With Election Day officially behind us, we thought we’d take a moment to recap how some of the key races in North Carolina turned out (or in a few cases, how they are likely to turn out). There’s an unbelievable amount of information to sift through and process before we can draw deeper conclusions, so we’ll save that for another day. Top line takeaways are that Republicans will control the White House, US Senate, and US House, and will maintain their supermajorities in the NC House and NC Senate, though the Governor’s Mansion could be occupied by a Democrat. Please note that there are a handful of races that are still “too close to call” despite a winner being listed because the State Board of Elections must complete its certification process — counting provisional and absentee ballots, conducting canvasses and recounts, etc. — before officially declaring a winner. Without further ado, here are your federal and state election winners:
Unlike the NCAA basketball tournament, the first round of North Carolina elections—last week’s primary—didn’t result in big upsets or surprises. The council of state races held as projected and, for the most part, incumbents in the state house and senate will be moving on to their general elections or returning to Raleigh for the 2017 long session.
Today, instead of analyzing individual races across the state, we will focus on the Farm Bureau-supported Connect NC Bond results and discuss a few voting trends that continue to emerge in urban and rural areas. (If you’re interested in learning about those other races, we highly recommended you read the NC Free Enterprise Foundation’s post-primary briefing.)
North Carolina voters last night passed the $2 billion Connect NC Bond that will strengthen food security and national security by making two investments in the future of North Carolina agriculture. NC Farm Bureau strongly supported the Connect NC Bond that provides $85 million for the Plant Sciences Initiative at NC State and $94 million for updating NC Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services (NCDA&CS) laboratories.
There’s no such thing as a perfect year when it comes to agriculture, especially considering the diverse geography and climate of our state. There will always be uncertainty when it comes to the weather—will we have a freeze, drought or flood? But in 2015 we had all three in a single year.
We could spend days discussing the role weather played in crop loss last year, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a farm that didn’t experience some sort of weather event. But today, we’ll focus on the Waterlogged Fall of 2015.
If you need help remembering what we’re talking about, this picture should help jog your memory.
