Below are a series of notable excerpts from our interview with Senator Dan Blue. Play the audio link to hear exactly what he had to say on each particular topic.
On the attitudes of North Carolina’s democratic state senators toward H.B. 589: “We said, ‘We aren’t going to participate in this kind of farce. It makes no sense. We’re not rolling the clock back. We’re not turning our back on 40, 50 years of anti-discrimination laws that we developed in North Carolina.’”
On both the political issues surrounding H.B. 589 and H.B. 2: “I think these kinds of laws remove you from the competition of differing and competing ideas in the marketplace of ideas. So it prevents you from developing whatever the best product is that competing ideas create.”
On voter participation: “Our challenge is to get everybody to participate and you get them to participate by showing them that their participation means something—that it’s registering with you as you try to represent them or who you’re trying to convince them to vote for. We’ll continue to do that. I started it 50 years ago as a high school student and I’ll be doing it 50 years from now as an old man on a cane.”
On the lack of bipartisanship from the North Carolina Republicans in the state legislature: “They weren’t interested in looking at studies that showed how this bill was going to disproportionately affect African-Americans or young people. And I realize that they weren’t interested because that’s the result that they wanted anyhow.”
On voter fraud: “If it’s a fundamental right, which is a right to vote, assume that everybody’s qualified to do it and take it upon yourself to disqualify them, rather than disqualifying them and putting the burden on them to qualify themselves.”
On NC Governor Pat McCrory: “It was not that the Democrats were asleep—the majorities were so great and the governor was going to sign it anyhow, the governor didn’t try to put together a real effort to sustain his veto. He bought it line, hook, and sinker and decided that he too would join the bandwagon to limit access to voting in North Carolina.”
On elections: “The whole political process is about people expressing their preferences, but it ought to be based on what they think about how you are representing them and if you’re missing the mark and not representing the way they think they ought to be represented, they ought to be able to remove you. That’s the purpose of elections.”
