For anyone who has followed my work here with RedState through this election season, you can probably tell, without prompting, what the biggest disappointments of 2016 have been for me.

First would be Donald Trump getting the GOP nomination for the presidency. We could have done so much better, and the actual election would have been about ideas and policy, rather than insults and scandal.

Could any other candidate have won?

Yes. A Cruz, Rubio, or even (ugh) Kasich would have decimated Hillary Clinton on the debate stage and could have buried her under her mountain of scandals. She was just an awful candidate.

How bad was she?

She lost to Donald Trump.

I’m not nearly as disappointed with Trump actually winning, because there’s always that off chance that he’s going to be, as I’ve said for some time, just a figurehead president, with Pence and his cabinet doing all the actual leading.

I’ve made my peace with that.

My second big disappointment, however, is much more heartbreaking for me.

The loss of Governor Pat McCrory, the first Republican governor the state has elected in several decades, and one who has been diligent in getting North Carolina out of debt and back on track to amazing fiscal health, in less than four years, is nearly too much to bear.

The campaign against Governor McCrory began before he ever even had a chance to get settled in as governor. As the days, months, and years wore on, with McCrory and the Republican-led General Assembly systematically carving away at Democrat dung-heaps, wrapped in bad legislation, the protests only intensified, in spite of the drop in unemployment, return of jobs, tax code reform, and an economy that has become one of the top in the nation.

Because Democrats don’t care about common sense policy or the success of anyone, if they didn’t orchestrate it.

There is no way that a sane, informed electorate should have let Governor Pat McCrory get away, but they did, in spite of his amazing successes. I chalk that up to petty, one-issue revenge voters in several counties, an unhealthy amount of voter fraud, and a lot of misinformation spread through attack ads, funded by Democrats outside of North Carolina, who don’t have the best interests of North Carolinians at heart.

On Thursday, Governor McCrory sat with WRAL anchor, David Crabtree, to muse about his term as governor of the Old North State.

In a sometimes poignant, but completely candid interview, McCrory gives his thoughts on what went right in the campaign, what went wrong, the ugly state of political discourse, and what the future may hold for him (He’s not ruling out coming back in four years).

It’s worth the 20 minutes to listen.

I’m not going to say “Goodbye” to this fine leader. Maybe “See you later”?