“Nobody wants any entanglement with him,” says Ferrel Guillory, a University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill analyst. But that’s not really a problem, because “he’s fallen out of sight,” Guillory adds. “He’s not a political liability. He’s a political non-entity.”

North Carolina State political scientist Andrew Taylor says, “He’s disappeared. He lives a private and mundane life.”…

“I have a lot of friends who are liberal Democrats,” says Steven Greene, a North Carolina State professor. “None of them has a good word to say about him. The word you hear most is ‘sleaze.'”