By John Hood
RALEIGH — To describe North Carolina as one of America’s chief political battlegrounds is a well-worn cliché. I’ve certainly done my part to wear it out. In past columns I’ve called our state a “flirt” (which happens to be a reddish shade of purple) that still contains just enough split-ticket voters to surprise even the most experienced of political prognosticators.
A week before the election, I wrote that North Carolina was the prototypical “state in play,” featuring competitive races for president and a dozen other statewide offices as well as a spirited contest by Democrats to break the Republicans’ supermajorities in the North Carolina House and Senate.
Well, the votes are in — and it’s time to give that trusty cliché a few more scuffs and creases.
Donald Trump won North Carolina for the third time, but once again the race proved competitive. At this writing, his margin of victory is more than three percentage points, or about 190,000 votes — a higher margin than he won in his 2020 and 2016 campaigns. At the same time, and as was widely expected, Democrat Josh Stein defeated disgraced Republican nominee Mark Robinson for governor with 55% of the vote — the widest margin in a gubernatorial race in two decades.
Democrats also won statewide races for lieutenant governor (Rachel Hunt over Hal Weatherman), attorney general (Jeff Jackson over Dan Bishop), state superintendent of public instruction (Mo Green over Michelle Morrow), and secretary of state (Elaine Marshall over Chad Brown). But unlike Stein’s victory, these candidates won by single-digit margins. So did most of the Republican victors in other executive-branch races: state auditor (Dave Boliek over Jessica Holmes), state treasurer (Brad Briner over Wesley Harris), insurance commissioner (Mike Causey over Natasha Marcus), labor commissioner (Luke Farley over Braxton Winston), and agricultural commissioner (Steve Troxler over Sarah Taber).
Out of 10 Council of State offices, then, each party claimed five. That’s a net loss of one Republican. On the other hand, the GOP appears to have won all four judicial contests on the statewide ballot, with Republicans Tom Murry, Valerie Zachary, and Chris Freeman prevailing for Court of Appeals and Republican Jefferson Griffin edging out Democrat Allison Riggs for Supreme Court.
In our state government, the legislative branch holds most formal power. Given a Democratic governor — which is the historical norm — Republicans must maintain three-fifths majorities if they wish to overturn a gubernatorial veto with a party-line vote. That means 72 seats in the North Carolina House and 30 seats in the Senate. At this writing, GOP appears to have fallen a seat short in the House.
Finally, in our only competitive race for the U.S. House, the 1st District in northeast North Carolina, Democratic incumbent Don Davis defeated Republican challenger Laurie Buckhout by about 6,000 votes.
Once again, a small but decisive set of voters marked their ballots with a mixture of Democratic and Republican choices. The GOP did an excellent job of turning out their base this year but it wasn’t enough for a clean sweep. It isn’t going to be, not for the foreseeable future.
I’ll delve more deeply into the results another time. Still, one explanatory factor is clear: in an otherwise solid year for Republicans in North Carolina and across the country, the nomination of Mark Robinson and several other weak candidates cost the party dearly. Primary voters made these choices, of course, but Republican leaders could and should have intervened earlier in the process to boost candidates with more qualifications and fewer online embarrassments.
What national politics will look like in the coming months and years I won’t hazard a guess at the moment. What North Carolina politics will look like is less of an enigma. Our voters have once again decided to divide power between the two parties — leaving the legislative and judicial branches primarily in the hands of Republicans while placing Democrats in key jobs such as governor and attorney general.
We’ve been here before. Many, many times.
John Hood is a John Locke Foundation board member. His latest books, Mountain Folk and Forest Folk, combine epic fantasy with early American history (FolkloreCycle.com).
