The Longleaf Podcast is back in a new format! North Carolina’s best political commentary on the day’s top news. Today, we take on Robin Hayes’ indictment.

We chat with the author of Cumberland County's new political blog Cross Creek Divide on the state of Fayetteville politics, Cumberland as a bellwether county, the turmoil in the 9th Congressional District, and the value that political bloggers bring to the marketplace of ideas.

Is it gerrymandering or geography? In this episode, we take on the most common counterarguments to the piece in this week's Longleaf Politics newsletter about why Democrats won a majority of the statewide vote but a smaller percentage of seats. Join the conversation! Send a note to [email protected].

The 2018 elections had extraordinarily high turnout for a midterm year. Thousands more people, from all political persuasions, were involved. Here are five ways to keep it up between now and the next election, ranked by how easy they are.

We're back with a mini-episode about candidates for political office who aren't just flawed, but actually on record saying reprehensible things. A recent example is Russell Walker, a N.C. House candidate on the Republican ticket who made racist comments. Headlines this week described how a racist N.C. Republican won 37% of the vote. We dive into why we keep seeing this type of person on the ballot and what we can do about it.

Now that the dust has settled a little bit from Election Night, we spend this episode breaking down the biggest winners and biggest losers from the midterm elections. It was hard to spin it as anything but a bad night for N.C. Republicans, but at least one of them makes the biggest winner list.

Get involved in the podcast! Send in feedback to [email protected]. And please, leave us a review on your podcast platform of choice.

We run through the 5 top stories to come out of the 2018 midterm elections in North Carolina. The biggest: Republicans have lost their supermajority in the N.C. House.

This is the first episode on a new series I'm calling DECODED. We'll break down stories in the national or regional media about North Carolina politics and discuss why they turned out the way they did. In this episode, we discuss the latest piece in The Atlantic about N.C. Republicans and the 2018 midterm ballot and why the national media in general seems to love writing hit pieces on the NCGOP.

Let me know how you like the new format. Send in a note to [email protected] or use the Anchor app to record a voice message.

Here's the link to The Atlantic's piece if you would like to read it: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/11/north-carolinas-constitutional-amendment-fight/574546/

The team at Indiv has sponsored this podcast for the last few months, and this week we wanted to bring you the story of how the app came about and how they're working to improve the political conversation in North Carolina and around the country.

With 10 days remaining until Election Day, we catch up with North Carolina political experts Tonya Jameson (Democrat) and Lawrence Shaheen (Republican) on what they're seeing at the polls and what early voting returns lead them to believe for this election. We touch on several incidents of incivility and how candidates set the tone for campaigns. Then we talk fearless predictions for the 9th Congressional District, the General Assembly supermajorities and some other key races.