Dear Gov. McCrory,
We recognize that your reelection campaign, like that of most politicians, started the day after you were elected in 2012. Now it ramps up in earnest, with the midterms behind us and the next two years a blank canvas.
Strategists are surely whispering into your ear about what last week’s results suggest for your own political future. So let us add to the whispers.
A Republican wave swept the nation, to be sure. But don’t get too comfortable. North Carolina is still as purple as any state in the nation. In an off-year election focused on an unpopular Democratic president, an uninspiring freshman Democrat came within a whisker of winning reelection to the U.S. Senate. The electorate for your race in 2016 will be half again as big as last week’s, and so will look quite different.
It appears you recognize this. In interviews after the election, you warned Republicans not to “spike the ball in the end zone.”
“I don’t think it’s time for us to all of a sudden get arrogant with power,” you told WFAE. “… We have to recognize the division and continue to have dialogue. … We gotta work together and we gotta listen to the public and we’ve got to understand our differences and find viable solutions to very complex problems.”
We couldn’t have said it better, and we urge you to stick to those words as you work with the legislature over the next two years. As luck would have it, the best path to your reelection is also the best path for the state: Being a governor, so to speak, on this hard-charging legislature, establishing a moderate course and using your bully pulpit to push common sense over political point-scoring.
We know you had a hard time finding your footing your first two years in office, and that legislative leaders really ran the show. But now you have a fresh start. Your best chance for reelection rests not in vacillating between moderation and extremism but by staking out consistent ground as the centrist that got you elected 11 times before.
Here are a few specific ways to do that:
• Expand Medicaid. Republican-led states are increasingly taking the federal government up on its offer to pay for almost all of the expansion. Even Speaker Thom Tillis started tiptoeing that way, and that probably won him a few votes. You can do this in a way that is politically beneficial to you and substantively valuable to the state.
• Raise teacher pay. Your efforts this year were a good start. Now you and the legislature need to continue the progress, especially to help those veteran teachers who were shortchanged in the first round. It will win you votes and provide crucial help to N.C. children.
• Budget responsibly. Thanks largely to sweeping tax cuts, the general fund came up $450 million short last budget year and was $62 million below budget in the first quarter of the current budget year. You need to lead the state out of this situation, without whacking education or health.
• Stay away from lightning-rod social issues. They’re a political loser in a purple state, and a distraction from those “very complex problems” you hope to solve.
Your approval numbers have not been pretty for most of your time as governor. Now’s a chance to reboot.
