But that was
never explained at the outset, and so I find it
difficult to toss those votes if that's who we're talking about.
And then the thing with the military voters and the
overseas voters not providing ID on the absentee ballots I
thought he made a compelling argument that their form is
covered under a different statute which was specifically designed to
harmonize our state absentee ballots laws with all of the
other states, so it's uniform. So this way, everybody overseas
is basically following one set of standards, so it's easier
to convey that standard to them. So all of that
makes sense from a legal.
Speaker 3: Perspective, right, And I think the military voters, especially, I
have a hard time throwing out ballots of military members,
you know, our men and women in uniform overseas. And
I really think that one is more clear cut. I
think the federal courts will step in and allow those
votes to go forward. The never residence is more questionable
to me, And I'm not a lawyer, and I have
I'm not fully up the speed with North Carolina's voting laws.
I've looked at them, but I'm not an expert in them.
You know, maybe we need to clarify what the law
is there and clean up I can honestly see arguments
either way on whether those folks you know should be
able to vote in North Carolina elections or not.
Speaker 2: I don't believe nuance is permitted any longer in America, Andrew, So,
now I'm with you. I think there needs Yeah, I
think there needs to be some you know, to get
specific with the types of classifications we're talking about for
these overseas non are never residents rather because it does
present an opportunity for abuse in my mind as well,
and that that would be on the legislature. Speaking of
no nuance, let's talk a little bit about tariffs, because
all right, so you said Democrats have slammed the plan
Trump has rolled out as a tax hike on American consumers,
and a lot of Republicans seem uneasy about it too.
But you right that in rural North Carolina, the news
lands differently. Okay, so, uh, why does it land differently
and where?
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean most of your listeners
are probably familiar with this, but North Carolina for decades
and decades was a big manufacturing state. We were big
in textiles, big in furniture. There's a lot of small
rural communities around the state, both east, central, you know,
all around the state. To be honest, you know who
used to be who know where. Most of the folks
who lived there were either employed by these you know,
manufacturing facilities or knew someone who was, and you know,
once NAFTA was passed, you know, a couple of decades ago,
those jobs all went away, and it happened slowly and
then all at once, and a lot of these communities
are now almost hollowed out, and you know, folks still
live there who used to work at the factories, you know,
or their parents worked at the factories, and there's you know,
a certain nostalgia for those days, you know, where you
could you know, be a person without a college degree
and have a solid middle class job at the factory
and raise a family and have a good life. And
a lot of people when they hear President Trump's messaging
around this, they think, you know, they hear you know,
Trump saying, I'm on your side. We're going to bring
back those days where you could make a good, honest living,
you know, throughout the state.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think you said the right word there, nostalgia,
because I think a lot of people think back and
through a through a filter of only good times and
only great conditions. You know, if you've ever done repetitive,
tedious work for eight nine hours straight, it's repetitive and tedious,
and so some of these jobs are not necessarily great
jobs to have.
Speaker 1: Yes, they can give you a paycheck, but that's it.
That's all.
Speaker 2: That's all it's going to be, and that's all it
ever will be, right because it's just that you're there's
no room for advancement in that in that profession. Now
that being said, I was driving through a couple of
small towns on the way down outside of Union County
the other day, and I'm amazed at some of the
downtowns that have now just been revitalized. I was, I
remember twenty five years ago that was a pipe dream,
and now it just seems like that's the case, you know,
all of in many small towns, I should say. So
there is hope.
Speaker 3: There certainly is hope, I mean, And what's one of
the things I'm really interested in digging more into. I
think it's pretty clear that, you know, no matter how
the tariffs go, you know, it's not going to be
exactly like it was before. I mean, manufacturing has changed dramatically.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 3: Now there's a lot fewer people that you need to run,
you know, a factory because of technology. And you're right,
I mean, there's there's a whole generation of people who
grew up telling their children, you know, go to college
so you don't have to work in a factory for
thirty years like I did. So, I mean there's certainly
some some rose tinted glasses there. However, I do think
that there needs to be a concerted strategy for how
do we bring you know, well, paying jobs to all
corners of the state.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, I agree. I appreciate the time as always.
Andrew Dunne. He is the publisher of long Leave Politics.
You can also read this piece that he wrote on
the tariffs at the Charlotte Observe. He's a contributing columnist
over there. Andrew, thanks so much, man, have a great week.
Speaker 3: Thank you, all right, take care.
Speaker 2: All right, if you're listening to this show, you know
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Andrew Dunn's piece over at the Charlotte Observer. He quotes
the speaker of the North Carolina House, Destin Hall, talking
about the tariff messaging from Donald Trump, and he says
it resonates in a visceral way. They're more receptive. Talking
about rural residents, he says they are more receptive than
ever to the message that the United States is a country,
not an economic zone. And then Dunn points out that
free trade used to be a bipartisan ideal in North Carolina.
No matter if it was Governor Jim Hunt, a Democrat,
or Governor Jim Holshauser, a Republican, both men saw it
as the pathway to growth. They championed open markets, they
recruited foreign investment, they leaned into globalization, and in many
ways they were right. The state's economy modernized. New jobs came,
but not everywhere. The jobs that replaced them came with
college degrees and urban addresses. Textile and furniture towns got
left behind, he says. Now, Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson tried
to bring this issue to the forefront. Remember he worked
in a furniture factory. He got let go. He talked
about NAFTA, but that message was quickly drowned out.
Speaker 1: I don't even remember what was it that never mind,
he said.
Speaker 2: Destin Hall, the Speaker of the House, said, I am
as most conservatives are a free market capitalist, but world
trade is not a free market. When you talk about
free trade, basically, to them, it means we gave all
our jobs to China and in exchange we got cheaper
TVs at Walmart, but we lost our jobs and have
less money.
Speaker 1: Now I do have some statistics on.
Speaker 2: The middle class and GDP and household wealth, because I
think I think a lot of people are operating under
feelings and not data. Let me go over to the
phones first. Let me get to Mary. Hello, Mary, welcome
to the show.
Speaker 4: Oh hey, Pete, thanks for having me on. You know,
one of the things I like to bring up about
the of bringing manufacturing back to the United States is
that not only to revive these lost towns, these forgotten towns,
but to make us self reliant. I mean, during COVID,
you couldn't get a bike for like two years because
they wouldn't let them come in. And that could be
so manipulative. Like well, I can't believe when I'm at
the grocery store and like a tomatoes from Holland, and
I mean, you gotta be kidding. It has to be
expensive to bring a tomato here from Holland.
Speaker 2: Well but why but Mary, But Mary? All right, let's
take the tomato example. What does it tell you then,
if you are seeing a tomato from Holland, what is
that What is the market signaling to you?
Speaker 4: I guess that it's cheaper to buy a tomato from
there than here, that our farmers are too expensive?
Speaker 2: Is that it?
Speaker 1: I don't we don't have enough farm right.
Speaker 2: The fact that the fact that the tomato went halfway
around the world in order to land on your produce
shelf means that it was cheaper for that good to
make that journey than it was for it to make
it from somewhere else for that price, whatever the price was.
And I don't know if you actually saw, like, what
did you actually see it was from Holland? Oh okay,
I didn't realize they grew a lot of tomatoes. But yeah,
So even with the illegal labor right that that America
has been utilizing that we keep hearing the Democrats talking about, oh,
you know, your crops, your produce is going to be
way more expensive now if we, you know, kick out
illegal immigrants and all of that. Even that wasn't apparently
enough to beat the pricing from from Holland.
Speaker 4: Well, but that's because of tariffs too. See, here's the
lie that I think most Americans have.
Speaker 1: What was the what's the tariff on the Holland? Hang on,
what's the tariff on the on a Dutch?
Speaker 4: But here's what I just learned about China versus America. So,
like I was always under the impression that like just
it's just cheaper to get everything elsewhere because our our
lifestyle is so expensive that we pay our workers so
much higher in a wage that we can't afford anything
from America anymore. But that's not really true when you
realize we're paying like like like some I don't know,
like they have slave labor in China, So that's not
right either.
Speaker 2: I mean I don't Yeah, correct, So there's a there's right,
so right, So there we cannot compete with if we're
if China is making a TV and we are making
a TV, we are paying workers way more than the
Chinese slave labor, right, So we can't compete on that
price point. So I would argue that's not actually fair
or free trade because there's no way to compete with
human rights abuses in order to get that product to
the market, right.
Speaker 4: Right, So like, but I mean, here's the thing, what
if we had if we.
Speaker 2: Made it more?
Speaker 4: I mean, is it really impossible to grow food in
America as cheap as Holland like, isn't there a way
to solve that problem?
Speaker 1: There might well, yeah, there very well might be.
Speaker 2: I think it's going to be crop specific Like I
just saw a write up this morning about rubber for tires,
and we rubber trees apparently don't grow in America, and
so I mean, I guess maybe we could set up
greenhouses to start growing all the rubber necessary to supply
all of the tire manufacturers so they can make tires,
because like you need those, you need that product, you
need that raw material. But most of the rubber comes
from overseas, so we're importing all that. Well, when you
you know, when you tax those things to come in,
then it drives up the price or takes it out
of the market, and now they can't afford the tires.
And you're not going to get a car if it
doesn't have tires. So like that's going to be a problem.
So not all crops grow well. I think the other
one we were talking about last week was bananas. You know,
bananas don't necessarily grow very well in our climate.
Speaker 1: Coffee, I think is another one.
Speaker 2: So like some of these products really only grow well
in certain climates and grow well enough where you could
go at scale for a low price.
Speaker 1: Right, that's their advantage too.
Speaker 4: And I saw a whole thing about South America and
the avocados are really making towns in South America have
no water because avocados require more water. They're making so
many crops for avocados because it's in demand that these
poor people now have no water because it wouldn't be
normal to grow that many avocados there because of the
economic demand elsewhere, the locals are literally like without water
for us to have our avocados. I think we could
grow avocados.
Speaker 1: Well, we could, it's just at what costs. That's the
other side of the equation.
Speaker 2: As Thomas Soul famously says, right, there are no solutions,
there were only trade offs. Mary, I appreciate the call.
I got to go to news. If you think avocado's
use a lot of water, check out almonds. Good grief, Mary,
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talk with Scott. Hello, Scott, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 5: Hello, Hey, I have a question regarding the Griffin Riggs election.
There were over five and a half million votes in
North Carolina in that election, and the general vote went
fifty point two for Griffin and forty nine point eight
for Rigs, but when the provisional votes were counted, they
went sixty for Riggs and forty for Griffin. And that
doesn't sound statistically legitimate.
Speaker 2: Well, he was up by like ten thousand votes on
election day and then after the Canvas the total flipped, Yeah,
by like ten thousand, eight hundred votes.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so that would have been thirty five thousand for
in the provisional votes for Riggs and twenty five thousand
for griffmin right, so overcome that ten thousand dollars, I
mean ten thousand vote deficits.
Speaker 1: So your question is about the provisional ballots.
Speaker 5: Yeah, why was that sample so lopsided?
Speaker 2: So think about well, think about who is casting provisional ballots, right.
A provisional ballot gets cast if you show up at say,
your your precinct and you try to vote and they're like, oh,
you're not on the voter rolls or you're in the
wrong precinct, right, And so maybe there is something to
be said about the demographic of the provisional voters that
end up voting in the wrong place that they These
are people that may be participating in the.
Speaker 1: Souls to the polls types of efforts.
Speaker 2: Right, people are are bussing voters around, taking them to
their polling stations, and then they get it wrong. A
lot of times they'll bring them to one place and
they weren't supposed to be there. That kind of thing
that's possible. You also have a lot of uh, these
overseas voters, right, they were part of the uh. They
were part of the mix. The military ballots were part
of the mix. But the provisionals that get counted afterwards,
there was some you know, deficiency, and that's why they
had to get scooped up with the provisional versus a
ballot at the at the polling place.
Speaker 5: I don't know. The sounds well, I'm away's a case
and when a Democrat needs more votes, there's some case
of votes out there that votes about ninety or one
hundred percent. For Democrats, it's either mail in votes or
provisional votes or whatever they can find. Well, I know
there was one precinct in Georgia one percent for Biden.
So I don't know.
Speaker 2: It just seems like, oh, there's there's a precinct here
in Charlotte that comes in and it's it's a very
large box and it is almost every single election cycle
it is one hundred percent Democrat.
Speaker 1: But that's because that's all who lives there. I mean,
with all of this vote.
Speaker 2: But think about it, with all of the sorting, well,
with all of the sorting that is occurring, the self sorting, right,
we are self segregating by political ideology. We have people
that are moving into red areas because that's what politically
aligns with their ideas and vice versa, and so you
end up with more densely populated areas in in the cities,
and they then become overwhelmingly Democrat. In those boxes are
Democrat and there are very few, if any Republicans left
in those precincts, but they are still large precincts. There's
still a lot of people in there because they're it's
densely populated versus going out, you know, to the suburbs
and it's not densely populated. But that means also on
election day, you can you can get a lot of
people to move through more quickly versus getting overwhelmed with
you know, with people getting bussed in through their church
or nonprofits or whatever. And I'm not alleging any illegal
activity by you know, getting people to the polls, but
those types of operations put stress on the polling locations
on the election day itself. And if somebody's name, if
there's a problem on the books, then they have to
file the provisional the provisional ballots. And out of five
million votes that were cast, a a change of ten
thousand statistically, is that that's that? I mean, it was
a close race before, right, it was, it was already tight,
and so I mean, I guess I don't I don't
know if that's I don't know if that's as clear
cut evidence of something fishy going on, just because the
provisionals came in more lopsided for Democrats, because they did
come in for Republicans too, like you said, So I
don't know if that proves any kind of fraud.
Speaker 5: It doesn't improve it, but it certainly to me suggested.
Speaker 2: Well, and this is why it's important to have systems
that people have confidence in because when and this is
one of the reasons why, you know, when the vote
counts drag on for weeks and weeks after election day,
everybody becomes suspicious with any result that comes out of that,
and you know that's that's part of managing the system,
is that you've got perception of wrongdoing that's occurring, and
you want to try to address that as well, and
you do that by constructing a system that people can
have confidence in. And I don't think we have that
right now. I don't think we have a system that
people have confidence in. I think you're an example of
what happens when we don't. So Scott, I appreciate the call. Yeah,
I don't know if I can't say, yes, there was
fraud because I can't look at I can't look at
numbers of provisional ballots and say aha, because the numbers
went this one direction, therefore it was fraud. I can't
say that now if I can find actual Like one
of the things that I find to be suspicious about
the provisionals is the way they get counted. And we
know that in the past they have counted double votes
for people like because they go in on the initial
tally and if it's a provisional cast ballot, then in
the past I don't know if they have corrected it.
It's been a while since I looked into it, but
this was one of the problems was that if somebody
went and voted, and then they go to another precinct
try to vote there, and they're like, oh, you're not
supposed to vote here, cast a provisional and then that
vote gets thrown into the hopper, but they're supposed to
go back through and pull out any kind of double voting,
that kind of thing. Yeah, it is a system that
can be improved upon, and the Board of Elections has
proven themselves, in my opinion, to be unable or unwilling
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mentioned earlier the rubber trees needed for tire manufacturing and
bananas like these are crops that America doesn't grow, and
I don't even know if we can grow them except
in like maybe high tech grainhouses and all of that stuff.
I mean, you think about like all of the crops,
the different kinds of crops that you would need to grow,
you know, in all of the different greenhouses because they
don't grow naturally in our climate. But here's a solution, potentially,
Timotao points out, rubber bananas sounds like fifty second and
fifty third beautiful states that we can end.
Speaker 1: That's that's this.
Speaker 2: Takeover, just colonize the the rubber capital in the banana
producing countries.
Speaker 1: Why not does Greenland grow rubber trees? I don't think so.
Speaker 2: So back to Andrew Dunn's piece at the Charlotte Observer
talking about the tariffs and specifically North Carolina. He talked
with the Speaker of the House, Destin Hall, and Hall said,
you know, you talk about free trade basically to a
lot of rural voters, it meant we give away all
our jobs to China in exchange for cheaper TVs, but
we lost all of the jobs. Andrew Dunn goes on
to say that we are one of the fastest growing
states in America, and most of it has been concentrated
in our metro counties, which are booming. Half of the
state's counties, though, have lost population over the last decade.
All of those are rural. That creates more than just
an economic gap. It's deepened the political one too. Cities
get bluer, small towns are getting redder, and by the way,
the small towns are getting bigger too. I drove through
so we a went to see a went to watch
a baseball game. My nephew was playing a baseball game
down in Union County, and so we you know, they
routed us through Waxaw.
Speaker 1: I hadn't been in downtown in a while. It's been
a long time.
Speaker 2: And holy moly, downtown Belmont, Downtown rock Hill. Last time
I was down there last year, I want to say,
just explosion of growth. I remember I worked at a
at a bar slash restaurant in downtown rock Hill. It
was called for what It's Worth and it sold after
I was gone, but I worked there as a cook
for several years. And downtown rock Hill had nothing. It
had the police department, it had a bank building, it
had nothing, and they tried to get everybody to come
down with the downtown you know, Live after five or
whatever they called it, to try to get people to
come downtown. I remember talking to guy by the name
of Clay Andrews, I believe, and he was the head
of the rock Hill Economic Development Corporation and I would
interview him regularly and he was like, the thing I
want to do if I do nothing else in this job,
is to get residential into downtown rock Hill. And you
drive through there now and you've got apartment buildings going
up all over the place.
Speaker 1: But that's bad too. I think.
Speaker 2: Even though the retail follows the rooftops, right, so you
get more people there, then you're going to have more
retail services for those people.
Speaker 1: That's how that works, right.
Speaker 2: So I guess I am unclear as to as to
how we like, What is it that like? What is
it that we're trying to do? What's the vision? I
understand everybody's got a different answer to this. Is the
vision to reopen a manufacturing plant, stick a bunch of
people on like sewing machines for eight to nine hours.
Speaker 1: A day, just sewing stuff. Is that the idea?
Speaker 2: That's what we and we want that for the for
small towns. We want the whole town to be employed
by the one factory. Again, we want that model because
when that fact is the thing. And look, I understand
this from a personal perspective. It's sort of like in
the advertising world, you get either lots of little accounts
or you get the big, the big account and if
you live by only going after the big accounts, then
you end up when that account says, hey we're pulling
our advertising now. You have no accounts, you have lots
of little ones. You got to you know, you got
to go out and get more of them. But if
one of them says we're not going to advertise anymore,
then you have others still and you still have revenue.
It's like that's the that's the all in, all your
eggs in one basket. Is that the model we're trying
to go back to where it's a one factory per
rural town and everybody works at that factory, and then
you don't have to get a high school degree. You
could just graduate high school, go to work in the mill,
and never get out. Is that that's the benefit, Because
like my parents did not go to college. They wanted
all of their kids to go to college because they
wanted us to have a better future than they had
and their parents wanted them to have a better future. Right,
That's always been sort of the natural progression, right, you
want your kids to have a better life. And so
I'm kind of like I'm noticing a bit of a
shift where we have gone from sort of the well
first was the helicopter parents, and then it became the
bulldozer parents, you know, where they would just clean out
every obstacle in front of their kids so they don't
have to worry about anything. And then, of course the
kids don't develop resiliency because they've they've never encountered obstacles
because mom and dad always push them out of the
way for him being bulldoze er parents. So are we
shift we're moving away from that model, maybe to one
where it's like, no, sorry, junior, you got to go
to work at the mill. You're going to go to
work in the factory. Is that the thing to aspire too?
Now that is a different that's a different question also
than whether or not we should have industries that are
vital to our national security that remain protected because they
are vital to our national security. I mentioned this example
the other day after Trump announced the tariffs. You know, like,
for example, I would not feel comfortable having all of
our fighter jets and ammunition manufactured by the Chinese. That
doesn't seem smart, right, It doesn't seem smart. And yeah,
to the point where we are reliant on countries that
hate us, that doesn't seem smart either. That was my argument,
by the way, for us having our own energy independence
from the Middle East. I don't want to buy oil
from those people. They don't like us. If they turn
off the taps we're in some serious trouble, right, I mean,
how are we going to lubricate the windmills here without
the oil? Same thing goes for China more so they
And I was watching an interview Douglas Murray did He's
got a new book and he was on Piers Morgan.
But he made a point. He said, America, there's this
funny thing about Americans in that they want to be
the global superpower, but they don't want to engage in
the rest of the world. And I thought that, I
thought that was accurate. And I guess we need to
kind of figure out what our national identity should be.
Is it fortress America, close ourselves off to the rest
of the world, or is it you know where the powerhouse,
where the superpower, you know where the top dog? Which
is all right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank
you so much for listening. I could not do the
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much for listening and don't break anything while I'm gone.