The Politician who Refused to Eat Barbecue and Lost (also, it's the Rabbit Hole's Fifth Birthday)
An update on the state of the Hole, but first, the most ridiculous North Carolina political food story ever told.
In September 1983, Rufus Edmisten stood in front of 200 people in Raleigh, and said about the worst thing he could have possibly said. “There is one thing that is blessed about tonight,” he told them. “We haven’t had any of that damnable barbecue. I know that is heresy. But I have got some principles.”
He kept going. Or, in the parlance of our times, he posted through it. “I’ve eaten enough barbecue,” he continued. “I am not going to eat any more. I’m taking my stand, and that is it.”
The quote ended up in the Raleigh News & Observer. The first call Edmisten got afterward was from Wilber Shirley, who was serving as the treasurer for his campaign for governor. Wilber was also the owner of the legendary Wilber’s Barbecue in Goldsboro. In short: Wilber was pissed off at Rufus.
The next call came from the head of the North Carolina Pork Council. Then another call came in. Then another. A few days later, the N&O’s editorial board wondered whether Edmisten had opened “a barbecue gap with the North Carolina electorate.” Columnists in Charlotte and Greensboro roasted him, with one calling his statement “political suicide.” The Goldsboro News-Argus, Wilber’s hometown paper, started a story about it with a ClickHole-type lede: “Rufus Edmisten said WHAT!”
Two weeks later, Edmisten explained himself: The devil made him do it. “I have come to the conclusion that I must have been possessed by demons the night I said that ridiculous thing about barbecue,” he told the News & Observer. Also, it was his doctor’s fault, who told him not to eat it, what with his hiatal hernia and all. But! Edmisten said that, after two weeks without barbecue, he was waking up “in a cold sweat,” and his doctor said that, because of the withdrawals, his patient could eat pork again. So he did. At a fundraising barbecue in Tarboro, his hosts took delight in cooking and serving Edmisten an entire goose, which he consumed in its entirety. Then, in Harnett County, Edmisten ate old school barbecue at an event at a high school, and made sure a news photographer got a picture of him doing it. “I do feel cleansed now,” he said.
I’ll just skip ahead to the end: Edmisten did not become governor of North Carolina. In November 1984, he became only the second Democrat to lose a gubernatorial election in the state in the 20th century. Trying to figure out exactly why is complicated. First off, Ronald Reagan carried North Carolina with 61% of the vote, so Republicans had the wind at their backs in a traditionally Democratic state. Second, Edmisten narrowly won the Democratic primary for governor, but his party didn’t coalesce around him afterward. Edmisten was the attorney general, and before the race, his office had prosecuted one of the candidates, Jimmy Green, for bribery. Green got off, but held a very big grudge. The other opponent, Charlotte mayor Eddie Knox, thought he was the front-runner but lost both the primary and the ensuing run-off. He had been counting on support and an endorsement from outgoing governor Jim Hunt, got neither, and decided that he was pissed off at the Democratic establishment. He went on to become national co-chair of the Democrats for Reagan organization that year. “My trouble up to the last day of my campaign for governor was that I was still trying to woo over Eddie Knox supporters and Jimmy Green supporters,” Edmisten would later say. He lost to Jim Martin by nine points.
That reasoning sound logical. It’s also boring. And it’s long been overshadowed by a simpler, more vivid explanation: Rufus Edmisten lost a governor’s race in North Carolina because he said that barbecue sucks.
Edmisten himself has played along with this idea. Part of campaigning at the time was, literally, showing up at barbecues across North Carolina, and he’d eaten so much pork. He’d already sworn off chitlins years before. He said that he was joking about the whole barbecue thing, but it didn’t read like a joke in the paper. The ensuing “barbecue faux pax,” was an easy dunk for reporters, editorial pages, and other candidates across the state. Edmisten, for a time, became what the Internet now refers to as the main character. Headlines are a good thing. Being the main character is not. “Things were never the same,” Edmisten would later reflect. “And I always believed that if I hadn’t said that about barbecue, I might’ve won the governor’s race.”
This story has become canon in North Carolina politics. It’s also been told SO MANY TIMES over the years. If you’re a North Carolina long-timer, you’re probably asking me to tell you something you don’t know by now.
So, why am I telling it here? Because one: I’ve heard it too, but I’ve never gone back to look to look at the primary documents. I trusted it, but never verified it. I know plenty of stories that have become lore that weren’t actually based in anything even resembling fact. This one, to a degree, was true. Edmisten didn’t even have a platform when he swore off barbecue in September 1983. It’s possible that his flopped joke about pork may have been the only thing that many voters remembered about him.
But mostly, I’m writing about it because if I’d been around at the time, it absolutely would have been a North Carolina Rabbit Hole story.
I made a glancing reference to Rufus Edmisten’s barbecue problem in the very first edition of the Rabbit Hole, which came out five years ago today. That’s the headline or the buried lede: This thing, whatever it is, is now five years old. It’s ready for Kindergarten. It’s a decade away from getting its learner’s permit and hittin’ the road. In 16 more years, it can get legally drunk, although many of you probably think this newsletter is already inebriated most of the time.
As is tradition, I brought you a story about something else because I hate using this space to earnestly reflect. I think you know the broad outlines of the Rabbit Hole story by now, but if not: I started this on a whim as I was wrapping up my time at Our State magazine, and the first edition went to 58 people. On its first birthday, in 2021, I opened the Rabbit Hole up to paid supporters. Dozens of you jumped in and contributed enough money to get me to stop freelancing and focus my creative and journalistic energy here. As of today, 12,704 people subscribe to the North Carolina Rabbit Hole. If this newsletter was a town, it would be Smithfield (2024 population: 12,373).
Out of that big, large group, only 2.2% of my subscribers actually pay to support this newsletter. In years past, I’ve gone into the financial calculations I’ve made to keep this thing going. The basic version is this: Paid supporters buy the time I need to create this newsletter on a weekly basis. I try not to think about business stuff when I’m reporting and writing stories, but every time I zoom out, I realize that it’s a critical component. I have a full-time job and a family, for one thing. For another, your continued paid contributions keep me focused. Freelancing sucks, because you’re constantly pitching and chasing checks. This provides stability and a safe space to allow me to write things and chase ideas in a way that I wouldn’t be able to otherwise.
So, my simple pitch is this: If you like this, please consider paying for it via a monthly or yearly subscription. I won’t be mad if you don’t! But I’ll be extremely grateful if you do. If you’re already a paid supporter, know that your money is the constant that allows me to be able to do this without the anxiety that comes from constantly trying to sell yourself to strangers. Here, I can just write stuff for you, and you can let me know what you think. Over the years, a community has popped up around this, and I’m always happy to see you all show up in my email, the comments, and occasionally in person.
That said, the landscape has changed quite a bit over the last five years. For one thing, people no longer come here from social media. Twitter was once the discovery engine for the Rabbit Hole. Now, because of its algorithm, practically no one clicks on a link there, and it gives me fewer referrals than Reddit, Bluesky, and Duck Duck Go (!). A lot of people are still ending up here via Google, although its AI summaries probably mean that fewer people will end up here via search in the future. In the past, a good story could truly go viral (i.e. Mick Jagger or Tony Hawk), and you’d watch it ping pong around people’s feeds. Now, that’s not really possible.
All of this means that today, more than 95% of people read the Rabbit Hole in their email inbox, and rarely stumble upon it on what’s left of the open web. Hence, word of mouth is still vital, and I see a bunch of you who are still forwarding Rabbit Holes via email with big aunt/uncle energy. But overall, far fewer people are sharing links like they did in the old days. This isn’t a me problem, it’s the issue bedeviling all of media at this moment. Asking folks to leave whatever platform they’re on to go somewhere to, gasp, read something is a very tall order.
To that end, I’ve experimented lately with video and audio, just to see if that might get more people interested in the stories you’re reading here. I like making TikToks and Reels and podcasts, but they take time. Turning myself from North Carolina journalist into a true North Carolina influencer would require more energy, bandwidth, and on-demand charisma than I currently have. I’d love to work with people to make those things on a regular basis—if you’d like to help, please let me know!—and I’m grateful to folks like Ovies and Giglio and WUNC for having me on to talk about stories I’ve written. But all of that stuff is very hard to do on my own. I have the skillset, but not the time.
So, in short, I think things have plateaued. Again, if I had more paid subscribers, that would change the calculus for me. I’ve had relatively low churn—I gain a few subscribers, then lose a few—but the overall numbers have been the same for a long time (I’ll say, gratefully, that I haven’t had a mass paid subscriber exodus that would make me consider quitting). I briefly had a sponsor for the email version of the Rabbit Hole, but that didn’t change the calculus either. Creating videos or podcasts hasn’t changed the calculus.
Plateauing, though, isn’t a bad thing. I think it’s just evidence that, in the word of John Fox, it is what it is. And what it is has been gratifying.
For one thing, it’s still fun. Trying to nail down the real story about Ay Zigga Zoomba (and the, um, sexual adventures of its creator) was a blast. Finding the stories behind the state’s most hardcore hurricane picture and its infuriating system of liquor stores felt worthwhile. I’ve delved into politics a little more, trying to find things that other people are overlooking when it comes to redistricting, crime, and voting access. I’ve also wrote about the worship of Winston-Salem’s extremely phallic skyscraper and quicksand and about a duet between Roberta Flack and Lee Greenwood (?!) that birthed a cheesy song that I regret to inform you is also a banger. In short, 2025 was extremely rewarding, and I don’t really have any plans on slowing down here.
Long-term, anyhow. In the short term, I am taking on a project that I’ve been meaning to handle for a while. When I launched this newsletter, I did it on Substack. For a variety of reasons, I don’t think it’s the right platform for me anymore. For one thing, it provides a bunch of functionality that I don’t really need. For another, it’s expensive compared to other providers. It takes a 10% cut of every paid subscription, versus other platforms that charge a flat fee, and the company is optimized to upsell you at all times. Some of you have been turned off by that. And, to be blunt, many people aren’t happy that Substack platforms some truly vile ideas. Neither am I.
So, over the next month, I’ll be transitioning this over to Beehiiv. It should be (I hope) relatively seamless on your end, but will require some technical effort over here, and it’s hard to do it while I’m also cranking out stories. So, I’m going to be taking a brief break from writing while I do that. Technically, I haven’t had a newsletter vacation in five years. Now seems like the right time for a short sabbatical.
All that said, I have a bunch of ideas stacked up, and I still want to hear from you! Some of the best stuff comes from tips that you all send me, or questions that are burning up your brains. Please, email me (jeremy.markovich@gmail.com) or hit me up on the socials (I’m mostly on Bluesky now). I joke about a lot of stuff, but I’m serious when I say that I could not do this without you. It’s been a pleasure to get to know so many of you, and I remain grateful and humbled that many of you give up a chunk of your hard-earned money to allow me to do this.
Here’s the last thing. Because this is the time for reflection, I’ve thought a lot lately about what the North Carolina Rabbit Hole actually, well, is. I’ve always thought of it as a newsletter, but it’s not always something that contains a roundup of articles, or even what I’d think of as news. Other people have called it a blog, but blogs sometimes include punditry. I always try to provide analysis, but I’m not out here trying to deliver hot takes (like, say, Rufus Edmisten). I consider what I do to be journalism, but I don’t consider this to be, like, a comprehensive news source. I mean, you try to cite the North Carolina Rabbit Hole with a straight face. Wikipedia editors had a hard time doing that! My rule is to provide original reporting, cite primary sources, or use my two decades of North Carolina experience to provide context and insight on each story I do. The downside is: I just can’t crank out stories at the rate of others. One a week is hard enough when I do things the way I do them. Again, I remind you: I’m just one guy.
A few weeks ago, I was busy doing something around the house, and I was thinking about whether journalism was art or more science. That’s when something hit me: What if the Rabbit Hole is both art AND science? What if I’m just reporting, and adding a layer of whimsy to it to make it more accessible and understandable? What I’m just dropping the facade that makes straightforward news coverage so sober? What if I’m just messing around on a road with guardrails, but leaving a road map behind that allows you to verify what I’m saying? Everything I write here is held to what I consider to be the standards of good journalism. And yet, I have a need to create, like an artist. I like to remix things. To experiment. To make something new. There’s something inside of me that I have to get out. Fiction doesn’t seem to work for me. Facts are my vessel. Truth is the north star. I like making things that don’t always look, or feel, or sound like they’re supposed to.
I guess what I’m saying is, this isn’t a newsletter, or a blog, or a news source. Maybe every week, I’m trying to send you a small package of journalistic art. Art doesn’t conform to tidy explanations. It’s meant to make you feel something, big or small. I hope that’s what the Rabbit Hole does for you.
Okay, that’s it. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for five years of support, and I hope that support continues for as long as you’re willing to give it. I hope you all have a great holiday season. Here’s to more North Carolina Rabbit Holes on the other side.
-Jeremy
Congratulations on the Substack exit!
Very happy to be one of your paid subscribers. I believe in supporting independent voices, and I love that you love the quirks of NC like I do. I always learn something new. I had never seen that picture from Hurricane Hazel.