Republicans are running wild in my state

Published May 4, 2023

Editor's note: Frank Bruni is a NY Times columnist who teaches at Duke University. This column first appeared in the NY Times May 4th.

Political colorists can be promiscuous in calling states purple, but my state is true to that hue. I speak of North Carolina, and I have receipts: While our junior senator, Ted Budd, is a Republican who won election to a first term in 2022 by about three percentage points, our governor, Roy Cooper, is a Democrat who won election to a second term in 2020 by more than four. Donald Trump prevailed in North Carolina that same year, but only barely.

This is not a land of blowouts. It’s a middle ground, and that’s reflected in voter registration rolls. Nearly 2.6 million North Carolinians declare themselves unaffiliated, while just over 2.4 million identify as Democrats and just under 2.2 million as Republicans. We don’t tilt. We teeter.

In a healthier democracy, that would be an amulet against extremism. In ours, not so much.

The North Carolina Supreme Court, which switched to a Republican majority from a Democratic one in the midterm elections last November, just reversed a ruling from last year and cleared the way for the Republicans in the General Assembly to gerrymander North Carolina’s congressional districts — which they will almost certainly do.

How can I be sure? That earlier court ruling voided a Republican-drawn map that probably would have led to a U.S. House delegation of 10 Republicans and four Democrats, while the replacement map yielded the current, appropriate split of seven and seven. That’s a huge comedown from what Republicans wanted and from what they’ve repeatedly tried to get for nearly 15 years. Without any fear that the state’s Supreme Court will foil them before the 2024 congressional elections, they don’t have to settle for it.

“This round of gerrymandering may be even worse,” Asher Hildebrand, a fellow professor of mine at Duke University who studies the issue, told me. He floated the possibility of a congressional map that seeks to give Republicans an 11-to-three advantage “and state legislative maps that lock in Republican supermajorities for the foreseeable future.” Never mind how unrepresentative of North Carolina that would be. People in power like to hoard and hold on to it.

And to wield it, whether their policies are popular or not. While the new Supreme Court here issues rulings of a strong partisan bent, Republican lawmakers are adopting or advancing a full complement of the party’s present fixations. They’re emboldened: Thanks to gerrymandered state districts, success in the midterms and one state lawmaker’s recent party switch, Republicans have supermajorities in the State Senate and House, bolstering their chances of securing enough votes to override Governor Cooper’s frequent vetoes.

“North Carolina Republicans aren’t really any less extreme than Tennessee Republicans or Texas Republicans — they’ve just been forced to share power for the last six years with a Democratic governor and a majority-Democrat Supreme Court,” Hildebrand said. “Now that their power is essentially unchecked, they’ll be asking other state legislators to hold their beer.”

They have already relaxed restrictions on firearms. They want to prevent teachers from talking about systemic racism. Last month the House passed a bill that would bar transgender girls from participating in female sports competitions; on Wednesday the House passed a separate bill banning gender-affirming surgeries for transgender people under the age of 18. On Wednesday the House also passed a bill that would change the state’s current banon most abortions after 20 weeks to a ban on most abortions after 12. That’s just a snapshot of Republicans’ agenda.

“They have immediate plans to use their supermajorities to reduce tax rates to levels that the governor’s office estimates would reduce our general fund revenue by 25 percent per year, causing the state to fall billions of dollars short of our obligations,” State Senator Graig Meyer, a Democrat, told me. “Surprisingly to me, they are also pushing all sorts of legislation that chips away at our previously bipartisan efforts to develop a clean tech economy.”

And they may well succeed, because Republicans in North Carolina have used “both skillful political maneuvering and brutal legislative tactics to develop supermajority power in the legislature and complete control of our courts, even though our state is about a 50-50 split politically,” Meyer said. “Policies that the G.O.P. base is demanding are getting farther away from what average voters will tolerate.”

But average voters don’t matter — that’s the lesson of and message in so much of what Republicans are doing in states around the country. They are enacting laws, like Florida’s six-week abortion ban, that defy public sentiment. In Ohio and Missouri, they are trying to change the rules so that a majority alone is not enough for a voter referendum to succeed.

Their highhandedness extends to such extraordinary actions as the Tennessee House’s expulsion of two Democratic lawmakers last month and the Montana House’s recent silencing of a transgender Democrat. And their movement ever further rightward means that the person heavily favored to win the party’s 2024 nomination for governor here in North Carolina is Mark Robinson, the Republican lieutenant governor, who is, as I wrote early this year, “extremism incarnate: gun-loving, gay-hating and primed for conspiracy theories, with a garnish of antisemitism to round out the plate.”

In him and in so many other Republican leaders in this state, I see almost no regard for the center. I see no interest in real consensus. I see the same arrogance and winner-takes-all attitude that are on display all around the country — and that are the antithesis of ethical, responsible, democratic government. It leaves me red-faced, even in this purple place.