Look what the casino lobby bought with its big spending against conservatives in GOP primary | Eastern NC Now

pay for play rides again

ENCNow

The casino lobby spent heavily in the last Republican primary in North Carolina against conservatives and now what they get for their money is bec. oming apparent.  They even had the audacity to call their newly organized casino-funded PAC "American Conservative Fund" to fool voters.

Now, the first fruits of the casino payola has emerged.  Inserted into the Senate-drafted state budget is a provision that opens North Carolina to "prediction market" gambling with the very loosest regulation in the country.  Amendments are not allowed to the budget bill and the only way to have stopped this was to vote down the entire budget.

Draft Kings, which has a major hand in "prediction market" gambling was a major contributor to the casino PAC.

Why did conservative legislators not take up this fight?  The casino lobby had just taken the scalps of a state senator and two representatives in the primaries who opposed them, one of whom was Rep. Keith Kidwell (R-Beaufort). and also bought the victories of establishment candidates over up and coming conservatives in several open seat primaries.  In Kidwell's race, they spent many thousands of misleading TV ads against him, and they did similar things in other districts.  Kidwell had been the chief legislative leader who blocked Phil Berger's infamous casino bill last legislative session, and so the casino lobby joined another special interest, Big Ag. to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy the seat for their puppet.  Things like that have an intimidating effect on other legislators.

https://dailyhaymaker.com/is-this-what-that-gambling-pac-bought-during-ncs-march-primaries/


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Comments

( July 23rd, 2026 @ 7:53 am )
 
Let's face it, Republicans have a huge problem in the legislature with "leadership" that is in the hip pocket of special interests and addicted to "pay-to-play". While the Democrats were at least as bad in this regard when they were in control, we did not expect our own party to fall into this trap. But lousy leaders like Thom Tillis, Tim Moore, and Phil Berger picked up the Democrat playbook on pandering to the special interests, doing it to cement their own power. Now that Berger has rightfully been kicked to the curb, maybe things will get better in the Senate, but if one of Berger's cronies succeeds him, there will probably be no changes, regrettably. In the House, the new leadership seems to be at least somewhat of an improvement so far, but we will see how that develops. Moore, at first, had seemed to be an improvement over Tillis, too.
( July 22nd, 2026 @ 8:35 pm )
 
I remember the ads run by that casino group that called itself "American Conservative Fund" while it attacked conservatives around the state in legislative primaries. They ran ads locally on TV claiming Keith Kidwell raised taxes. What nonsense. Kidwell was one of the biggest TAX CUTTERS in the legislature. Those scalawags spent a lot of money lying on TV about Kidwell and unfortunately some people were gullible enough to believe it. So now we are stuck with a legislator who was a longtime Democrat and major Democrat contributor who couldn't be bothered in his campaign to tell us where he stood on taxes or much of anything else, for that matter. Now, in sacking Kidwell, who was the main force in stopping the last casino bill, they have others running scared on gambling issues. They not only screwed our district but the whole state.



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