Dem
47
GOP
53
As we noted yesterday, the House Republican Conference has two Graham Platner-style headaches who are going to make it hard to hammer on the Democrats for supporting Platner, and who could put two semi-swingy R+5 districts at risk.
One of those two headaches is Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-NC), who was very creepy with his young, female staffers. He did not touch anyone, nor did he try to use his powers to coerce anyone, but his behavior was clear-cut sexual harassment, to the point that the House Ethics Committee recommended he be censured. That vote will likely still happen, and will make the censure official. What won't happen, however, is another term for Edwards. He ended his reelection bid yesterday.
This means that the NC-11 Congressional District Republican Executive Committee, participating in an activity that seems to be happening a lot these days, is going to have to schedule a meeting post-haste, and come up with a replacement candidate. There does not appear to be any informed speculation as to who the replacement might be. The person who represented the district before Edwards was elected was Madison Cawthorn; GOP officials are rather unlikely to choose him. Maybe they can dig up and run the corpse of Jesse Helms.
The Democrat in the race is farmer Jamie Ager. Well, OK, he calls himself a farmer, but he's really more like an agribusinessman. It's kind of like how Jimmy Carter, an Annapolis-educated Naval officer who owned and operated a massive agricultural enterprise, was underselling things when he called himself a peanut farmer. Anyhow, Ager is quite charismatic, and is sort of the non-sordid version of Graham Platner. He was also leaving Edwards in the dust, fundraising-wise. Given that the GOP is now going to have to scramble for a candidate, you can certainly see Ager winning this thing. And if he does, then he'll be on the NRCC's "target list" for every election cycle for the rest of his career.
The other headache, meanwhile, is Rep. Max Miller (R-OH). There have also been developments on that front. Unlike Edwards, Miller is refusing (thus far) to read the writing on the wall. So, in a very Nixonian move, he demanded yesterday that the House Ethics Committee investigate him. There is no chance they can do that before the election, so Miller is clearly depending on voters adopting the logic of "a guilty person would not demand an investigation into themselves."
Meanwhile, the Representative managed to dig his hole just a little deeper. Over the weekend, he posted a tranche of court documents to the Internet; the ostensible purpose was to support his version of events in terms of his dispute with/divorce from Emily Moreno. However, the documents included the name of their 3-year-old daughter, un-redacted, as well as a picture where that daughter was sans clothing. Miller's attorney took responsibility for the error, but does that really help much? It makes Miller look careless, and also like someone willing to sell out his daughter to save his career.
Miller's opponent in November, assuming he remains in the race, is union ironworker Brian Poindexter (D), who has many pictures of himself in a hard hat on his website and on social media. He's running a lefty-populist campaign. In fact, if we gave you a copy of his platform, and one of Sherrod Brown's (D) platform, and asked you to guess which was which, you'd probably have a hard time deciding. If Brown wins in November, and if he has some coattails, it's plausible he could bring Poindexter along for the ride. Especially if the badly wounded Miller stays on the ballot. (Z)