Senator Richard Burr didn't bother gracing North Carolina with his presence on election night, instead appearing at a fundraising dinner in Washington to watch the results.
Burr sent out a statement thanking his supporters for his primary win and warning them that he needed their help because "special interests have already committed to pouring millions of dollars into our state to influence voters and defeat me."
Burr didn't mention that he was dining with special interests in Washington when the message went out or that he has $5 million in the bank, much of it raised by the out of state interests he is complaining about.
Burr's opponent in the fall will be Secretary of State Elaine Marshall or former state senator Cal Cunningham. The two will meet in a runoff next month after Marshall defeated Cunningham by ten points but fell short of the 40 percent needed to win the nomination.
There were no real surprises in the Congressional primaries, with all the incumbents winning including Democrat Larry Kissell from the 8th District who has been under fire for voting against health care reform.
Kissell will face either Tim D'Annunzio or Harold Johnson in November. The two Republicans will battle for the nomination in a runoff in a race that must be causing some heartburn at state GOP headquarters.
D'Annunzio, who led Johnson Tuesday night 37-33 percent, scared off former GOP Chair Jack Hawke with the bizarre rants on his "Christ's War" blog, and proposes what he calls a four year plan for the revitalization of the US Federal Government.
It includes abolishing the Departments of Education, Health and Human Services, Agriculture, Energy, Labor, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Transportation, Treasury, and Home Land Security. Johnson is a former sportscaster in Charlotte. D'Annunzio says that makes him part of the liberal news media.
You can only imagine how thrilled Richard Burr will be to share a stage with Mr. D'Annunzio.
There were several encouraging signs for progressives in legislative races when the dust cleared. Four sitting Democratic members of the state House lost, but it doesn't appear to be anti-incumbent fever that defeated them.
Rep. Bruce Goforth from Asheville lost to Patsy Keever, who campaigned as the more progressive candidate from the start with calls for more aggressive measures to protect the environment.
Goforth openly criticized Keever for being too liberal, but the voters saw things differently and it wasn't even that close.
In a much tighter race, Democrat Ronnie Sutton from Robeson County was defeated in his bid for a tenth term in the House by Charles Graham.
Sutton is one of the more conservative Democrats in the General Assembly, a strong supporter of the death penalty and an outspoken opponent of legislation that would ban corporal punishment in schools.
Representative Nick Mackey from Charlotte was handily defeated by Rodney Moore, which probably brought a sigh of relief to many Democratic leaders in Raleigh. Mackey has been plagued by questions about his conduct and the State Bar announced the day before the election that it was suspending Mackey's law license for three years for "acts of dishonesty."
The fourth Democratic incumbent to lose was Rep. Earl Jones from Greensboro, who has spent much of the year crusading to legalize video poker in North Carolina. Jones lost to political consultant Marcus Brandon, who ran a progressive campaign that included a call for investments in light rail in the Triad.
One Republican legislative incumbent lost in the primary, Rep. Pearl Burris-Floyd from Gaston County who was defeated by Kelly Hastings. Burris-Floyd is the lone African-American Republican in the General Assembly.
For all the bluster about tea parties, the rabid anti-taxers didn't fare too well either. Voters in conservative Onslow County approved an increase in the local sales tax and the local Republican primary for the legislature was won by Phil Shepard who supported the increase.
That came despite the usual overheated rhetoric from Americans for the Prosperous against the tax and mailings from the group reminding voters that Shepard supported it.
Quite a rebuke for AFP and not very tea partyish of the folks in Onslow County. Let's hope it signals the display of reasonableness from the voters that continues into the fall.
