Wayne Republican Party's Wade Latham: 'Midterm is important this year -- very, very important'
By Steve Herring
Published in News on February 4, 2018 3:05 AM
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Wade Latham
Wayne County Republican Party Chairman Wade Latham is frustrated by the uncertain future of North Carolina's state and national voting districts lines.
It is a frustration shared by many, he said.
"It is right at the edge of a very busy time, and we are still unsure," Latham said. "Come Feb. 12 (when filing opens) if somebody says they want to run for such and such office, how are they going to file for it if they don't know if the districts are correct?"
But while that uncertainty is impacting this year's midterm elections, it remains important to concentrate on local races, whose district lines are not in question, while organizing and preparing for state and national races, he said.
"We have identified some people who have said they would like to run for certain things," Latham said. "So we are going to press on ahead as if things are just going to be normal. I mean, that is all you can do.
"If things change, then you have to adapt. But in the meantime you press on with what is right now, and if what is right now changes, you adapt to the changes."
Failure to press forward will leave the party so far behind the eight ball that it would be hard to even get a campaign going, he said.
Campaigns take a long time to get moving, and now is the time to start that process, he said.
"I mean, we are eight months, nine months out (from the November election) so it is time to start ginning these things up," Latham said. "I mean, county conventions are going to start happening. We have ours in March. I don't know when the Democrats' is, but I am pretty sure it is close to the same time frame."
The county conventions are quickly followed by the district and state conventions, he said.
"So you have got to identify your delegates," he said. "You have got to identify who is running for office, and it takes time to get all of that stuff together.
"Then, once it is all together, those people are the ones who are going to have to bust their tails to make things happen. So yeah, it is a busy time."
For now the local GOP is concentrating on preparing for local elections, he said.
The state GOP has "pretty good" training programs that it has passed down that shows how to organize locally, he said.
Wayne County has 30 precincts -- not as many as in some other counties, but a lot of the ones in Wayne are in rural areas, he said.
"It is much harder to get those organized than it is a city precinct," Latham said. "Our rural precincts, the people don't live so close together. There aren't any big towns in them, and it is tough to get people ginned up and excited about upcoming elections.
"But hey, this midterm is going to be important. That is our big push through the N.C. state GOP to make sure to get out the vote and get people excited and make them realize midterm is important this year -- very, very important."
A challenge will be that people will get frustrated and just may say "forget it" because of the controversy over district lines, he said.
That is a tough thing to overcome, and that is why it is important to organize and train locally, concentrate on local elections -- like judges and board of education -- in order to keep the focus and be prepared as best we can for state and national races, Latham said.
"And that is what we are doing," Latham said. "We are not in a wait and see. We are in a hope-it-stays-the-way-it-is mode on more of the state and national stuff."
However, the battle over the maps has frustrated the rank and file, he said.
For example, Latham cites the N.C. House District 21 seat now held by Rep. Larry Bell, a Democrat from Clinton.
Bell has announced he will not seek re-election, creating an open seat -- a seat Republicans would like to gain control of, Latham said.
"So they (Democrats) are going to have to come up with a new candidate, and we are going to have to come up with a new candidate," he said.
Latham said he recently received a form from the state Board of Elections that says "as of right now" the requirement for living in a district for at least one year before a person can run for anything might be waived because of the uncertainty over the district maps.
"Well then, is it going to be waived or not waived?" he said. "It is going to be a long, long process. One side is not happy so they are going to court. One court is going to rule one way. It is going to be appealed.
"It is going to a higher court, and they are going rule a certain way, and it is going to get appealed and end up in the Supreme Court, which is exactly what happened. As it sits right now, my understanding is the Supreme Court stayed what the Fourth Circuit Court said. So the maps, as is right now, are what we are going with."
Latham said that he would hope that all North Carolinians are very upset with the fact that a panel of three judges has decided "some Stanford lawyer from California" is going to draw the state's election lines.
"I don't think any state should tell another state how to vote. Period," he said. "Again that is up in the air."
The maps are obviously going to change districts, and it is going to change who may run against whom, he said
It might end up pitting two Republicans against each other because their districts were intermixed, or it might pit two Democrats against each other, he said.
It might pit candidates against each other from both sides who wouldn't have had to run against each other to begin with, Latham said.
"The sad part that I don't like about it is that for however many decades the Democrats controlled everything in the state and drew the district maps which, hey, elections have consequences," he said. "They drew the district maps to favor themselves.
"I understand that, and nobody ever really said a word. We just accepted the fact, hey, guess what, elections have consequences. But now that our side has got the majorities and chose to redraw the maps based on the census, which is their constitutional right, to favor us then all of a sudden we are in court. That bothers me."
This is the third iteration of these maps, he said.
The first one got sued because opponents said race was not factored into the thought process for drawing the lines.
The lines were redrawn adding race into the equation.
Opponents didn't like that either so they sued again, he said.
"You can't have it both ways," Latham said.
Latham said he is bothered that the political process has stooped to the point of where of instead of being political it is now judicial.
"Will it affect things?" he said. "We will wait and see. I don't know what the new maps, if they are going to leave them as is, or if we are going to have some outsider guy draw our state maps for us.
"I hope that doesn't happen because I don't like that idea at all and most people shouldn't, I would think."