Elections are heating up. Here in NC that means abortion, the filibuster and ... NASCAR?

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With Labor Day behind us, the weather will hopefully start cooling down — but in the world of North Carolina politics, things will only be heating up.

Apologies for the cliche, but it’s true. Anyway, I’m Will Doran, and let’s dive into this week’s newsletter.

We have midterm elections coming up in November, in case any of you forgot. The summer is always slow in politics, but things tend to start picking back up in September. Once October comes around we’ll be fully deluged in ads, debates and appearances all over the state by the candidates and their proxies.

One campaign avoiding a certain high-profile proxy is that of Cherie Beasley, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate. When Vice President Kamala Harris was in Durham last week, Beasley skipped Harris’ speech on prescription drug prices.

It’s not because she doesn’t see it as important — Beasley has actually made that a key part of her campaign as well — so it’s probably more likely tied to President Joe Biden’s underwater approval rating, which FiveThirtyEight estimates is only about 42% as of early September. We’ll see what happens next week, when First Lady Jill Biden comes to Greensboro Monday to talk education policy.

Beasley also skipped Harris’ swanky private fundraiser at a mansion outside Chapel Hill after her Durham speech, which my colleague Lars Dolder talked his way into. He reported that Harris told the Democratic donors assembled that Beasley winning is key to the party’s hopes of killing the filibuster.

But while Harris is touting Beasley’s support of killing the filibuster, so is the GOP. The national Republican Party’s “War Room” YouTube page features a clip of her talking about. Probably someone is wrong, if they both think it’s a good strategy to promote her stance on that issue. Just one of many things to watch in the coming weeks.

To win moderates: Delete your website?

Danielle Battaglia wrote an interesting story recently on NC13 — which mostly covers the southern Wake County suburbs and Johnston County. Possibly the only competitive U.S. House district in North Carolina’s newly drawn maps, the district would’ve narrowly supported Trump in 2016, then narrowly supported Biden in 2020.

After spending this spring campaigning as the far-right option in the GOP primary, Bo Hines won the coveted Donald Trump endorsement and rode that to victory over several more established candidates. During the primary, Hines’ website had a page called “Life and Family” that indicated he opposed gay marriage, and supported outlawing abortion in all circumstances.

He put it even more clearly to The News & Observer’s McClatchy DC bureau during the primary, writing: “Abortions should be made illegal throughout the United States. No exceptions.”

However, once Hines won the primary and the Supreme Court undid Roe, Hines deleted that entire page from his website. Danielle reported that it’s a time-honored juggling act in competitive political districts: Win the primary by appealing to the base, then immediately shift gears and try appealing to more moderate voters for the general election.

Other stories from our team

▪ I accidentally went viral Wednesday, tweeting about a new amicus brief in a big U.S. Supreme Court case involving North Carolina that could change elections for the whole country. I figured it’s a pretty wonky development, but the case is interesting enough that a tweet might get seven, maybe even eight interactions. Tens of thousands of likes and retweets later, the internet proved me wrong. So I went back and wrote an article with more detail and context than a tweet can provide.

▪ NASCAR is coming back to Wilkesboro, and both political parties are rushing to take credit. Both deserve some, too. Sports reporter Alex Zietlow reported Thursday on Gov. Roy Cooper’s big event with Dale Earnhardt Jr. in downtown Raleigh. It’s because of $18 million for the speedway in the new state budget, passed by the Republican-led legislature and signed into law by Cooper. And while the choice to send the money to Wilkesboro was made by GOP leaders in Raleigh, the money itself came from Democrats in Washington, D.C. It was part of North Carolina’s cut of the American Rescue Plan, Biden’s post-pandemic stimulus package in 2021.

Sports do tend to bring out bipartisanship, don’t they?

▪ Speaking of money and Washington, D.C., Danielle wrote another interesting story on the latest in Sen. Richard Burr’s insider trading allegations. He netted a quarter of a million dollars in the earliest days of the COVID-19 pandemic, she reported, due to what court records call “well-timed” stock trades that avoided $87,000 in losses and made another $164,000 in gains. The trades happened in February 2020, just before COVID-19 shut down the country — and while Burr, as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was receiving confidential briefings on the coming pandemic.

That’s all, folks

Thanks for reading this week’s newsletter. Be sure to also check out our stories, our tweets and our Under the Dome podcast. All our politics stories post to our Under the Dome Twitter account, so be sure to follow it. We also have a pinned list on that Twitter account of the politics team so you can follow our work individually as well. And our new podcast episodes post every Monday to keep you informed about what’s coming up next.

— By Will Doran, reporter for The News & Observer. Email me at wdoran@newsobserver.com and follow me on Twitter @will_doran.