The MAGA Challenge Facing North Carolina Is Much Like the Nation’s

Will a centrist state choose to be governed by extremists? Will the nation?

Growing up on Long Island and attending college and law school in New England, I thought very little about the American South in my first decades and certainly never imagined living there. 

But when my wife was offered a job at Duke back in 2005, we looked into the politics of the state. At that time, Democrats controlled the legislature and North Carolina had a tradition of electing centrist governors (mostly Democrats, but a couple Republicans) stretching back for decades all the way to Terry Sanford, after whom the policy school where I would go to work at Duke was named.  Sanford was noteworthy for having guided segregated North Carolina through the civil rights era without anywhere near the violence witnessed in the so-called “deep south.” North Carolina had also differentiated itself from other southern states by having made early efforts to diversify its economy away from a reliance on agriculture and textiles and investing substantially in its state higher education system. The region where I was going to live – the Research Triangle – is a bastion of blue-voting counties filled with professors, scientists, and biotech entrepreneurs that value public schools and fund them adequately. The state and region are fundamentally decent places to live.    

But the political environment changed dramatically when Republicans dominated the 2010 midterm election and gained large majorities in both chambers of the state legislature. They used these majorities to craft an egregious partisan gerrymander of state legislative districts. This gerrymander resulted in the GOP picking up 10 seats in the House and 1 Senate seat in the 2012 election, giving them veto proof margins in both chambers. This shift occurred even though Romney only beat Obama in the presidential race that year by 2%.  

The legislature used its powers to try to govern the state as if North Carolina were Alabama, not the purple, middle-of-the-road state that we are. It dramatically cut funding for our vaunted higher education system and brought public teacher salaries so low that we were competing with Mississippi for the lowest paid teachers in the country. It enacted a voting law that a federal court of appeals found to discriminate against Black voters with “surgical precision.” In 2016, it passed a controversial “bathroom bill” requiring transgender people to use facilities that matched the sex stated on their birth certificates. This law prompted the NCAA to withdraw sports championships from the state and cost $3.6 billion in lost business. When Democrat Roy Cooper was elected governor in 2016, the legislature reacted by passing a series of measures that stripped the governor of many of his key powers of appointment. Large scale protests erupted and many of the laws were struck down as violations of the state constitution. 

The GOP legislature’s extremism was tempered somewhat by Cooper’s election and the loss of veto-proof majorities from 2018 – 2022. But a bad state legislative election for Democrats in 2022 (plus a party-switch in 2023 by a legislator who had received substantial contributions from progressive causes), has reinvigorated it.   

The current legislature has pretty much gone full MAGA, prompting 19 vetoes from Governor Cooper, all of which were overridden. These new laws:

• Ban abortions after 12 weeks with limited exceptions;

• Prohibit state agencies from conducting anti-discrimination and bias training for employees;

• Repeal a state permitting requirement for handgun purchases, thereby eliminating background checks for private handgun sales;

• Ban state pension plans from considering any environmental or social factors when making investments;   

• Ban gender transition care for minors;

• Allow “low-performing charter schools” to grow in size by up to 20%;

• Ban transgender athletes from playing on women’s middle school, high school and college teams;

• Bar any discussions of sexuality and sexual orientation in kindergarten to 4^th grade; and

• Prohibit new housing codes that requiring buildings to have additional insulation or energy efficiency measures.

Along with this legislative onslaught, North Carolina has witnessed the destruction of the traditional establishment GOP.  Back in 2012, Pat McCrory, the moderate GOP mayor of Charlotte, cruised to an easy win in the GOP primary and won the governorship by 7 percent in the general election. A decade later, McCrory ran in the GOP Senate primary against Trump endorsed, gun-store owner Ted Budd. He was crushed by 58-24 percent, losing every county except for Charlotte. 

This dismantling of the GOP establishment continued during the GOP primaries this month.

Meet GOP candidate for Governor – Mark Robinson (pictured above). Robinson gained notoriety for his unabashed pro-gun advocacy, which he leveraged into a successful run for Lieutenant Governor in 2016. He ascribes to a deep Christian fundamentalism and is unapologetic about using the power of the government to advance this philosophy. He favors a full abortion ban with no exceptions, claiming that “once you make a baby, it is not your body anymore, it’s y’all’s body.”  He calls homosexuality “filth” and would ban same-sex marriage. He has neanderthal views about women, advancing the view that “we are called to being led by men.” He believes that “feminism was … watered by the devil” and has even publicly stated that “I absolutely want to go back to a time when women could not vote.” GOP primary voters had two rock solid establishment conservatives on the ballot to choose from, but they delight at Robinson’s provocation and full-MAGA demonization of Democrats, who he has called “the real virus.”  Robinson won his primary with almost 65% of the vote. 

Meet GOP Candidate for Attorney General – Dan Bishop. Bishop was the author of the aforementioned infamous “bathroom bill” in the North Carolina legislature. As a member of Congress, he voted against certifying the presidential election results even after the riot on January 6 at the Capitol. Bishop is a member of the Freedom Caucus and supported the effort to push the U.S. government into default unless Democrats agreed to massive budget and entitlement cuts. He has also voted against bipartisan legislation to this year to fund government agencies and prevent a government shutdown. Bishop is a co-sponsor of the “Life at Conception Act,” which guarantees full constitutional rights to human embryos from the moment of conception. North Carolina political analysts marvel that Bishop was once seen as being on the radical fringe of the GOP, but is now considered a mainstream “run of the mill” Republican. He ran unopposed in the GOP primary. 

Meet GOP Candidate for State Superintendent for Public Instruction – Michelle Morrow. Morrow beat the incumbent Superintendent and former McCrory education aide, Catherine Truitt, by 4 percent in the primary. In May 2020, Morrow responded to a tweet calling for President Obama to be put in Guantanamo by saying “I prefer him in front of a firing squad…I do not want to waste another dime supporting his life.” When President Biden took office and asked Americans to wear a mask for 100 days to curb the COVID pandemic, Morrow tweeted, “Never…AND KILL all TRAITORS.” Morrow has echoed multiple QAnon conspiracy theories on social media and called for Islam to be banned and Muslims to be barred from serving in elected office. Morrow characterized the COVID-19 vaccine as “population control” and marched to the Capitol on January 6 (without entering the building). While in D.C. on January 6, she posted a TikTok video echoing conspiracy theories about the election and accused election officials of committing treason, threatening that “we’re coming after you.”   

So, this is the full-MAGA agenda the North Carolina GOP is presenting to the voters in November even though we are clearly a slightly right of center, pink/purple state. In 2020, Trump won the state by a mere 1.34 percent (about 74,000 votes). In the 2022 mid-term election, under a fair legislative map drawn by the North Carolina Supreme Court, the congressional delegation was split evenly, 7-7 (though total votes were about 52 to 48 percent in favor of the GOP).

Nationally, Trump is doing the same thing, leaning heavily into culture-war issues that divide Americans, campaigning full bore on the immigration issue, and obsessing over election-denialism and his desire for retribution against those he believes have “persecuted him.” This is a stark contrast to how he ran in 2016, when he emphasized themes of economic populism that resonated with voters who felt ignored by the establishments in both parties. He mainly avoided cultural issues except when catering to evangelical constituencies.

Most of the elections since Roe v. Wade was overturned in the summer of 2022 have shown that a majority of voters in the country, including swing states, reject the extremist MAGA agenda and message. It is a long time until election day and we will have to see how this plays out. But I have a hard time seeing either right-of-center North Carolina or a very 50/50 America endorsing full-bore MAGA governance for the next four years.

It is up to the Biden campaign and the Democratic party to make clear that this is choice before the voters.