North Carolina Democrats find electoral success further down the ballot and hope to build on it

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North Carolina Democrats find electoral success further down the ballot and hope to build on it

2024-11-17 21:12 Last Updated At：21:20

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — Democrats fell short again in wresting away swing-state prize North Carolina from Republicans in the presidential election, but scored significant downballot victories, giving them hope as they look to the future.

Despite Donald Trump's more than 3-percentage point win over Vice President Kamala Harris in North Carolina, Democrats celebrated Election Day victories in races for governor, attorney general and the legislature in a closely divided state where conservatives have recently dominated the General Assembly and the courts.

In an election with few bright spots for Democrats nationally, the ticket-splitting tendencies of Tar Heel state voters offered some of that good news.

“I think we had quality candidates running for office against right-wing extremists, and the people of North Carolina made the right choices,” said Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, a Harris surrogate who was once considered her potential running mate, of the downballot races.

Attorney General Josh Stein, a Democrat, easily defeated Republican Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson to succeed Cooper, who was ineligible to run again because of term limits. The campaign was dominated by Stein’s fundraising prowess and by ads and social media targeting Robinson’s history of inflammatory statements on issues such as abortion and LGBTQ+ rights.

Democrats have now won eight of the past nine gubernatorial elections in North Carolina. In contrast, Republicans have won the state in 11 of the 12 past presidential elections, with Barack Obama in 2008 the lone exception.

In the race to succeed Stein as attorney general, U.S. Rep. Jeff Jackson extended a Democratic election winning streak from 1900 by defeating U.S. Rep. Dan Bishop. Democrats flipped both the lieutenant governor’s office and the state school superintendent’s job — defeating, in the latter race, a Republican who attended the Jan. 6, 2021, rally in Washington before the attack on the U.S. Capitol and who called public schools liberal “indoctrination centers.”

State Democratic Party Chair Anderson Clayton, the youngest in the country at 26, is learning to embrace the positives while coping with the headwinds Harris faced at the top of the ticket.

“Everybody keeps calling us a bright spot," she said. “And I’m like, ‘We still lost the presidential race.’”

State Republicans can hang their hats for 2024 success on Trump’s third consecutive electoral victory and the pickup of three additional congressional seats — the result of 2023 redistricting that led Democratic incumbents not to seek reelection. Those flips were key to national Republicans' efforts to maintain U.S. House control.

But in the state's lone toss-up congressional race, first-term Democratic Rep. Don Davis won narrowly. While the GOP retained a veto-proof majority in the state Senate, it will likely fall short of keeping one in the House by a single seat, giving Stein a more robust veto stamp to turn back Republican legislation.

Ticket-splitting in North Carolina has gone on for decades. Voters have long been comfortable with Democrats running state agencies but less at ease with the liberal wing of the national Democratic Party.

“People are unhappy and want to see change at the federal level. They’re not quite as comfortable with that idea of change for change’s sake at the state level,” said David McLennan, a political science professor at Meredith College in Raleigh.

State Republican leaders say their party still is doing well. They point to winning five of the 10 statewide executive branch positions, retaining General Assembly control and continuing recent dominance in statewide appellate court races. A pending state Supreme Court race, however, seems likely to go to a recount.

“There’s going to be a lot of talk about North Carolina being a purple state. You’ve all heard me say this before: North Carolina is a default Republican state," state Senate leader Phil Berger told reporters after the election.

Still, 2024 will be marked by missed GOP opportunities that some critics place at Robinson's feet.

What was billed after the March primaries as the nation's most competitive gubernatorial race never materialized; Stein won by almost 15 percentage points. Robinson's bid was overwhelmed by Stein's 4-to-1 spending advantage through mid-October and a CNN report that said Robinson posted graphic sexual and racist statements on a porn website message board more than a decade ago.

Robinson denied writing the messages and ultimately sued CNN. The case is pending. But the Republican Governors Association stopped running ads supporting him, most of his campaign staff quit and Republicans distanced themselves. That included Trump, who had endorsed Robinson before the March primaries and called him “Martin Luther King on steroids" but stopped appearing with him when Trump passed through North Carolina.

Stein's campaign was comfortable enough to send $12 million late to the state Democratic Party that helped other candidates, including General Assembly hopefuls who ran advertisements linking GOP rivals to Robinson.

“It could have been a historic race for the state of North Carolina, but it didn’t happen," state House Majority Leader John Bell said in an interview. While giving credit to Stein for his campaign, Bell added, “our gubernatorial candidate ran a very poor campaign.”

Larry Shaheen, a longtime political consultant who is now a state Republican Party fundraiser, wrote on X that without the work of party leaders “the damage to candidates due to Robinson would have been huge.”

Some conservatives stuck with Robinson and blamed Republican officials who gave up on him for some poor electoral results. Robinson himself complained during the campaign about politicians on his side of the aisle that “when it gets hot in the kitchen and you turn around and look, they’re not there anymore.”

The next major electoral test comes in 2026, when GOP U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis' seat is up for reelection. Robinson hasn’t ruled out a future bid, which could include challenging Tillis in a primary. Among Democrats, Cooper hasn’t publicly rejected a 2026 Senate bid, and outgoing U.S. Rep. Wiley Nickel, a Democrat, has said he was also considering one. Democrats haven’t won a U.S. Senate seat in North Carolina since 2008.

Still, McLennan said, Democrats gave themselves something to build on.

“Democrats have to feel pretty good," he said. “But they've still got a lot of work to do for 2026 and 2028.”

Clayton, the Democratic chair, said the work starts now. That means recruiting candidates, starting with next year's municipal races, making sure incumbents have the help they need, and checking in with people across the state to lay the groundwork for future elections.

“We got to get back to basics," she said.

Hezbollah's spokesman killed in rare Israeli strike on central Beirut, official says

2024-11-17 21:19 Last Updated At：21:20

BEIRUT (AP) — A rare Israeli airstrike on central Beirut killed Hezbollah's chief spokesman on Sunday, an official with the militant group said. Earlier, Israeli strikes killed at least 12 people in the Gaza Strip, officials said, where Israel has been at war with the Palestinian Hamas for over a year.

The latest in a series of targeted killings of senior Hezbollah officials came as Lebanese officials were considering a United States-led cease-fire proposal. Israel also bombed several buildings in Beirut's southern suburbs, where Hezbollah has long been headquartered, after warning people to evacuate.

Mohammed Afif, the head of media relations for Hezbollah, was killed in a strike on the Arab socialist Baath party's office in central Beirut, according to a Hezbollah official who was not authorized to brief reporters and so spoke on condition of anonymity.

Afif had remained especially visible after the eruption of all-out war between Israel and Hezbollah in September and the killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who was also targeted by an Israeli airstrike. Last month, Afif had hastily wrapped up a press conference in Beirut ahead of Israeli strikes.

An Associated Press photographer at the scene of Sunday's strike saw four lifeless bodies and four wounded people, but there was no official word on the toll. People could be seen fleeing the neighborhood. There was no comment from the Israeli military.

“I was asleep and awoke from the sound of the strike, and people screaming, and cars and gunfire," said Suheil Halabi, who witnessed the strike. "I was startled, honestly. This is the first time I experience it so close.”

The last Israeli strike in central Beirut was on Oct. 10, when 22 people were killed in strikes on two locations.

Hezbollah began firing rockets, missiles and drones into Israel the day after Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack ignited the war in Gaza. Israel launched retaliatory airstrikes in Lebanon and the conflict steadily escalated, erupting into all-out war in September. Israeli forces invaded Lebanon on Oct. 1.

Hezbollah has continued to fire dozens of projectiles into Israel each day and has expanded their range to the central part of the country. A rocket barrage on the northern city of Haifa on Saturday damaged a synagogue and wounded two civilians.

More than 3,400 people have been killed in Lebanon, according to the country’s Health Ministry, and over 1.2 million driven from their homes. It is not known how many of the dead are Hezbollah fighters.

On the Israeli side, Hezbollah’s aerial attacks have killed at least 76 people, including 31 soldiers, and caused some 60,000 people to flee from communities in the north.

Israeli strikes killed six people in Nuseirat and another four in Bureij, two built-up refugee camps in central Gaza dating back to the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation.

Another two people were killed in a strike on Gaza’s main north-south highway, according to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in the central city of Deir al-Balah, which received all 12 bodies.

The war between Israel and Hamas began after Palestinian militants stormed into Israel on Oct. 7. last year, killing about 1,200 people — mostly civilians — and abducting around 250 others. Around 100 hostages are still inside Gaza, about a third of them believed to be dead.

The Health Ministry in Gaza says around 43,800 Palestinians have been killed in the war. The ministry does not distinguish between civilians and combatants but has said women and children make up more than half the fatalities.

Around 90% of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million Palestinians have been displaced, and large areas of the territory have been flattened by Israeli bombardment and ground operations.

Israeli police meanwhile arrested three suspects after flares were fired at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s private residence in the coastal city of Caesarea.

Netanyahu and his family were not at the residence when two flares were fired at it overnight, and there were no injuries, authorities said. A drone launched by Hezbollah struck the residence last month, also when Netanyahu and his family were away.

The police did not provide details about the suspects behind the flares, but officials pointed to domestic political critics of Netanyahu. Israel’s largely ceremonial president, Isaac Herzog, condemned the incident and warned against “an escalation of the violence in the public sphere.”

Netanyahu has faced months of mass protests. Critics blaming him for the security and intelligence failures that allowed the Oct. 7 attack to happen and for not reaching a deal with Hamas to release scores of hostages still held inside Gaza. Israelis rallied again in the city of Tel Aviv on Saturday night to demand a cease-fire deal to return them.

Israeli Justice Minister Yariv Levin seized on the flare attack on Netanyahu's home to call for a revival of his plans to overhaul the Israeli judiciary, which had sparked months of mass protests before the war.

“The time has come to provide full support for the restoration of the justice system and the law enforcement systems, and to put an end to anarchy, rampage, refusal, and attempts to harm the prime minister,” he said in a statement.

Supporters said the judiciary changes aim to strengthen democracy by circumscribing the authority of unelected judges and turning over more powers to elected officials. Opponents see the overhaul as a power grab by Netanyahu, who is on trial on corruption charges and for an assault on a key watchdog.

Many Israelis believe the fierce internal divisions caused by the attempted overhaul had weakened the country and its military ahead of the Hamas assault.

Opposition Leader Yair Lapid said in a post on X that he “strongly condemns” the firing of flares at Netanyahu’s home while blasting Levin’s proposal.

“Levin should go home with rest of this irresponsible government,” Lapid wrote. “We will not let him turn Israel into an undemocratic state.”

Melzer reported from Tel Aviv, Israel. Associated Press reporters Wafaa Shurafa in Deir al-Balah, Gaza Strip, and Kareem Chehayeb in Beirut contributed.

Find more of AP’s war coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/israel-hamas-war