I don't know if this is dirty politics or what. I'm quite certain that at least in part it is but this guy has only to run on this one thing and I believe that he has a really good chance of being elected.
His name is Dan Forest and he is currently in a position in North Carolina politics that most people don't pay any attention to: He is the Lieutenant Governor for the state.
He is currently running on a campaign to oust our current governor Roy Cooper, who has become incredibly unpopular in the past year for reasons that at least in part, are beyond his control. He has overseen one of the most authoritarian lockdowns in the United States since the virus became the only thing anyone ever talked about and his measures didn't really keep our state any safer than other states, as we have seen all across the country and also the world.
Dan Forest has said if he is elected he is going to change all that: The only campaign promise that I am even aware of is that this guy has said that he is going to reopen the state, reopen the schools, and get rid of the mask mandate that oh so many of us are tired of and don't believe it actually accomplishes anything anyway.
In my part of the state, we never really followed these rules anyway because a town hall meeting was held and at said meeting our sheriff said that he would follow the desires of the community, not the decree passed down by the state even if it meant the Governor removing him from office (which is something the Governor has the power to do.)
School recently started back up for kids in NC and almost all of it is the wildly unpopular with both kids and parents: At home distance learning. The kids hate it, the parents hate it, the population hates it and the current governor is in a tough situation because he went all in on it... He can't just back off now.
Dan Forest immediately went from an "non-issue" to top-contender after this announcement. All the polls still show Cooper in the lead but here is the thing: Every single one of these polls were either taken by liberal media such as CNN or NY Times, or they were done at various universities where a large portion of the student population is liberal and also aren't even allowed to vote in our state elections.
I truly believe that Dan Forest is going to win this thing in November, just like I believe all the polls about Biden leading Trump is also false just like it was when we heard the exact same statistics with Hillary in 2016.
For those of you that don't know, North Carolina is one of those "swing-states" you hear so much about. We sometimes vote Democrat, we sometimes vote Republican. I really don't think that we are going to see a lot of Democrat leaning things happening in this state in 2020 because whether it is actually true or not, a great many people see the Democrats and their liberal supporters as the reason why things are so messed up right now.
I do realize that I live in a conservative bubble based on my community but I really think there is more at play here than just someone's age old belief systems and this is especially true with the way that Roy Cooper has handled the pandemic. His handling of it is very unpopular and while that might not necessarily be his fault seeing as how something like this has never been faced by our state or any of the other ones ever before - the blame ends up falling on someone and right now that someone in North Carolina is Roy Cooper, and Dan Forest might be exactly what we end up with as a result.
In a very not-at-all-surprising turn of events, Trump endorsed Forest for governor and Kamala Harris endorsed Cooper. Yeee-haw!
I'll be voting for Forest, and so will essentially everyone else I know who lives here.