Republicans in North Carolina are preparing for decades of minority rule
Yesterday, Carolina Forward released a report analyzing voting trends at the county level. They noted that the rural-urban divide is continuing to expand with most rural counties getting more Republican and most urban/suburban counties getting more Democratic. They also noted that the fastest growing counties in the state are trending more Democratic even if they are still Republican counties. In contrast, most rural, Republican counties are either growing very slowly or losing population.
If that trend continues, sometime in the not too distant future, Democrats will probably have a solid edge in statewide elections, even if they don’t have a lock. These trends have not been lost on Republicans in the legislature. They know that they may have a disadvantage in Council of State elections in the future, but they also know they can likely keep control of the legislature through gerrymandered state house and senate districts for the foreseeable future. For years, they have been steadily shifting executive power to the legislature.
State Senators Graig Meyer and Julie Mayfield released an op-ed yesterday titled “Our legislature is shifting toward authoritarian rule.” They point out six steps the legislature took in the past session to consolidate power and weaken opposition. They include diminishing checks and balances, politicizing institutions, weakening election oversight, reducing the power of the press by limiting access to government oversight, criminalizing dissent, and targeting minorities. Whether these steps are leading to authoritarian rule might be debatable, but the GOP is certainly trying reduce democratic rule. They want unchecked legislative power that’s protected by their gerrymandered districts at the expense of democratically elected executive branch officials.
They seem to be modeling the illiberal democracies that have emerged in Eastern Europe. Hungary’s Victor Orban has reduced the power of the courts to check his power. He’s hollowed out institutions and gerrymandered his party a majority in parliament. He’s demonized immigrant and minority communities. Republicans in North Carolina seem to be following his road map to consolidate their power. American conservatives have been so impressed with Orban, CPAC held a conference in Budapest earlier this year and he was a speaker at their annual meeting in 2022.
However, while Orban has broad support in Hungary, Republicans in the North Carolina legislature only enjoy strong support in the districts they represent, not the state as a whole. They are trying to weaken the governor’s office, in particular, to prevent any checks on their power. They are assigning the legislature executive functions like overseeing elections. They are trying to micromanage the state by committee.
Some Republican attempts to strip power from the governor in the recent past have been thwarted by the courts. Now, Republicans control the Supreme Court and Chief Justice Paul Newby seems to be more of a partisan warrior than a neutral arbiter dispensing justice. The court has been willing to break precedent and reverse recent rulings by the former court that was led by Democrats. They may be creating a new, if unhealthy, precedent, watching their rulings dismissed by a future court led by Democrats. If the trends illustrated by the Carolina Forward report hold, the GOP’s dominance of the Supreme Court will not last as long as Republican control of the legislature.
While Republicans may be following the road map laid out by an Eastern European autocrat, they are following a sordid tradition that has defined North Carolina’s politics since its beginning. Contrary to the statement of Meyer and Mayfield that “Since our founding we have grounded ourselves in a system of checks and balances, transparent government and fair elections as the ultimate tool of accountability,” North Carolina has been dominated by conservative reactionaries for most of its history. We’ve only had two periods in the past defined by liberal democracy—one sporadic era in the years following the Civil War until the turn of the 20th century and the other from 1960 until 2010. The right-wing populism dominating the GOP today is in large measure a backlash to the enlightened progressive governance of those fifty years.
The political battle in North Carolina over the next few decades will likely be defined by spats between an executive branch supported by a growing, culturally diverse population and a legislature representing a largely White, rural population. The best predictor of how people will vote may be how deeply their roots are entrenched in the state—the old versus the new. The fight will be to define what we mean by a more perfect union, one that reflects the values of our changing population or one controlled by the people who have been here for generations.