It was New Year’s Day. I was standing in line at Harris Teeter, my favorite store and the paragon of southern grocery shopping, when I had a conversation that forced me to confront a bitter reality. On a nearby television, coverage of the inauguration of North Carolina’s new Democratic Governor and previous state attorney general, Roy Cooper, rolled by. A woman in front of me commented on how Cooper beat the incumbent Republican candidate, former Governor Pat McCrory, by a close margin, and we began talking about the mess that is state politics in North Carolina.
After talking about how divided North Carolina had become, she eventually told me that she has a sister who had participated in the legislative house protest that occurred just a few weeks prior. The two-day protest in Raleigh occurred in response to a surprise special session called by the right-leaning General Assembly (G.A.) to limit the power of Governor-elect Cooper. I could feel the pain in her voice and see her intense disappointment as she began telling me about how over 50 people were unjustly arrested at the site of the protest, all for exercising their rights in an attempt to confront one of the most underhanded sessions conducted by the G.A. in years. This was the first time I had been forced to tangibly confront the political distress in my home state.
North Carolina has been my home since the age of five, although I have moved to many different parts of the state since that time. I have only called Charlotte my home for the last few years, but I notice that the political showdowns reverberate most intensely there. Protests and demonstrations overwhelmed the streets last year, first when Keith Scott—Charlotte’s sixth fatal police shooting victim in 2016—was shot and killed, then again when the General Assembly responded to Charlotte’s anti-discrimination ordinance with House Bill 2 (H.B. 2), a bill that nullified any legal protection of North Carolina’s LGBTQ+ community. It was not until recently, after reading about the Women’s March on Charlotte in response to President Trump’s inauguration, that I realized the protests were not just an announcement of discontentment. The thousands of voices in Charlotte joined thousands more across North Carolina to seek redress from a government that has forgotten its values and crossed a red line.
The downfall of former Governor Pat McCrory is best told through a brief description of North Carolina’s delicate political balance over the last several years. Historically, North Carolina was not always this divided; the balance was emphatically upset in 2010 when national Republican donors responded to the center-left coalition that helped brush Barak Obama into office.
The initiative, then known as the Redistricting Majority Project (REDMAP), was coordinated by the GOP across several states to increase Republican majorities in the state legislatures. In North Carolina, the initiative took the state by storm. Its leader, millionaire mega-donor Art Pope, used $2 million to help Republicans win 18 of 22 state assembly races. The result was a Republican majority in both chambers of the General Assembly for the first time since Reconstruction.
Soon after the GOP gained legislative control, State House Representative David Lewis began an effort to solidify the gains made in the G.A. with the redrawing of political districts. Under the authority of the Voting Rights Act, Lewis drew up majority-minority districts across the state that strategically grouped voters based on race demographics––while the new districts were legal in theory, the improbable shapes of the districts clearly demonstrated an effort to pack and ultimately suppress African American voters, who are statistically left-leaning, into hyper-gerrymandered districts. The redrawn districts, now under scrutiny by the U.S. Supreme Court for racial gerrymandering, were instituted in time for the 2012 gubernatorial election. Pat McCrory won with ease, and the GOP suddenly found themselves in control of all three branches of state government. With no power-separating road blocks and the guarantee of a hardline Republican supermajority in the House and Senate, North Carolina had transformed itself from a state of delicate moderation into a one-party experiment.
Republicans wasted little time once McCrory was inaugurated. The General Assembly went on to introduce numerous bills that fell directly along the ideological line between conservative agenda and tea party fantasy. Legislation included a move to restrict abortion clinic administrations, a law to limit workers unions’ ability to bargain for wages, and a bill that prevents coastal developers from considering climate change impacts. In addition to pursuing these directional legislative objectives, many N.C. representatives attempted to cement the Republican majority for a second time. In anticipation of a court ruling that would prevent federal oversight of possibly discriminatory voting laws, the state House of Representatives passed stricter voter ID provisions as well as a reduction of early voting just days after it would normally have been blocked by federal statute. Many House leaders vehemently defended the “voter-ID” legislation as necessary to the state’s democratic integrity. Ironically, the same laws were overturned a year later in the court of appeals for targeting African American disenfranchisement with surgical precision, a move that uncovered the smoking gun North Carolina’s legislature was pointing towards our nation’s Jim Crow history.
Unfortunately, the passage of voting restrictions was not the last time legislation in North Carolina gained national attention. In February of last year, the state legislature fired back at Charlotte’s non-discrimination ordinance with House Bill 2, a law that banned local nondiscrimination ordinances pertaining to sexual orientation and gender identity. Reminiscent of the use of fear-mongering by Civil Rights-era segregationists, conservative proponents of H.B. 2 galvanized those on the fence by highlighting the potential danger of transgender people using the public restroom of their choice. As a result, H.B. 2 mandated that people only use the bathroom that corresponds with the sex listed on their birth certificate.
The passage of House Bill 2 immediately put North Carolina in the nation’s spotlight, and reactions were unapologetically polarized. For the first time in decades, the state’s rift was clear—it followed a national trend that James Woods ’20, a resident of Raleigh, N.C., described in a conversation with The Politic as “a 50/50 split between more diverse, urban areas that tend to be liberal, and outlying areas that tend to be conservative.”
Unfortunately, H.B. 2 drew negative attention from one constituency that right-leaning representatives could not ignore: businesses. Both PayPal and Deutsche Bank cancelled several job-creating opportunities, the NCAA withdrew tournament games, and the NBA cancelled the All-Star Weekend previously scheduled to be held in Charlotte. The damage to the state’s reputation and economy was irreversible and convinced even the most impassioned proponents of H.B. 2 that it needed to be repealed. As state Representative John Autry summarized in a conversation with The Politic, “the economic bleeding must stop and equality for all must be embraced.” Anger over the ideas endorsed by H.B. 2 also likely cost McCrory, who signed the bill in full, his bid for reelection in November.
The dysfunction of North Carolina’s legislature is not necessarily an issue of party. The problem, rather, is an issue of state representatives choosing to weigh their own political interests before those of the people. Nearly every piece of divisive legislation passed over the last six years of state politics has contributed to a commonly sought but rarely attained narrative of the search for sustained power. In the process, it seems that those who were willing to do anything to stay in office not only shot themselves in the foot, but also undermined the very process that allowed them to be elected. A recent report by a UNC Chapel Hill Professor of Political Science, Andrew Reynolds, found that North Carolina has breached an unprecedented number of principles that classify a democracy, including legal framework, voter registration, and voting district boundaries. Reynolds concludes when he writes “North Carolina’s overall electoral integrity score of 58/100…places [it] alongside authoritarian states and pseudo-democracies like Cuba and Sierra Leone.”
Respect for democracy is not a partisan issue. My home state offers an extremely valuable lesson for other states and even national politics: those with unlimited power will eventually overstep. As North Carolina fades from reactionary red back towards the moderate purple, it is likely that the future will be shaped by the masses who protested, as they return recognition to those undermined in the past. Though many House and Senate seats still lie in carefully ensconced conservative districts, a clear divide has opened between moderate and far-right state Republicans, a divide which Governor Cooper and the newly Democratic Supreme Court can exploit to unravel some of the GOP’s groundwork in the state.
In the weeks since his inauguration, Governor Cooper has used several events to publicize his support for the full repeal of H.B. 2, an expansion of Medicaid, and a boost for state school funding. As Jack Lattimore ’20, a Yale freshman and Cary, North Carolia resident, noted in an interview with The Politic, “[we] suffered tremendously under the McCrory administration…this is a pivotal time for North Carolina, as whichever political party ultimately prevails in this tense, divisive political climate will determine the future of the state.”
It is currently unclear how North Carolina will emerge from a past that has so profoundly impacted the present. Though I know full cooperation is not possible or necessary, it is my hope that state leaders—Democrat and Republican alike—are awakened by the alarming threat to the state’s democracy and recognize that with great power comes even greater responsibility.