EDITORIAL: Before the election, wait and see

Are there any undecided voters left in regards to the Senate race in North Carolina? The choices are as stark as they come: a highly accomplished Black woman against a white male who voted to overturn the 2020 election. There is a lot more to it than that, of course, but it’s hard to imagine anyone who knows anything to be weighing this decision at this late date. So everyone knows who they are going to vote for, but no one knows what is going to happen.

You cannot gerrymander an entire state, you see.

On top of that, for just the second time in more than 10 years and after many, many lawsuits, NC voters will be voting in fairly drawn districts — fair enough, anyway, that even House Whip Jon Hardister, who is a part of Republican leadership in Raleigh, finds himself in a district that leans, ever so slightly, blue.

Fortunately for him, his opponent, Sherrie Young, caught a gun charge last month. But these days, there’s no telling how that might play to the GOP base, so Hardister must keep campaigning, even though his recently-arrested competitor has not been campaigning, has not yet made a campaign website and is not responding to interview requests from reporters.

Because you never know.

We don’t know who will win the down-ballot races, just as we don’t know who will win the Senate race, which means we don’t know what the balance of power will be in Washington, DC. So many questions, so few ways to answer them before Election Day.

Compounding the normal pre-election soul-searching is the seismic development in March — when independent voters became the largest political party in the state. Plenty of them are extremists from both sides, unaffiliated because the parties don’t go far enough in their ideologies. Most, we suspect, are fed-up moderates. But don’t quote us on that, because we’re not really sure.

Even the US Supreme Court has put NC’s swirling, enigmatic electorate on hold. Though they have agreed to hear Moore v. Harper — which if overturned would give all state legislatures, and not just NC’s, the power to overturn elections — the case has been pushed off the October and November dockets for the Supremes.

And people are not too sure about those folks either.