Nearly everything that comes out of his office gets analyzed as a political calculation. Who asked for it? Who benefits? What does this mean for 2028?

I’m fine with that level of attention. Boliek is a Council of State member and signed up for it, though Stein and former Gov. Roy Cooper could stand to get more of the same.

Anyway, I couldn’t complain even if I thought it was unfair. I’ve written a ton about Boliek myself — albeit mostly positive — and I’m about to do it again.

His latest audit landed Monday morning, and I’m going to speculate wildly about why it exists.

In the report, Boliek’s office calculated how much North Carolina’s odd-year municipal elections cost in 2025.

The answer is $8.4 million, spread across 91 counties. About 822,000 votes were cast. Mecklenburg County spent the most at nearly $1.3 million, or $5.83 per vote. Camden County …

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“There’s power, and then there’s pork,” Hayes told The Concord Tribune, his hometown newspaper. “That’s the mentality we’re trying to kill this year: the thinking that you can take as much as you want back home with you without hurting the rest of the state.”

“Just because we’ve got some influence doesn’t mean the pork is going to start rolling in.”

Hayes’s later career requires an unfortunate footnote: He pleaded guilty in 2019 to lying to the FBI during a bribery investigation and was pardoned by President Donald Trump. That case had nothing to do with earmarks, but it would be odd not to mention it.

Still, his quote captured how Republicans talked about pork when Democrats controlled Raleigh. Earmarks were not merely wasteful. They were an abuse of power.

Counting up the spoils

Depending on how broadly you define an earmark, the new budget contains anywhere from $350 million in formally labeled special appropriations to nearly $1.6 billion in projects directed to particular places and recipients.

The longer-term growth is unmistakable. One like-for-like measure tracked by The Assembly found $76 million in earmarks for roughly 200 private organizations in the 2017-19 budget. By 2023-25, that had grown to $1.4 billion for more than 600 organizations.

Even a decade ago, I suspect most lawmakers would have been a little sheepish about admitting they brought it home. Today, though, the embarrassment is completely gone.

Now they even send press releases about it.

Last week, Republican Rep. Alan Branson announced that he had helped deliver “hundreds of millions in new investments” to Guilford County. Along with money for roads and public facilities, he highlighted $50,000 each for Bikes for Kids, Senior Resources of Guilford and the North Carolina Folk Festival, plus more than $2 million for Peacehaven Community Farm.

“One of the most rewarding parts of serving is being able to bring real results back home,” Branson said. “I’m proud that this budget delivers for the great people of our county.”

I don’t particularly blame him. If I were a legislator and helped a local fire department buy equipment or secured money for a worthwhile nonprofit, I would probably brag about it, too. Not every earmark is bad, and elected officials should know their districts better than a faceless state grant committee.

However, some earmarks are harder to defend than others. The Carolina Journal found that a gated Harnett County community is receiving $300,000 from the new budget. That includes $160,000 for undefined “emergency services needs” and $140,000 for “various needs,” including work on shelters that residents can rent for $60.

Voters share the same contradiction.

An Elon University poll in 2010 found that 59% of North Carolinians supported government spending to create jobs specifically in their own community. But when “jobs” was removed from the wording, 60% opposed spending that benefited only their community. And 63% opposed “pork-barrel” spending.

In other words: People like local investments. They hate pork.

I haven’t seen the subject polled much lately, perhaps because we all have bigger fish to fry. But I doubt human nature has changed much.

Everybody wants credit

Brian Balfour of the John Locke Foundation counted 727 earmarks in this year’s budget, but the budget does not identify which lawmakers requested them.

One obvious fix is the Insko Rule, named for former Democratic Rep. Verla Insko. She proposed requiring each special appropriation to identify the lawmakers who requested it. Her 2017 bill never received a hearing, and an attempt to put the requirement into the House rules failed 48-68.

When reporter Bryan Anderson asked legislative leaders about reviving the idea, the House’s explanation was not that lawmakers might be embarrassed. It was that too many people would want to take credit for the same provision. The Senate reportedly considers attribution a logistical headache.

That may be the best summary of how power changes a political party. In 1994, Republicans worried that influence would tempt them to bring home too much pork. Today, the concern is that there might not be enough room on the label for everyone who wants credit.

I understand why majority lawmakers like earmarks. They help assemble votes, reward allies and give legislators something tangible to show constituents. Some of the projects are quite good.

But directing anything close to $2 billion toward particular projects through a process with little public debate and no named requester is a bad way to conduct state business.

Hayes’s prediction did not hold up: Once Republicans gained influence, the pork eventually started rolling in. That is unlikely to change. But now that nobody is embarrassed by it, there should be no objection to putting names on the label.

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A rare consensus last week: 97% of you said that lawmakers should revisit the prediction markets issue when they come back into session.

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Longleaf Politics is a deeply personal project for me. I started it because I wanted to create a place for smarter government and better politics in North Carolina. I still research and write every post myself, and the support of readers like you is what keeps it going.

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The basic argument is that local governments have built more infrastructure and assumed more obligations than their tax bases can ultimately support. Everything looks fine, until growth slows. Then it all falls apart.

Just this week, a new report from the state auditor’s office offered a remarkably clean North Carolina example of how this can start.

The audit covers Columbus County, a geographically huge but sparsely populated rural county in southeastern part of the state.

It found that the county’s tax base has eroded at an alarming rate. Between its 2024 and 2026 budgets, Columbus County lost roughly $328 million in taxable property value.

That is a loss of about 7.5% of the county’s tax base, in only two years.

But the more astounding part is how it happened. A decline that large sound…

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Prediction markets are a different story. With a short section in the new state budget, North Carolina appears to have become the first state to expressly welcome prediction market gambling while giving up virtually all state authority to oversee it.

While it’s largely been overlooked, this is a fundamental statement about who should control a rapidly growing form of gambling and whether North Carolina intends to have much of a say at all.

When it goes into effect on Jan. 1, 2027, it would place North Carolina at the most permissive edge of an unsettled national fight over gambling, federal power and state regulation.

When lawmakers return later this month for a budget corrections bill, they should repeal this section and return the state to the position it occupied just a few weeks ago.

That wouldn’t settle the national debate over prediction markets. It would simply allow North Carolina to have that debate before giving away its leverage.

North Carolina’s unusually permissive position

Prediction markets — including platforms such as Kalshi and Polymarket — have quickly become the center of one of the biggest legal battles in American gambling.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s position is straightforward: Event contracts traded on federally registered exchanges are financial derivatives under federal law, not gambling products subject to regulation by individual states.

The CFTC has repeatedly argued that it has exclusive authority over those markets. It has filed briefs supporting prediction-market operators and lawsuits seeking to prevent states from applying their gambling laws to federally registered exchanges such as Kalshi and Polymarket US.

Most states have not been willing to accept that argument.

Their resistance has been broad and bipartisan. State attorneys general and gaming regulators have brought lawsuits, issued cease-and-desist orders and defended the states’ longstanding authority to decide whether and how gambling takes place within their borders.

Many of the states resisting that argument are led by Republican attorneys general or conservative legislatures. Their position is that attaching the label “financial contract” to a wager on a football game should not automatically allow an operator to bypass state gambling laws.

Kentucky took a more cautious middle course. It chose to tax prediction-market activity but expressly declined to treat that decision as legalization or as a surrender of state authority.

North Carolina did the opposite.

Section 44.9 of the new state budget imposes a 6% tax on prediction markets’ net trading-fee revenue. But it also expressly recognizes exclusive federal regulatory authority and says North Carolina will impose no licensing, registration or other regulatory obligations of its own.

That appears to make North Carolina the first state to write the prediction-market industry’s preferred legal theory directly into state law.

The courts have not conclusively resolved whether the CFTC or the states are right. North Carolina nevertheless decided the issue for itself — and entirely in favor of federal control.

Whether that ultimately proves to be the correct legal interpretation is almost beside the point.

What is remarkable is that North Carolina voluntarily embraced it before it had to. Rather than preserve its authority to establish age requirements, consumer protections, licensing standards or limits on particular kinds of contracts, the state agreed to stay out of the way.

If you’re concerned about gambling, this should concern you

My own position on gambling has never been a secret. If I were designing North Carolina’s laws from scratch, sports gambling would not be legal.

But that isn’t the question facing lawmakers today.

The more immediate question is whether North Carolina should voluntarily surrender its ability to regulate an entirely new category of gambling before deciding what rules ought to apply.

Prediction markets have already produced controversies that illustrate the moral and practical problems surrounding wagers on real-world events.

ABC News reported that President Donald Trump’s longtime White House teleprompter operator is believed to have earned more than $100,000 trading on Kalshi contracts tied to what Trump would say in his speeches.

Federal prosecutors have also charged an active-duty Army soldier stationed at Fort Bragg with using classified information about a planned military operation to capture Nicolás Maduro to make more than $400,000 through Polymarket trades. Those remain allegations, and the soldier is entitled to the presumption of innocence.

Neither example proves that state regulation could prevent every abuse. They do show how quickly prediction markets can create incentives to exploit privileged information about political decisions, public officials and even military operations.

When new forms of wagering emerge, states normally preserve the ability to respond. They debate consumer protections. They establish licensing requirements and age limits. They decide which subjects should be off-limits. They retain the authority to adapt as new problems arise.

North Carolina’s budget moves in the opposite direction.

Instead of asking what guardrails should exist, it largely gives up the state’s ability to build them.

Prediction markets are increasingly sports betting without the state rules

There is another reason this budget provision deserves scrutiny. Most people still associate prediction markets with election forecasts or quirky wagers about politics and popular culture.

Visit the home pages of Kalshi or Polymarket, however, and something else becomes obvious: Sports dominate.

Prediction markets increasingly compete directly with traditional sportsbooks. The difference is that licensed sportsbooks in North Carolina operate within a regulatory framework designed by North Carolina.

They must obtain state licenses, pay a 23% tax on gross wagering revenue and comply with North Carolina’s age requirements, responsible-gambling rules, integrity safeguards and regulatory oversight.

Federally regulated prediction markets have their own compliance obligations. But the new budget expressly says North Carolina will impose no state gaming license, registration or other regulatory obligations on them. They will not have to follow the state’s sports-wagering framework or answer to North Carolina gaming regulators.

The economic activity looks remarkably similar. Consumers are placing money on the outcomes of sporting events.

North Carolina’s legal sports-betting market was designed to generate revenue for public priorities while requiring operators to meet state consumer-protection standards. If customers migrate from licensed sportsbooks to federally regulated prediction markets, the state could collect less revenue while still bearing many of the resulting social, enforcement and consumer-protection costs.

The American Gaming Association, which represents the state-regulated gaming industry and therefore has an interest in this debate, estimates that states have missed out on more than $1.1 billion in potential gaming-tax revenue since prediction markets began offering sports contracts.

That figure should be treated as an industry estimate, not settled fact. But the underlying concern is obvious.

Even people who support legal sports betting should ask a simple question:

Why should North Carolina encourage a parallel sports-wagering market that plays by a completely different set of state rules?

Fix it before it takes effect

None of this requires lawmakers to decide whether prediction markets should ultimately operate in North Carolina. Reasonable people can disagree about that.

What does not make sense is allowing North Carolina to become the nation’s most accommodating jurisdiction for prediction markets through a budget provision that received little independent scrutiny.

The upcoming budget corrections bill provides an easy solution.

Repeal Section 44.9 and return North Carolina to the status quo that existed before the budget passed.

Allow the courts to resolve the federal questions. Allow lawmakers to consider prediction markets through a standalone bill with committee hearings, expert testimony and public input.

I’d still prefer to see gambling far more limited than it is today, but that isn’t the realistic choice before the General Assembly.

The realistic choice is whether North Carolina should give away its authority before deciding how this new industry ought to operate.

It shouldn’t. Lawmakers still have time to fix that mistake.

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A serious primary, she argued, would force the Senate president pro tem to spend money that otherwise could help vulnerable Republican senators — and could cost the party its supermajority.

Page ran anyway and beat Berger by 23 votes, ending the career of the man who has led the North Carolina Senate since Republicans took control in 2011.

And while Galey was wrong about whether Page could beat Berger, she appears to have been right about the money.

Berger ended the second quarter with just $40,381 in his account, according to newly filed campaign finance reports. That is an extraordinary reversal for a leader who has spent years serving as the financial center of the Senate Republican caucus.

At the same point in previous election cycles, Berger had:

• $587,046 in 2024.

• $1.03 million in 2022.

• $1.31 million in 2020.

• $1.61 million in 2018.

Berger did contribute a li…

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Ohio took the top spot this year, and congratulations are in order. It has clearly made some smart economic reforms over the last few years (shoutout to the Buckeye Institute for that).

The state is also finally adding people again, which is nice to see. Come to think of it, you do not hear as many jokes anymore about Ohio transplants moving to North Carolina.

So maybe Ohio’s comeback is real. Or maybe they all already moved here. Either way, well done, Buckeye State.

North Carolina fell all the way to No. 2, losing by nine points out of 2,500. The basic explanation is simple: CNBC changed what it values most. Last year, “economy” was the top category. This year, infrastructure is.

North Carolina still ranks No. 1 for the economy, but Ohio ranked No. 1 in infrastructure. That was enough to flip the order.

These rankings are always a little inscrutable, though people do actually care about them. So I spend more time than I care to admit trying to figure out exactly how CNBC makes these rankings. I’m sure there is a method to the madness somewhere, but I just cannot promise I found it.

However, there is one interesting nugget here. CNBC says Ohio’s infrastructure advantage is partly about its robust program to pair companies with shovel-ready industrial development sites.

In this context, “infrastructure” is not just roads and bridges. It also means whether a company can show up and build quickly. Is the land assembled? Are the utilities there? Is there enough water, power and sewer capacity? Can a company move from announcement to construction without spending years untangling local, state and utility questions?

Ohio appears to have made that a specialty. CNBC highlighted its “SiteOhio Authenticated” program and inventory of construction-ready sites. Nobody runs for office promising more certified industrial dirt, but billion-dollar projects need somewhere to go.

North Carolina knows this is a priority, too. In 2022, the General Assembly created the Megasite Readiness Program to identify and prepare more 1,000-acre-plus sites capable of handling the next wave of major projects.

In one sense, North Carolina has been a victim of its own success. We have less available infrastructure because big companies have already claimed so much of it. Toyota, VinFast and Wolfspeed were huge wins. They also consumed some of the state’s best large industrial sites.

North Carolina’s run of megaproject wins depleted its inventory of megasites just as demand for them was rising. At the time, EDPNC said it was competing for 15 to 20 projects requiring a megasite, compared with only a few in a typical year.

But there is a money difference, too. Ohio backed its site-readiness push with a $750 million fund — roughly $375 million a year over its two-year budget. North Carolina’s comparable Megasite Readiness Program had about $108 million over two fiscal years, or roughly $54 million a year, plus another $10 million for smaller “selectsites.”

That is real money. It is not Ohio money.

So no, North Carolina has not lost its edge. People and businesses are still choosing this state. We are still the real First in Flight, no matter how much Ohio wants to inspect the birth certificate. And Charlotte is still the real Queen City, with apologies to Cincinnati and its very ambitious nickname.

But there is a useful warning in the ranking. Growth does not maintain itself. If North Carolina wants the next Toyota, Wolfspeed or advanced manufacturing megaproject, it needs places ready for those companies to go.

Last year, when North Carolina was No. 1, I wrote that the real story was not the trophy but the long-term reform agenda that put us there: lower taxes, fiscal discipline, regulatory restraint and a state government that mostly remembered growth is good.

That remains true.

Ohio can have the crown this year. They earned it.

North Carolina should just remember that getting to the top took years of disciplined work. Staying there will, too.

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Have you bought The Change Agent yet?

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Sometimes it was just about getting a quick straightforward story on the event. But sometimes, especially with the capitol press corps, it was more likely to be something else — a reaction to the controversy of the day or the chance to see whether the candidate would say something awkward.

That is why I am more sympathetic than most to Republican U.S. Senate candidate Michael Whatley’s campaign after it barred Bryan Anderson of The Assembly from a campaign event this week. I generally do not think this is a good strategy, but I understand the calculation.

Anderson had RSVP’d to cover an event touting Whatley’s endorsement from the Police Benevolent Association. But he had also made a bunch of hay recently about Whatley’s awkward Hurricanes moment and the questions surrounding how Whatley describes his North Carolina upbr…

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Gov. Josh Stein has made a habit of signing bills even when they were not exactly what Democrats would have written. That has been one of the more interesting parts of this second year of his term. He has seemed determined to avoid performative fights with the General Assembly.

Then he vetoed House Bill 437, a bill dealing with homelessness encampments and shelters. I’ll be honest: I don’t really get it.

The bill does two main things.

1. It creates drug-free zones around homeless shelters, with tougher penalties for certain drug offenses in those zones.

2. It bars local governments from allowing regular public camping or sleeping on public property, while still allowing them to create temporary designated camping sites when there are not enough shelter beds.

Those sites would have to meet basic standards: safety, sanitation, restrooms, running water, security, and coordination with mental health and substance abuse services.

Non…

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I spent the past year trying to answer that question. The result is my first book: The Change Agent, available now.

For the first time, you’ll get the full story of one of the most consequential political figures in modern North Carolina history.

Get the Book

Before the boycotts, protests, and bitter defeat, McCrory was the mayor who helped transform Charlotte into a major American city. Then he became governor and brought that same restless, results-driven style to Raleigh.

It worked, until it didn’t.

Over the past year, I spent hundreds of hours talking with Gov. McCrory, his advisers, his allies, and his critics. What I found was bigger than a simple rise and fall.

The Change Agent is about what Pat McCrory built, what he changed, what he misjudged, and the kind of leadership North Carolina once rewarded, and may yet need again.

I’m proud of this book, and I hope you’ll read it.

You can order The Change Agent on Amazon today.

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Thank you, as always, for reading and supporting Longleaf Politics.

Andrew

That’s not reality.

As I drive around Charlotte, I see plenty of American flags on display ahead of the Fourth of July weekend. It’s not a political statement at all. It’s just normal. Neighborly. American.

A new Catawba College-YouGov survey points in the same direction. Before the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, 87% of North Carolinians said it was important to celebrate the Declaration, including 80% of Democrats, 86% of independents and 98% of Republicans.

That does not sound like a people ready to give up on the country.

And yet, it is true that this year’s semiquincentennial celebration does not feel like as big a deal as it should. You can point the finger in plenty of directions, including the present occupant of the White House.

But I do not think the deeper problem is any one politician, party or ideology. It is certainly not that Americans have rejected patriotism. Maybe patriotism has simply become thinner.

The Venerable Fulton Sheen, the Catholic bishop whose television broadcasts once drew millions of viewers, saw this problem long before our current moment. In an episode called “Quo Vadis, America?” he said patriotism was tied to the old virtue of pietas: love of God, love of neighbor and love of country.

“And when one goes out,” he said, “all go out.”

That feels right. And we have work to do on all three fronts.

Love of God reminds us that the nation is not ultimate. Love of neighbor keeps patriotism from becoming mere tribalism. Love of country teaches us gratitude for what we have inherited and responsibility for what we pass on.

This July 4, that seems worth remembering.

One programming note: I’m not planning to send the regular Longleaf Politics email on Monday. Enjoy the holiday weekend, and keep an eye out for a special announcement on Tuesday.

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There are some hefty raises for teachers and law enforcement officers, and above-average raises for other state employees. Personal income taxes are going to continue to go down, with a reset slate of revenue triggers. We’re also going to put a sizable amount of money into reserves, too.

You can get a pretty good overview of the top-line numbers in this press release from Senate president pro tem Phil Berger and House Speaker Destin Hall. You can get a shorter version here from The Assembly and here from WUNC.

Or you can go ahead and read the full 600+-page bill.

Leadership says they’ll vote on the bill by the end of the week, and I do not expect Gov. Josh Stein to veto it. Could we escape 2026 without a single veto? It’s looking likely.

To close the loop on stuff I’ve written about earlier:

• The provision to make Charlotte r…

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In the final days of budget negotiations, lawmakers reportedly considered a framework for a $1.7 billion Raleigh baseball stadium that could support a Major League Baseball expansion bid. The Senate wanted to move forward, while the House had concerns.

Baseball didn’t make it in the final budget released this week, and that’s for the best. The budget is already nearly a year overdue, and it needs to pass. We didn’t need another thorny disagreement holding up the process, and besides, the MLB proposal is too big, too expensive and too complicated to be handled so cavalierly.

Even so, there is now real momentum behind the push to bring Major League Baseball to North Carolina. The General Assembly can still support Raleigh’s baseball dream this session. It just needs to do it in a way that respects both the ambition of the project and the risk to taxpayers.

That means a c…

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Lawmakers just overrode several of Gov. Josh Stein’s vetoes from 2025, including the N.C. Border Protection Act, which is now law. In a short session that could have been consumed entirely by budget gridlock, the legislature has actually done a lot.

One of the most under-the-radar wins came last week, when Stein signed House Bill 315.

The new law makes North Carolina the first state in the country to ban third-party litigation investment. That sounds like something only lawyers and lobbyists would care about, but the basic idea is simple: Outside investors should not be able to bankroll lawsuits in exchange for a cut of the winnings.

A lawsuit is supposed to be a search for justice, not an asset class.

Litigation financing changes the incentives of the court system. It encourages more lawsuits, bigger demands and longer courtroom battles, not necessarily because justice requires it, but because a third party is trying to maximize its return.

North Carolina has spent years trying to improve its business climate. Taxes and regulations get most of the attention, but the legal climate is part of the equation, too. Businesses notice whether a state’s courts are places to resolve disputes or places where outside money can turn lawsuits into speculative investments.

By drawing a clear line against that practice, North Carolina is making its courts less attractive to outside litigation financiers and more predictable for everyone else.

That is good for North Carolina.

It doesn’t quite roll off the tongue like “First in Flight,” but “first in ending the financial securitization of the court system” is notable, too.

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Gov. Stein signed a property tax moratorium bill that he clearly didn’t love. In my newspaper column, I argued that his decision shows where the 2026 campaign is headed: Property taxes are becoming the defining state issue, and that’s exactly the kind of debate North Carolina politics should be having.

Read it here, free with gift link: The surprising central issue in North Carolina’s 2026 elections

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But this one is important. And ideally, North Carolina handles it now, before it turns into a political problem later.

The issue is SNAP, commonly known as food stamps. The federal government has historically paid the full cost of the benefits, while states and counties handle much of the administration.

That arrangement changed in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the major federal law passed last July. Congress decided to crack down on waste, fraud and abuse in the food stamp program by focusing on payment error rates.

Starting in fiscal year 2028, states with SNAP payment error rates at or above 6% can be required to pay part of their own benefit costs. The higher the error rate, the bigger the state share.

The Trump administration takes a lot of heat, and rightly so in plenty of cases. But this is one of its brighter spots. Washington is finally putting real pressure on states to ru…

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Those arrows are flying in the wrong direction. All that anger aimed at Sawyer badly misunderstands what is actually happening. Here’s why.

In case you haven’t been following this issue, here’s a quick recap. The Charlotte City Council voted last month to rescind support for the I-77 South toll lane project. That effectively blew up a project NCDOT had spent years advancing and tens of millions of dollars planning.

Everyone kind of expected the General Assembly to respond, and earlier in June, Sawyer floated a proposal that would require Charlotte and the other local governments that voted to pull the project to repay NCDOT for those costs. Until they do, some state transportation money could be frozen.

Because of that, I get why Sawyer is taking the arrows. But anyone paying attention should understand the dynamics. She made them clear on her radio s…

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To start off, this bill is nowhere near as “sweeping” as a lot of the rhetoric would suggest. The word sounds neutral, but it carries a pretty clear implication: Republicans are pushing through a massive, dangerous package of election changes.

I don’t think that’s right.

The vast majority of this bill is pretty innocuous, like bumping up the threshold for filing campaign finance reports a tiny bit, increasing compensation for county board of elections members by a small amount, or creating more training requirements for election officials. There’s also stuff in here that liberals should appreciate, like extending some cure deadlines from three business days to five and making some temporary Class C driver’s licenses valid for voter ID.

That said, there are a few parts of the bill worth debating at greater length and places where the language should be tightened.

Exempt positions are not inherently scandalous

One of the loudest criticisms is that the bill politicizes the State Board of Elections by creating more exempt positions. I think that’s a misreading of what “exempt” employees really are.

State personnel laws have two classes of workers: those covered and those exempt. Covered employees have a ton of protections that make it so they can stay employed even with a changing administration. In a lot of cases, this makes sense. It would be hard to get good civil servants in bureaucratic positions if they were afraid they could get axed every few years.

But a duly chosen executive — or, in this case, the leadership structure responsible for running the agency — should have latitude to put people in leadership positions who can execute the vision for the office.

You can call the alternative a permanent “deep state” if you want, but I think it’s really more of a management issue.

It happens in companies all the time. A new leader comes in, the organization needs to move in a different direction, and there are people inside the building working at cross-purposes with that direction. Not necessarily because they’re bad people. Often they’re not. But those folks can make management difficult.

State personnel laws can do the same thing.

There’s a reason legal, communications, legislative affairs, HR and internal audit roles are different from frontline administrative jobs. Those are positions of trust. They shape the direction and responsiveness of the agency. In most organizations, senior leaders get to have a say over who occupies those roles.

That is not scandalous, and it shouldn’t even really be controversial.

We should also be clear about the scale here. Opponents are talking about this like some huge percentage of the elections staff is being converted into political operatives. The bill deals with seven exempt positions.

Seven.

Pretending seven leadership positions represent some wholesale partisan takeover is not a serious way to talk about the bill.

The post-election audit process is a real improvement

The part I like most is Section 2.10, which creates a new post-election process for identifying invalid votes.

Right now, close elections can get very weird very fast. Legal teams start digging through obituaries and voter files looking for dead people from the other party who cast early or absentee ballots.

Republicans look for dead Democrats. Democrats look for dead Republicans. It’s macabre and gross.

This bill would have boards of elections do basic clean-up work through a more orderly process, outside the normal partisan challenge hunt. That is a much better way to do it.

The process should be uniform, statewide and evidence-based — not a partisan scavenger hunt after a close race. That matters for election integrity, but it also matters for public trust.

The “promoting turnout” language should be tightened

There is one provision I would tighten. The bill says State Board of Elections members and county board members cannot make public statements encouraging or promoting voter turnout in any election.

I understand where this is coming from. Board members should not be partisan actors. They should not be running turnout programs designed to help one party, one candidate or one side of a referendum.

But the language probably goes too far. There is a difference between a board member running a large-scale voter registration or turnout campaign and a board member posting a short Instagram video saying, “Go vote.”

I’d tighten the language to focus on partisan, targeted or organized turnout activity — not generic pro-voting speech. Election officials should not be campaigners. But we should be careful not to make civic participation sound suspicious.

The takeaway

Election law should be boring. It should be clear, enforceable and administered by people who know what they’re doing. The rules should protect every eligible voter’s right to cast a ballot, and they should also protect the public’s confidence that every ballot counted was legally cast.

I think this bill moves us in that direction.

Sure, there are places where the language could be improved. But the loudest version of the criticism treats almost every administrative change as a threat to democracy. I don’t buy that.

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But I also try to keep an eye on the bills that pass with little fanfare. One that caught my eye is Senate Bill 695, which now awaits Gov. Josh Stein’s signature after passing 45-0 in the Senate and 110-1 in the House.

The bill gives local governments the power to create “incentive districts,” designed to encourage development in places that are blighted, underdeveloped or otherwise struggling to attract private investment. When you dive in a little, it’s actually an interesting new economic development tool.

It’s a complicated topic, but I think it’s worth explaining. Those of you with MPA degrees can tell me if I’m wrong.

Here’s the backstory

Back in 2004, North Carolina created something called a “development financing district.” This is basically our state’s version of tax-incre…

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The most obvious recent example is in how schools teach reading. For years, education experts preached a “whole language” approach, which encouraged children to guess words from context and pictures instead of being systematically taught how letters and sounds work together.

Unsurprisingly, too many students failed to become strong readers. And eventually, public pressure reached a boiling point, forcing lawmakers to step in and require science-backed reading instruction.

But even that may not hold a candle to the fad currently dominating North Carolina public education, with little sign that the people in charge are ready to slow down.

I’m talking about, of course, the digital device craze in schools.

For more than a decade, North Carolina’s education establishment has pushed schools to issue every K-12 student a laptop or iPad, spending more than $3 billion in the process. At this point, the public school system has more than 1.2 million such devices, with 75% of them traveling home with students each day.

The experts called it innovation, equity and personalized learning. But the real impact has been turning the school day into a nearly endless parade of screen time that is crippling students’ ability to learn.

We bought every child a distraction machine, then made it inescapable in the classroom. And we left parents with no meaningful way to say no.

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How we got here

You will often hear school districts talk about 1:1 device policies as if they were a COVID-era necessity that never quite went away. That’s not really true.

North Carolina’s device push was already well underway long before schools closed in 2020.

The Mooresville Graded School District was an early adopter, beginning its “Digital Conversion” program in 2007 and distributing laptops in 2008 to students in grades 2-12.

Chatham County was early too, discussing a plan in 2010 to give every student from kindergarten through high school some sort of digital device. The school board voted that year to give high school students new laptops while students in kindergarten through eighth grade got iPads. A spokeswoman said the board was “in full support of the 1:1 program” and wanted to move to a “digital learning environment as soon as possible.”

But the craze really exploded in the early 2010s through then-President Barack Obama’s Race to the Top program, which pressured states to adopt the Common Core standards. Obama visited a Mooresville school to celebrate1.

To win crucial federal funding, states had to agree to implement new standardized assessments that were designed to be taken online, setting off a mad scramble for schools to buy hardware.

Google capitalized on this panic by hosting targeted seminars for school administrators, hyping Chromebooks as revolutionary tools that would “democratize education” and “transform passive consumers into active creators.”

North Carolina jumped right on the train. After a Google education seminar in Union County, local school leaders sounded fully converted. Then-board chairman Richard Yercheck said schools should start asking what “22nd Century classrooms” would look like, because “if you’re not getting ahead of it, you’re behind it.” The district then bought 24,000 new Chromebooks for students in grades 6-12 and pushed thousands of older laptops into elementary schools.

The General Assembly bought in to it, too. In 2013, the Republican-led legislature passed a cluster of laws that pushed North Carolina schools toward screens. These laws directed the State Board of Education to write digital learning standards for teachers and students and declared that North Carolina should start moving away from printed textbooks and toward digital materials. It also created a grant program to help districts re-orient their instruction around technology.

The result was the N.C. Digital Learning Plan, released in 2015. It imagined technology as a constant presence in school: digital textbooks, online testing and assignments, personalized learning software, etc.

In 2016, the General Assembly doubled down on the vision, requiring the State Board of Education to collaborate with the Friday Institute to implement the plan and setting aside millions of dollars to assist with that. The Golden LEAF Foundation also pumped money into 1:1 device programs across the state.

School districts responded in a big way.

Moore County handed out iPads to all 410 students at Carthage Elementary School in 2013 as the first phase of an initiative to eventually provide a device for every student in the school system.

News coverage from that time almost glows with enthusiasm. “The kids are ready for it,” one principal said. A teacher said that if the same lesson had been pencil and paper, some students “might not be as into it,” adding that “the engagement is going to lead to more learning for sure.”

In Graham County in 2016, Robbinsville High School gave every student a new laptop. The principal called it “the most exciting thing that’s happened education-wise” since he had become principal.

News coverage at the time said it did not take much to sell district leaders on the “one device for every student” concept, with the principal saying that technology staff came back from a conference in Raleigh reporting that if the district did not act, “we would be way behind everybody else.”

By 2017, Watauga County had integrated more than 2,500 student Chromebooks into classrooms, increasing digital access down to fourth grade. That same year, Cherryville High School became Gaston County’s first neighborhood public high school to provide a Google Chromebook to every student and teacher.

Carteret County completed a one-to-one Chromebook initiative in 2018 for students in grades 2-12, while kindergarten and first-grade students had access to iPads.

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools began rolling out its one-to-one device program in 2018. Cumberland County completed its 1:1 rollout that same year. Pitt County wasn’t far behind.

There were differences in speed and sequence among N.C. school districts, but the direction was clear. North Carolina’s public schools were being rebuilt around screens.

What it looks like today

In 2015, Wake County debated a policy requiring parental consent before students used technology in school. Today, that world is long gone.

Walk into a school now and ask whether your child can opt out of school-issued devices, online assignments or routine screen-based instruction, and the blunt answer is no. Ask me how I know.

It’s not because teaching is impossible without a Chromebook, but because the system has been rebuilt around them.

In nearly all grades, the device is now the place where students complete reading passages, math practice, benchmark assessments and independent work. It becomes the quiet activity when a teacher needs to work with another group. It becomes the make-up station, the review station and the test-prep station.

And it all starts earlier than many parents realize.

In elementary school, the devices often enter through reading and math blocks. A teacher works with a small group while other students rotate through stations. One group reads, while another group puts on headphones and logs into a program like iReady, DreamBox or Amplify. If a child finishes early, the default instruction is often some version of, get on your Chromebook and work.

By middle school, assignments are all posted online. Teachers communicate through Canvas, Google Classroom or another learning-management system. Students read digital articles, complete online quizzes, take benchmark tests, draft writing assignments in Google Docs, watch instructional videos and submit work through portals. Textbooks, when they exist at all, are generally digital.

By high school, the Chromebook has become nearly inseparable from the school day.

Students use it for notes, research, essays, class readings, online textbooks, quizzes, discussion boards, test prep, homework and submissions. Even when a teacher is lecturing or leading discussion, the laptop is open nearby.

Once school happens on the device, distraction becomes part of the school, too. Students learn which sites are blocked, which ones are not, which games still work, which browser tricks get around filters and which videos can be watched without drawing too much attention.

A break in class becomes a chance to watch YouTube. A few minutes after finishing an assignment becomes game time. Lunch becomes screen time. Homework becomes a reason to open the laptop again, with every distraction one click away.

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The impact

During the pandemic lockdowns, school districts used the flood of federal money to buy new devices by the tens of thousands. They are now reaching the end of their useful lives, and so administrators now face the cost of replacing them — and are finding the price tag too steep.

Wake County, the state’s largest school district, is now openly questioning whether the model is financially sustainable. Superintendent Robert Taylor told a school board committee that “one-to-one is something that a district of our size just cannot afford,” and suggested the district move toward “appropriate access” instead.

That’s a problem, sure, but the money is not the main issue. The real problem is that North Carolina spent billions and does not have much to show for it educationally.

If the 1:1 era was supposed to transform learning, it is hard to see it in the results. North Carolina’s NAEP reading results certainly do not look like a vindication of the model. In 2024, only 30% of North Carolina fourth-graders scored at or above proficient in reading, down from 39% in 2017.

Obviously, many things affect achievement, but after billions of dollars and more than a decade of disruption, the device push cannot credibly claim to have put a dent in the problems it was supposed to address.

There is also good reason to think it created new problems.

A growing body of research suggests that students tend to understand and retain material better when they read on paper rather than on a screen. Handwriting appears to support learning and memory in ways typing does not fully replace. Multitasking harms comprehension, and digital devices invite precisely the kind of multitasking, skimming and distraction that serious learning is supposed to overcome.

That tracks with what parents and teachers see. North Carolina just passed a cellphone law because phones distract students, but the school-issued device may now be an even bigger problem inside the classroom.

Dr. Kaitlyn Burnell, director of research at UNC-Chapel Hill’s Winston Center on Technology and Brain Development, told lawmakers that “more students are reporting being distracted by other students’ school-issued devices than other students’ phone use or personal device use.”

Parents push back

Parents are now beginning to push back, and what’s fascinating is that it seems to be a true bipartisan issue. The concern is not especially ideological. Parents are looking at the school day their children actually experience and asking a basic question: Why is so much of this happening on a screen?

A group of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools parents launched a petition asking for “balanced, intentional technology use,” including limits on nonessential screen time, more transparency around ed-tech platforms, stronger privacy protections, meaningful consent and clear opt-out pathways for families who want less technology.

In Chapel Hill-Carrboro, Mary Beth Roche launched Parents for Intentional Tech after hearing similar concerns from other families. The group began with 35 people in a focus group and has grown to more than 300 members.

Roche described the values disconnect well. Parents work hard to set screen boundaries at home. Then their children go to school, and those boundaries disappear into a system the parents do not control.

School boards are still (mostly) pushing ahead

Despite all that, most school districts are still not ready to turn around. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools now wants $6 million from the county in its new budget proposal to refresh student devices. The district has budgeted roughly $16 million to $20 million in county funding over four years for student device updates beginning in 2024.

The Rowan-Salisbury district recently discussed its 1:1 device program before ultimately reaffirming support for it.

However, there are pockets of change. Burke County, for example, is now going in the other direction. Last year, its school board adopted a resolution encouraging reduced screen use and more balanced instruction. Chairwoman Tiana Beachler called it the first resolution of its kind in North Carolina.

“We’re not anti-technology,” Beachler said, according to The Paper. “We’ve heard concerns from parents and educators regarding the negative effects of excessive screen time. Keeping our kids’ mental health and physical health in mind, I think it’s worthy that we start moving back toward paper and pencil instruction where we can and where appropriate.”

The public response was telling. One teacher thanked the board and wrote that students need to “slow down and work out their problems and pay attention to the process, as opposed to hurry and click an answer.” A tutor said she had seen firsthand how constant computer use hurts basic skills.

The hardest thing for any institution to do is admit that a major investment became a mistake. That is especially true when the investment was not just financial, but philosophical.

Repent and unwind it

The good news is that there is a way out. It does not require pretending computers have no place in school, nor does it require some grand anti-technology crusade.

It starts with a simpler act of institutional honesty.

Thales Academy already went through this. The school network had leaned into educational technology, saw the tradeoffs up close, and decided to pull back.

Winston Brady, Thales Academy’s director of curriculum, explained the logic on the N.C. Family Policy Council podcast. A computer can be “a really good tool if you’re 25,” he said, especially if you have already developed the discipline to use it well.

But adults struggle to put down phones, avoid social media and stop checking email. Now multiply that problem across 20 or 30 students in a classroom.

If teachers spend too much time making sure the tool is being used well, Brady asked, “what’s the point of the tool?”

Then he used the word I keep coming back to.

“In the best sense of the word, we repented,” Brady said. “Once you recognize that you’re doing something wrong, you acknowledge it, you own it and you just stop doing it.”

Repentance is not just regret, but a change in direction. And that is what North Carolina needs.

North Carolina’s 1:1 device push will likely be remembered as one of the biggest education mistakes of the last generation. The state and its school districts made screens too central to the school day, especially for younger children. They made it harder for parents to set limits, harder for teachers to hold attention and easier for students to drift toward distraction.

So start unwinding it.

That does not mean banning computers from school. It means putting them back in their proper place.

Bring back computer labs, textbooks, paper assignments, handwriting and teacher-led instruction. End 1:1 device policies, and sharply limit device use. Use technology where it clearly improves instruction — not as the operating system for the entire school day.

North Carolina spent more than $3 billion making screens unavoidable, then left parents and teachers to manage the consequences.

The way back is not complicated.

Admit it went too far. Own the consequences. Change direction.

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They give a look at what the best email program money can buy actually delivers. In short, it’s a professional, Washington-built fundraising machine creating an alternate reality.

Let’s dive in.

Over 35 days, I received 72 emails from Cooper’s campaign and affiliated fundraising accounts — just over two per day.

My best guess is that these emails are the work of Battle Axe Digital, a Washington, D.C., firm that has worked for a coterie of far-left interest groups, like the ACLU, National Education Association, the Women’s March and Service Employees International Union.

Federal campaign finance records show Cooper for North Carolina paid Battle Axe Digital more than $1.8 million in 2025 alone, for things like email list acquisition and digital consulting.

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