That is the job of executive leadership.

I write a lot about governors and other executive leaders because they matter in ways that can be easy to underrate in North Carolina. The General Assembly is still the most powerful branch of government in this state. It writes the budget and drives most of the big policy changes.

Republicans leading the General Assembly are perfectly content to have a Democrat in the Executive Mansion. They don’t have to pretend to share power, and it gives them a useful foil. Voters seem to like divided government in North Carolina, too.

I understand the logic. But it has limits.

There is value in having some unity of purpose between the executive and legislative branches. Not so one rubber-stamps the other, but so both can tackle the same problems from different directions.

Teacher recruitment is a g…

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Chances are you’re in the same boat, since most of North Carolina’s urban districts have done the same thing. My older daughter is about to take EOGs for the first time, and she is already anxious about it. Great time for an extra day off school.

I wrote about the N.C. Association of Educators’ plans in my newspaper column this week. My basic point is that when a “teachers” group measures success by how many classrooms it can empty, it’s a pretty good sign that this is more about political power than educational stewardship.

Read it here, free with gift link: NC teacher walkout is sacrificing students for left-wing politics

But the mess does raise a broader question that is worth thinking about on its own. Where, exactly, is the line between political theater and political mobilization? In other words, when does a protest become a stunt, and vice versa?

Real mobilization is one of the hardest things to achieve in politics. Getting people to care enough to leave work, rearrange their lives, and physically show up somewhere is incredibly difficult, at least for normal people. Most political leaders cannot do it on command, no matter how many emails they send or how many consultants they hire.

I don’t think I’m going out on too much of a limb by saying the organized left is far more comfortable with protests, pressure campaigns, and public demonstrations than the right is. You’ll see some kind of liberal rally every other week. When is the last time conservatives in North Carolina really did anything similar?

Both sides get this wrong in their own way. The left overdoes it. Democrats are often too quick to turn every grievance into a march, every policy fight into a moral emergency, and every institution into a pressure target. Republicans, meanwhile, often act like public mobilization is too corny or messy to be worth trying. That leaves conservatives with electoral power, but not always much organized civic muscle between elections.

That is why I tend to look at protests through a pretty simple framework. Is it bottom-up or top-down? Is the grievance real? Are the demands realistic? Were other methods tried first? And is the pressure aimed at the right target?

Real mobilization usually comes from somewhere deeper than messaging. It has to tap into a frustration people already feel in their bones. When it works, it feels less like an event and more like a release valve.

That is part of why the examples that stick in my mind are things like Widen I-77 and ReOpen NC. Whatever you thought of them, they felt real. They did not feel like consultant products or institutional rituals. A lot of the more local No Kings protests are the same way.

This year’s May Day demonstration does not really clear that bar. It is not a spontaneous uprising. It is a highly organized, top-down action. The demands stretch well beyond practical school concerns into a broader ideological program. And the tactic is not especially well aimed. The legislature will not even be there Friday. Lawmakers will be back home for the weekend. The people feeling the disruption most directly are parents and students.

That is usually a bad sign. A good protest puts pressure on the people who can solve the problem. A bad one mostly burdens bystanders and calls that leverage.

This one has enough organization behind it to be disruptive. I am just not convinced it has enough authenticity or enough discipline to be effective.

That may be the real dividing line. Political theater seeks visibility. Political mobilization builds legitimacy. From a distance, the two can look pretty similar. Up close, they are very different things.

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Question of the week

Last week, I asked you about marijuana. A narrow plurality of you (38%) were OK with medical marijuana, but not full legalization. The next biggest group (33%) didn’t want any marijuana legalization.

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The N&O just reported that Sen. Phil Berger is looking at moving quickly on a bill to freeze property tax revaluations. I get the argument for it. Some local governments have used soaring property values as a way to bring in a lot of revenue and spike homeowner tax bills.

A moratorium on property tax revaluations may sound like relief. It may even produce some in the short-term. But it is the wrong tool for the job, because the problem is not really about property values. It is about tax rates, tax collections, and the lack of accountability around both. Those are very different problems.

That distinction matters more than it may seem at first. Revaluations are supposed to tell us what property is worth. They should be accurate, current, and connected to the market as best th…

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That may sound harsh, but a new state audit released Monday makes a pretty strong case for it. The Office of the State Auditor examined how community colleges used $1.25 million in Hurricane Helene emergency relief money meant to support student and staff mental health.

Two-thirds of the money remains unspent. But what did get purchased is enough to make you do a double-take. The audit found thousands of dollars spent on rhino-shaped stress balls, potted succulents, wellness journals and guided bird walks.

My first instinct was to ask why the General Assembly put this money in the budget at all. But on reflection, I think lawmakers had the right idea. Mental health support is a legitimate part of disaster recovery.

Still, this is the risk when you throw hundreds of millions of dollars around and then send the money through layer after layer of bureaucracy. Common sense gets lost somewhe…

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Over the past few years, I’ve used AI tools, data, and basic automation to speed up my work in ways that would have sounded absurd not long ago. That may give me a skewed view of the real world.

It almost certainly gives me a skewed view of state government. Even so, North Carolina’s public sector might be even more low-tech than I realized.

To that point, two stories caught my eye last week.

The first was State Treasurer Brad Briner’s announcement that his department is rolling out artificial intelligence tools across the agency.

The office said a 12-week pilot using ChatGPT showed productivity gains of up to 10% in certain divisions, and now it is moving into broader training and implementation.

The use cases are the ones you’d expect: research, drafting, summarizing, plain-English rewrites, document comparison. I love to see it, but none of this exactly sounds cutting-edge in 2026.

The second was Attorney General Jeff Jackson’s testimony about Medicaid fraud.

Jackson told lawmakers that better data-mining technology could help the state catch more fraud. The division has done some of that work since 2017, but it has no positions dedicated solely to data mining.

As WRAL described it, he told lawmakers that only a few other states have started using this kind of technology for Medicaid fraud detection, and that he sees it as the way of the future. What he’s talking about is combing through billing data, spotting outliers, and identifying patterns.

Again, that’s great that he’s focused on it. But I guess I had it in my head that our state law enforcement was already doing this sort of work — not some Criminal Minds fantasy, exactly, but at least basic data analysis at scale.

I don’t say any of this to diminish what Briner or Jackson are doing. Far from it. Focusing on this stuff at all is a huge step forward. In government, where the temptation is always to preserve the process instead of improving it, even basic modernization takes real leadership.

What these stories suggest, though, is just how low the baseline may still be.

A while back, I read the book Recoding America by Jennifer Pahlka, who served as the U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer in the Obama administration. Her argument, in simple terms, is that government tech usually falls behind not because people are dumb or resources are lacking, but because bureaucracy rewards process and self-protection more than results.

That certainly fits with what I think I’m seeing here.

North Carolina does not seem to have a shortage of smart people in public office. What it may have is a shortage of urgency. Or maybe a system that makes urgency hard.

I’m not suggesting state government should go full “move fast and break things.” But I would like to see a bit more impatience. A bit more willingness to test tools, rethink workflows, and challenge the assumption that the current way of doing things is the safe way simply because it is the old way. To their credit, Briner and Jackson seem to understand that.

Because in a lot of cases, the bigger risk is not moving too fast. It is moving too slowly while the world changes around you.

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Charlotte is making a huge bet on public transit just as CATS admits roughly half of riders aren’t paying fares. In my latest column, I argue that this is not mainly a revenue problem. It is a safety and order problem, and a city whose buses now rank among the most dangerous in the country cannot afford to treat fare enforcement as optional.

Read it free with gift link: No fares, no safety, no transit future for Charlotte

Question of the week

I love your optimism. Last week, 83% of you agreed that towns like Mayberry are still possible and are a worthy goal.

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The answer was treated as basically self-evident, an obvious no. But the more I’ve thought about it, and the more responses I’ve gotten, the less satisfied I am with leaving it there.

North Carolina is genuinely approaching a decision point, so those of us who oppose full marijuana legalization need to do more to make the case. There’s no possible way to cover every single argument and objection here, but I’ll give a short version a shot.

The shortest answer is that I believe marijuana legalization would degrade the quality of family life in North Carolina.

That phrase can sound soft or vague, but it is important. Every state makes choices about what kind of place it wants to be. Philosophers as far back as Aristotle have recognized that the civic law is a moral teac…

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Climate is one of those topics where conservatives hear “the world is ending” and tune out. Inglis says that’s a mistake — not because we’re all doomed, but because conservatives should be comfortable talking about risk and insurance policies.

He argues we’re in the middle of an “electrification revolution,” and whether you love EVs or hate them, global competition is pushing the world in that direction.

Where we started to diverge is on the solution. RepublicEN is backing a carbon tax, where fossil fuel producers pay for the emissions they put into the atmosphere.

In one sense, it makes sense. Price in the externalities and the market will adjust. I’m still not sure this will work. But it’s exactly the kind of specific, concrete proposal Republicans almost never hear from their own side on climate anymore, which is why this part of the conversation is worth your time.

If you’ve ever wanted to hear a conservative make a forward-looking case on climate without the usual theatrics, this is the conversation.

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That can come across as cheesy or tacky. But I just took my family there this weekend, and what struck me was how little of it felt forced.

Every shopowner we met was warm, even when we barged in noisily and didn’t buy a thing. Snappy Lunch had a line out the door, but nobody seemed stressed. At one point, a man walked by with a llama, and it didn’t seem strange.

What makes Mount Airy truly interesting is that it does not feel like a tourist town. It feels like a town that knows what it is. Mayberry really doesn’t seem like an act, but part of the town’s DNA.

That DNA is shaping the future of the town. There is real economic ambition there: The city has spent years pushing the Spencer’s Mill site toward redevelopment, and its downtown plan is built around adding new activity, new investment, and new reasons for people to spend time in the center of town.

But every single discussion about all this growth starts in the same place. How do we build in a way that protects the town’s character rather than replaces it?

It seems to be working. Downtown taxable value has risen sharply over the last decade, occupancy is high, and local leaders are still planning for more.

That is the part North Carolina should pay attention to.

Too often, we talk about growth as if it is just a matter of adding more people, more buildings, and more investment. Mount Airy suggests a better way to think about it. Start with the kind of place you want to be, then make decisions that strengthen that identity instead of dissolving it.

My kids had never seen The Andy Griffith Show, so we watched a few episodes at the Airbnb on Saturday night.

It still holds up. It feels as relevant today as it was back in the 1960s.

Mayberry is not just something to remember and yearn for. It is still something to build.

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In the newspaper

A new I-77 toll lane fight is brewing in Charlotte, and Gov. Josh Stein may be learning the same lesson Gov. Pat McCrory did a decade ago. In my first newspaper column last week, I argued Stein may not have started this fight, but as it keeps moving, he will own it politically.

Read it here, free with gift link: The I-77 tolls project is about to become Josh Stein’s problem

Stein’s new cannabis panel says North Carolina has reached a breaking point on marijuana. In my latest column, I agree with that part. What’s false is the supposed choice they offer between today’s hemp chaos and full legalization. There is a third option: close the loophole and enforce the law.

Read it here, free with gift link: North Carolina should choose order, not surrender, on cannabis

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Question of the week

Last week, I asked you about where the Roy Cooper-Michael Whatley race really stands. An overwhelming majority (63%) of you said Cooper is up between 4 and 7 points. I think that’s about right, but I probably should have adjusted the ranges. It’s a lot closer to 7 than 4 right now.

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At first glance, they seem to be all over the place:

• PPP: Cooper 47, Whatley 44, undecided 9 (Cooper + 3)

• Carolina Journal: Cooper 49, Whatley 41, other 4, undecided 6 (Cooper + 8)

• Quantus Insights: Cooper 48.6, Whatley 43.8, other 1.9, undecided 5.7 (Cooper + 5)

• Healthier United: Cooper 50, Whatley 32, Shannon Bray 4, undecided 14 (Cooper +18)

• Catawba College: Cooper 48, Whatley 34, undecided 14 (Cooper + 14)

As I’ve written before, poll reading is as much art as it is science. We know Cooper is ahead. But is he up three, or is he up 18?

I think the answer is that the polls look more different than they really are, and the biggest reason is how they treat undecided voters.

Some pollsters push respondents harder. They ask leaners where they are leaning and try to force a softer choice. Others cast a wider net and allow a much broader undecided bucket. People are much more likely to tell a pollster they are “unsure” than they are to walk into the voting booth with no real preference at all. That’s especially true when they may have never heard of one of the candidates.

Obviously, Whatley is going to get more than 32 percent of the vote. We learned in 2024 exactly where the floor is for a statewide Republican candidate’s support, and it’s at 40%. Whatley is not Mark Robinson.

So the question is not whether Whatley gets off the floor. He will. The question is how high he gets.

Plenty of right-leaning unaffiliateds will come home once the race is better defined. Some will not. A lot of them just won’t vote at all.

Then you have unaffiliated voters who are just alienated and unhappy with both parties. That’s why I think polls that do not ask about Libertarian Shannon Bray are missing something crucial. In a pessimistic electorate, a small protest vote is more likely to be meaningful.

Then there is turnout. Trump is not on the ballot and turnout is going to be a problem for Republicans.

Cooper isn’t going to win many actual Trump voters, but he does not need to. If a chunk of softer Trump voters are unengaged in a non-presidential race and stay home, that has basically the same effect. In other words, Whatley’s risk is not really mass crossover. It is drop-off.

The question is not whether Republican voters prefer him to Cooper. Of course they do. The question is whether enough of them are engaged enough to show up when Trump himself is not on the ballot.

The history points in the same direction.

North Carolina Senate races are usually close, or at least close-ish.

• U.S. Sen. Ted Budd won 50.5 to 47.25 in 2022

• Sen. Thom Tillis won 48.7 to 47 in 2020.

• Former Sen. Richard Burr won 51-45 in 2016.

• Tillis won 49-47 in 2014.

• Burr won 55-43 in 2010.

Even clear wins here usually happen in the low 50s, not the mid-50s.

That is why I do not think a 55-40 type result is the likeliest read of this race.

The closer analogue is something like former Sen. Kay Hagan’s 52.6 to 44 win in 2008 against former Sen. Elizabeth Dole. You’ve got a Democrat with a favorable environment, a Republican who is not collapsing but still cannot quite get where they need to be, and a result that is clear without being apocalyptic.

I’m not doing any statistical analysis of these polls. I’m not building a model. I’m just looking at the data we have, how unaffiliateds tend to behave, what turnout may look like without Trump on the ballot, and the basic history of U.S. Senate races in this state.

And if I had to guess, if the election were held today, I’d put it at:

Cooper 52
Whatley 45
Bray 3

That is my read of where the Cooper-Whatley race really stands.

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Question of the week

Last week, a clear majority — 58% — of you agreed that levy limits are a good idea. Only 20% said they were a bad idea.

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That was always the fantasy at the heart of North Carolina’s landmark Leandro case.

What began more than three decades ago as a lawsuit by families in low-wealth counties became something else entirely: a sprawling judicial effort to supervise education policy. In its final years, it became a fight over whether a court could effectively declare how much money the Constitution required lawmakers to spend.

This week, the North Carolina Supreme Court brought that experiment to an end. After 32 years, the majority held that the case had drifted too far from the claims originally pleaded.

Leandro, as a legal matter, is dead, as it should be. That does not mean the underlying idea should die with it.

A memorable ruling

For readers who have not followed every twist in this saga, here is the short version.

Leandro began in the mid-1990s, when families in Hoke, Cumberland, Halifax, Robeson and Vance counti…

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The guest was Jason Caplain, co-founder of Bull City Venture Partners. After walking through his background as an early employee at Red Hat and his path to becoming one of the Triangle’s most established venture capitalists, they got to the part I found most interesting: What should North Carolina actually do to help more startups grow here?

The first was to bring back state tax credits for individual investors who put money into North Carolina startups.

The second was for North Carolina to set up a public-private entity that invests in startups, similar to how Virginia has Virginia Venture Partners.

I always appreciate thoughtful ideas for public policy, and both of these, on the face, sound reasonable. So let’s look at both of them.

Tax credits for startup investors

Starting in 1987, North Carolina offered a program that allowed people who invested in state-based startups to clai…

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That may be about to change. House Speaker Destin Hall has floated the idea of a constitutional amendment referendum on property tax limits, and lawmakers in both chambers have started giving the issue real attention. What once felt like a niche policy discussion is starting to look like a real political question heading into the fall. I love it.

Property taxes are one of those issues that cut across red states and blue states alike. Almost everybody is wrestling with the same basic problem. Home values are up, tax bills are too, and voters of all stripes get angry about that.

Most states have put some kind of guardrails in place for what local governments can charge. Some are pretty strict, while others are loose.

North Carolina today is on the more lenient side. Our only real statewide rule is a simple cap on the property tax rate at $1.50 per $100 of value1. That’s a pretty high ceiling (a $4,500 annual bill on a $300,000 house), so it doesn’t come into play that often.

Because so many states have worked on the issue, there is no shortage of levers North Carolina could pull to try to rein in property taxes more. The House already seems to have settled on one of them: levy limits.

I think that is the right direction. But this is the kind of issue that can get confusing fast, so I want to slow down and walk through it carefully. What exactly is a levy limit? Why is it better than the other approaches states have tried? Why does North Carolina need one? And what are the best arguments on the other side?

What is a levy limit?

A levy limit is a restriction on how fast a local government’s total property tax collections can grow from one year to the next.

Basically, it works like this. Say a town collected $100 million in property taxes in 2026 from a collection of homes and businesses. The next year, the town would be limited to collecting $100 million plus a small percentage increase from those same homes and businesses.

Levy limits usually allow that amount to rise with inflation, and sometimes with population growth as well. Oftentimes, the limit is somewhere around 2%. So in this scenario, the town could collect $102 million from these properties in 2027.

If property values rise faster than that formula allows, the tax rate has to come down.

One key thing to note is that new construction is typically excluded, which means growing communities can still collect additional revenue from actual growth. And if local leaders want to go above the limit, there is usually some sort of override mechanism, generally through voter approval.

Why levy limits are better than the alternatives

Like I said earlier, levy limits aren’t the only tool in the box. States have tried a number of different ways to limit property taxes, and most of them are bad. Here is a quick breakdown of a few of them.

Assessment caps

Assessment caps limit how quickly a home’s taxable value can rise each year, even if the market value rises much faster. That sounds good until you look at what it does over time.

For example, say you bought a house in 2020 and it was assessed at $300,000. You’re taxed on that assessed value. You live in a hot housing market, though, and the actual value of your home jumps quickly. By 2026, say it’s worth $500,000.

But because of assessment caps, you are taxed on a much lower amount. With a typical 3% annual assessment cap, you’d be paying property taxes as if your home was worth closer to $360,000 in 2026.

However, if you sell the home, the new owner would immediately start paying property taxes on the actual value — $500,000.

That creates a lock-in effect. It discourages moving and home renovations, which can break the assessment cap.

Homestead exemptions

Homestead exemptions work differently. Instead of limiting how much a property’s value can rise on paper, they carve out part of a home’s value from taxation altogether.

Say your house is worth $300,000 and the state gives you a homestead exemption on the first $50,000 of value. Instead of paying property taxes on the full $300,000, you would pay them on $250,000.

That can be a real help, especially for seniors, disabled veterans, or lower-income homeowners who are feeling squeezed. North Carolina already uses versions of this approach for some of those groups, and I think that kind of targeted relief can make sense. If someone on a fixed income is genuinely at risk of being taxed out of their home, that is a real problem and government should take it seriously.

But homestead exemptions do not really fix the underlying issue. They help certain homeowners, but they do not stop local governments from continuing to collect more overall as property values rise. That makes them a useful supplement, but not a real answer to the broader growth problem.

Rate caps

Rate caps are simpler. They limit the tax rate itself rather than the total amount of money a local government can collect. The problem is that a rate cap focuses on the number on paper, not the amount of money government actually brings in.

Say a county has a tax rate of 60 cents per $100 of value. Home prices take off, and the taxable value of property across the county jumps by 25 percent over a few years. The county can keep the exact same 60-cent rate and still collect a lot more money. The cap never comes close to binding, but taxpayers still feel the increase.

And rate caps can be awkward in the other direction too. If property values fall sharply, a local government may need to raise the rate just to collect roughly the same amount of money for basic services. That can make the cap pinch at exactly the wrong time, especially in places with weaker tax bases or volatile property values.

So rate caps can be both too loose and too rigid. They often fail to stop revenue from rising fast when values surge, and they can create pressure when values drop.

That is why levy limits make more sense. They go straight to the real question: how much more money is government collecting from us one year to the next?

Why North Carolina needs to work on property tax limits

This is not some abstract tax debate. It is an affordability issue.

Since 2020, rising home values have pushed assessments up across North Carolina. That has meant bigger tax bills for a lot of families at exactly the moment they are already dealing with a higher cost of living. In a recent Carolina Journal poll, 77 percent of likely voters said property taxes are a burden on their household budget.

The problem is not uniform, though, and that is what makes this debate so important.

Some towns and counties have been relatively restrained. Others have used rising property values as an easy way to bring in more money without having to make as direct a case to taxpayers. Over the past decade, property tax revenue in some of North Carolina’s fastest-growing counties has far outpaced inflation and population growth. Cabarrus, Wake and Johnston counties are a few of the clearest examples.

That is why levy limits make sense. They are not a one-size-fits-all punishment for local government. They are a guardrail against the places that have gotten used to treating appreciation as a revenue machine.

In that same Carolina Journal poll, 73 percent said they would support a constitutional amendment requiring limits on local property tax increases by local governments.

The best arguments against levy limits

The strongest case against levy limits is practical. Local governments do have real responsibilities. They have to fund deputies, firefighters, EMS, schools, roads, and everything else.

Those costs do not always move in a straight line. A fast-growing county may need a new school sooner than expected. A rural county may struggle with fixed costs on a weaker tax base. If you write the rules badly, you can create real problems over time.

That concern is valid. It is also not a reason to give up on guardrails. Rather, it is a reason to write a smart levy limit.

A good levy limit should leave room for normal growth. It should account for inflation and new construction. And it should include a clear override path for cases where a community genuinely needs to go beyond the normal limit.

If a county really needs more money for a new school, more deputies, or major infrastructure, there should be a way to raise it. My preference is voter approval. Local officials should make the case openly, and taxpayers should decide. That is a healthier system than the one we have now, where rising property values can quietly produce more revenue without the same level of accountability.

I’ve also heard concerns about the state government stepping in where it doesn’t belong. I wrote about that more fully in a separate piece, so I will not relitigate it all here. The short version is that a levy limit does not erase local choice. It sets a statewide default, then leaves room for local governments to make the case for more when they have a real need.

That seems like the right balance.

A levy limit should not be designed to starve local government. It should be designed to force discipline.

Why I support levy limits

At bottom, I support levy limits because government should not get a windfall just because your house got more expensive.

That is what happens now in too many places. Local governments can pull in more and more money as values rise without ever having to make a clear case to taxpayers.

Levy limits draw a clearer line between growth that has to happen and growth that officials choose. Under the current system, those two things blur together too easily.

A county can wind up with a much larger tax take because values climbed, and taxpayers are left arguing after the fact about whether that was necessary, justified, or just convenient.

Levy limits do not end property taxes or freeze local government in place. They just force local officials to be more honest.

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Question of the week

You guys are not nearly as big a fan of politician March Madness brackets as I am. A near majority (47%) said you could take it or leave it.

The latest to do so is House Speaker Destin Hall. In a new 25-minute interview with WRAL he didn’t really break any news, but what he did is a lot more important than that. He sounds calm, smart, and perfectly reasonable throughout. In a Raleigh environment that often rewards opacity, that alone is refreshing.

One of the side effects of long-running Republican supermajorities is that leaders can begin to act as if the only audience that really matters is inside the building. That’s a mistake. Real political power stems from public support, not Roberts Rules of Order.

That is what Hall is starting to build here.

Two things in particular from the interview stood out to me.

The first was his explanation of the House position in the budget stalemate. As you probably know, the House and Senate couldn’t agree on a two-year budget. The Senate wanted to keep aggressively lowering pe…

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But after I posted about my support for levy limits on Instagram, I got a few good-faith questions that are worth addressing first. They all pointed to a broader issue that comes up again and again in North Carolina politics: If Republicans believe in small government and local control, why are they so willing to have Raleigh step in and overrule local governments?

The stock answer is that North Carolina is a Dillon’s Rule state1, so cities and counties are creatures of the state. That is true as a legal matter, but it’s an unsatisfying argument. As a wise man once warned, don’t be preoccupied with whether you can do something before you decide whether you should.

That is the more interesting question here, and it’…

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Earlier today, a partial hand recount in the Senate District 26 race left Sheriff Sam Page’s 23-vote lead exactly where it was. A few hours later, Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Berger conceded.

In one sense, it all felt a little anticlimactic. The outcome had seemed clear for a while, and today’s recount felt more like the formal end than a real moment of suspense. That makes it easy to miss the scale of what just happened.

This is a political earthquake in North Carolina. In terms of consequence, I think it stands second only to the Republican takeover of the General Assembly in 2010.

The resolution leaves us with a million questions. Who leads the Senate next? How does Berger approach the short session? What does this do to budget negotiations? What happens inside the caucus? We’ll get to all of that in time. If you’re anxious to get started, the New York Times broke some new ground in a piece published today, which you can…

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By all the normal external metrics, I have no particular reason to believe he’s a serious candidate. He’s so new to the race that he hasn’t shown up in the polling yet, but his social media following is abysmally low and he’s said he’s not raising money. That’s really not a flex because self-funders should still raise money to help validate a candidacy, and more importantly, turn out voters. But that’s a separate newsletter.

And yet, if you just dropped into this race cold, you’d assume he was the front-runner. There’s just so much activity. That’s what has my attention.

Reddy is a wealthy businessman with a Wharton finance degree and a private-sector turnaround story. He first waded into South Carolina politics in early 2025 with DOGE SC, and now he’s using that…

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I thought it was fun when President Barack Obama turned it into a tradition, and I still enjoy it now. It’s a fun little glimpse of personality. But of course it’s also political.

Gov. Josh Stein and former Gov. Roy Cooper, now running for U.S. Senate, both went through the exercise this year. And both of their brackets were bad enough to require comment.

The mistake was treating this like a points contest. That’s not what a public bracket is for. Nobody cares whether the governor can outsmart America in the round of 32. The point is to be fun, a little relatable, and at least somewhat rooted in the state you govern.

You don’t have to turn in a parody and send every North Carolina team to the Final Four. But you should give the home teams a little extra juice.

That’s the sweet spot. Good enough to look credible. Booster enough to befit the chief salesman of the state of North Carolina. In general, the right move is to pick each North Carolina team to go about one round farther than it probably should.

High Point is the easiest example. If you’re a North Carolina political figure filling out a public bracket and you see a 12 seed from your own state, you just take the 5-12 upset and keep it moving. Everybody knows there’s going to be one somewhere.

Instead, both Stein and Cooper picked High Point to lose to Wisconsin. And of course High Point won.

That’s exactly the kind of pick a North Carolina governor is supposed to make.

Cooper at least explained himself. “When I do these brackets, I am not a homer,” he said in a video he posted to X.

I get it. Nobody wants to look silly. But this is one area where being a little bit of a homer is not only allowed, it’s probably wise.

Stein had an even rougher moment. In his bracket video, after he put Michigan State and Michigan in the Final Four but left out Duke, even the host stepped in.

“You’re going to be able to run again in three years. Are you trying to tell us you’re moving somewhere?” she asked. “Like what is up with the state of Michigan love?”

Fair question.

There ought to be a few basic rules here.

1. If a North Carolina team is seeded 1 through 4, it should probably win it all. Final Four at a minimum.

2. If a North Carolina team is a 12 seed, you have to take the upset.

3. Most importantly, don’t try to show off with your bracketology.

The point of a political March Madness bracket is not to be perfect. It’s to look like you’re from North Carolina.

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Power is hard to win, but often harder to surrender. In my latest newspaper column, I look back at the example of former House Speaker Liston Ramsey to make sense of Phil Berger’s current moment. Knowing how to leave matters just as much as knowing how to lead.

Read free with gift link: The hardest part is letting go, Phil Berger. But it’s time.

Question of the week

Last week, I asked you which job was better: state senator, or state party chair. More than 70% of you said senator, and I think that’s right.

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The former lieutenant governor teased it as the moment he would finally tell all, but what he mostly revealed were things we already knew. He said he has a pornography problem, and repeatedly called himself a “carnal person.” It was as unpleasant as it sounds.

Over the course of 90 minutes, he said he had been living in a way God did not want him to live. He said he wants to help people struggling with pornography addiction. He says he is changed.

That would be wonderful if it were true. Redemption and forgiveness are possible, through Christ, yes, but even in politics.

This interview, though, was not convincing. It fit a familiar sub-genre of public apologies, where the subject confesses just enough to sound candid while still evading the heart of the matter.

Robinson was not just justifying the lies that got him here. He was…

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In a body of 170 legislators, rarely does a session elapse without a departure or two. That’s where Democrats are now with the news that Sen. Graig Meyer is leaving the Senate to run the N.C. Justice Center. It’s a plum job, especially for a member of the minority party, and it comes with a nice pay bump too.

I don’t have any special insight into what the Orange, Caswell, and Person County Democratic parties are going to do. But because Person County is in the district, one name naturally comes to mind: Anderson Clayton.

To be clear, I have no indication Anderson Clayton is pursuing this Senate seat. But it would make some sense.

The chairwoman of the state Democratic Party proudly hails from Roxboro, and has made the quixotic task of persuading rural voters to turn back to her party a centerpiece of her agenda.

She’d be an instant force to be reckoned with should she trade the party gavel for a back bench in the state Senate.

But that got me thinking about a broader question. Which is actually the better job in North Carolina politics, state senator or state party chair?

The case for the Senate is pretty easy to understand.

As a state senator, you can build something with your own name on it. You can advocate for a positive agenda, file bills, and take positions that are distinct from your caucus. Even if you are in the minority, you can still say what you are for, not just what you are against.

More than that, you represent actual people, including the ones who did not vote for you, and that gives the job a weight that party posts simply do not have. It is also a clearer path to building a public profile.

Of course, the job has obvious limits. Legislators are not as independent as they look. You still do get pressure from your caucus leadership, and the calendar is a grind. Plus, if you are a Democrat in today’s Senate, your odds of moving major legislation are slim to none.

The party chair job is almost the reverse.

A chair is not really a policymaker. A chair is a messenger, fundraiser, organizer, recruiter, surrogate, and sometimes attack dog. The work is more oppositional by nature. You are often prosecuting the case against the other side, defending your own candidates, and cleaning up disputes inside the coalition.

That can be useful, and even be energizing for the right person. But it also pushes you into the role of operative.

It is easier to turn elected office into something bigger than it is to turn party management into something bigger. Once voters know you as the person carrying the message, it can be hard to persuade them that you should now be the one they rally behind.

Michael Whatley is dealing with some version of that right now. He did make the jump, and he did it successfully enough to become the Trump-endorsed Republican nominee for U.S. Senate. But his candidacy still shows the challenge. Being the party man and being the principal are not quite the same thing, even when you have the full backing of the president.

The upside is that you get a statewide footprint in a way few legislators do. You travel from Bertie to Buncombe. You meet county chairs, donors, activists, candidates, consultants, and elected officials all over the map. You are tied into every major race and you see the whole board, not just one district.

If your next move is a national party job, the DNC, or a presidential campaign, that may well be the better perch. You are building relationships, not just a voting record.

But the weakness of the role is easy to see too. You have visibility without much authority, plenty of people to please, and not a lot of control. When things go wrong, you catch it. When things go right, the candidates usually get the credit.

That is why, to me, party chair sounds like the harder job. It looks more exhausting, more constrained, and more thankless.

So which is it?

I don’t have any special insight into Anderson Clayton’s ambitions, and I’m not pretending otherwise.

She catches a lot of guff online from the right, much of it cheap and unserious. I disagree with her on a lot, probably most things on policy. But I respect her. Her heart seems to be in the right place. She clearly cares about North Carolina, and she has taken on a hard job with real energy.

That is part of why this question interests me.

If the goal is career advancement, I think the answer is fairly clear. Party chair can be a launchpad into national politics or party infrastructure. A Senate seat is probably better if your ambition is to become a major elected official.

But if the real question is where you can do the most good for North Carolina, I’m not sure there is an easy answer. A state senator gets a vote. A party chair gets a microphone.

Making a difference is not always the same thing as holding the better title. And on that question, I’m not sure the answer is obvious at all.

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Honestly, I’m making a strategic argument just as much as moral one. I don’t like campaigning that stretches the truth, but I also don’t think it works very well in a case like this.

Voters are much more likely to come away thinking Michael Whatley is lying than believing Roy Cooper has blood on his hands. And once that impression sets in, Cooper gets an opening to duck the broader and more serious case against him.

It also gives the media an easy line of attack that will keep getting repeated. A new Observer piece saying the “loudest case against Roy Cooper is a flat-out lie” is proof enough of that. If Republicans keep pushing the weakest version of the argument, they should expect more coverage built around the idea that Whatley is lying. That is not where this race should be.

As I wrote in my piece on Cooper’s “secret list,” the Bro…

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