There’s nothing wrong with that, but I want to talk about a labor question on which people actually disagree: Should North Carolina put “right to work” in its constitution?

“Right to work” basically means you cannot be required to join a union or pay union dues as a condition of keeping your job. You remain free to organize and join a union; the choice belongs to you.

North Carolina has had a right-to-work law since 1947, and the freedom of choice it provides is the strongest argument for it. But it’s also become part of North Carolina’s economic identity. It is one of the advantages the state’s economic developers advertise to prospective employers, alongside low taxes and a strong workforce.

Democrats see it differently. They argue that right to work weakens unions by reducing the membership and dues that support collective bargaining.

Of course, the alliance is also political. Democratic candidates remain the overwhelming beneficiaries of union political spending. On average, union PACs direct about 94% of their contributions to Democrats.

If Democrats take control of the General Assembly, they will almost certainly undo our state’s right to work law. The state Democratic Party has called for repeal, and Democratic legislators have introduced a bill that would do it.

That possibility is the case for constitutional protection. Yet Republicans have repeatedly failed to send the question to voters.

Twice the General Assembly has come close. In 2017, the House approved an amendment 75–44, only for it to stall in the Senate. This year, the Senate approved one 30–16, only for it to stall in the House.

I reached out to Mitch Kokai, senior political analyst at the John Locke Foundation, to get his take on why this hasn’t gone on the ballot. The Locke foundation has long advocated putting right to work in the state constitution.

He told me he thinks Republican lawmakers simply see little immediate danger while they remain in charge. He also thinks they view constitutional amendments primarily through an electoral lens.

“I suspect that the lawmakers making the final decisions about those amendments just haven’t seen as much bang for the buck from right to work as they have when they consider measures involving limiting taxes or shoring up election integrity,” Kokai told me.

I think that’s part of it. But another factor is the political realignment of the working class. Union households once voted overwhelmingly Democratic. In 1996, Bill Clinton beat Bob Dole among them 60% to 30%. In 2024, Kamala Harris’s advantage over Donald Trump was only eight points, 53% to 45%. Republicans are now, in electoral terms, the party of the working class and at a national level have become a lot more union-friendly than they used to be.

That realignment may help explain why right to work no longer looks like an obvious Republican turnout issue. Even so, this is not a year in which lawmakers were shy about amending the constitution.

They considered a pile of proposals and ultimately put three on the November ballot, involving income taxes, property taxes and voter identification. Right to work is not among them.

That is unfortunate, because right to work is exactly the sort of policy that belongs in a constitution. It protects an individual choice from government-sanctioned compulsion and places it beyond the reach of a temporary legislative majority. It is more fundamental than many of the subjects lawmakers routinely ask voters to add to the state’s governing document.

I would like to see lawmakers put it before voters. Not as an attack on unions, but as a lasting protection of worker choice.

Share

At a premium

Question of the week

Nevertheless, here we go again. The board approved two memos Friday morning governing mail-in ballots, just hours before absentee ballots were scheduled to go out (as every headline immediately points out).

I’ll concede that the timing is not great. If you wanted to invite suspicion, this would be a decent way to do it.

But the explanation is more bureaucratic than conspiratorial. The General Assembly ratified a new election law on Aug. 6. It passed the Senate (unanimously, by the way), and Gov. Josh Stein signed it Aug. 11.

Some of its provisions, including new deadlines for correcting absentee-ballot deficiencies, apply to the November election, meaning the Board of Elections had less than a month to incorporate them before voting began.

At the same time, the State Board had spent the summer trying to put its absentee-ball…

Read more

That’s how I read his announcement Thursday that he won’t seek reelection to his seat as an associate justice. Berger Jr. says he’ll serve out his term and is considering other ways to serve the state. He hasn’t announced another campaign, but he left us with this: “my commitment to North Carolina and the law does not end with this term.”

Some people have asked me whether that means a run for attorney general. I’d put those chances at almost nil. Assuming Jeff Jackson seeks reelection, I think Berger would get hammered. Jackson beat Dan Bishop in 2024 and would enter another campaign with the advantages of incumbency. Berger Jr. has a much more plausible path to leading the judicial branch.

This, of course, assumes that Chief Justice Paul Newby will be retiring. This, too, I’m almost certain of.

You may remember that back in 2023, lawmakers raised the mandatory retirement age

Read more

My newspaper column this week traced its spread across North Carolina. You can read it here, free with gift link: Socialism is growing in North Carolina. Don’t dismiss it

As I was putting the column together, I interviewed JD Mazuera Arias, a 27-year-old first-term Charlotte city councilman who considers himself part of the DSA, though he’s careful to attach plenty of caveats to that description.

Not nearly enough of our conversation made it into the column, so I wanted to share more of it here.

We’ll start with the end. As we wrapped up, Arias joked about people who know his politics but have never met him: “I always tell everybody who has heard of me but hasn’t spoken to me yet, ‘I’m not that scary, aren’t I?’”

And he’s not.

Arias comes across as eminently reasonable, with the rare political talent to talk about issues in terms nearly everybody would agree with. He does not spend much time defending socialism in the abstract, talking instead about housing costs, stagnant wages and the economic insecurity many people feel despite living in a booming city.

That combination can be politically formidable. Like former Gov. Roy Cooper, he is temperamentally moderate while pretty progressive on policy.

Republican attacks built around the word “socialist” work best when the target looks and sounds like a caricature. Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong fit that mold. Arias does not.

“I think if we spend all of our time debating whether the word socialism or the momentum of democratic socialism as scary, we miss the more interesting story,” Arias told me. “Why are more young people and working people open to these ideas? Why are people questioning who benefits from Charlotte’s growth?”

I agree. That is the more interesting story. When I listen to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani speak and when I listen to Arias, I start to understand why people are attracted to democratic socialism.

The policies may be socialist, but the pitch is populist. And that makes Democratic Socialism part of a political story that reaches far beyond its membership.

The system is rigged

I don’t know how online you are, but if you spend any time on conservative X, you probably heard about the $20 burrito debate a few weeks ago. It even made The New York Times.

The whole thing began when a Turning Point USA spokesman shared a college student’s lament that a burrito simply should not cost $20.

The right then spent several days arguing over whether this was evidence of an affordability crisis or simply a young person who needed to make better decisions. One camp — you could call them traditional conservatives — advised the gripers to order something cheaper, cook at home and stop treating the price of premium takeout as evidence that capitalism had failed.

The other camp, primarily postliberal conservatives, said the literal burrito was beside the point. Food, housing and other essentials have become unaffordable, in their view, especially for younger Americans. Telling them to eat ramen does not answer their broader sense that the economy no longer works for them.

While I’m associating all these viewpoints with modern labels, none of these ideas are particularly new. The Tea Party, Trumpism and Democratic Socialism look very different, but they all start with essentially the same populist complaint: Powerful people have rigged the system against you.

The Tea Party directed its anger at bailouts, runaway spending and a government that protected the politically connected. Trump blamed corrupt elites, global institutions and leaders who sold out American workers. Democratic Socialists blame corporations, billionaires and capitalism itself.

Different villains, same basic populist message. The “system” is keeping you down.

The appeal of soft socialism

The Tea Party answer was to get government out of the way and return power to individuals. Trump-style populism is much more willing to use government through tariffs, immigration restrictions and other forms of economic nationalism to (in theory) protect American workers and industries.

Postliberals also reject the limited-government consensus. Many embrace versions of “common-good conservatism” in which government actively shapes markets and institutions to support families, workers and a healthy social order.

On the left, Mamdani and Arias offer different versions of what I would call “soft socialism.” Mamdani’s agenda is more sweeping, but both see government, labor organizing and collective action as tools for restoring balance and giving ordinary people a larger voice.

“My politics are about balance and power,” Arias told me. “Making sure neither government nor corporations become so powerful that ordinary people lose their voice and their ability to live a decent life. And I think democratic socialism is answering the call.”

And that's the clever part. Arias isn't asking voters to choose between capitalism and a Marxist state. He is asking whether corporations have become too powerful and whether government should do more to restore the balance.

Those are not inherently socialist questions. The socialism comes in the answers.

The danger is that “balance” can become a one-way ratchet. Every market failure becomes a reason to transfer more authority to government, while government failure rarely leads that authority to be returned. Weakening a powerful corporation does not necessarily empower an individual. Sometimes it merely replaces one distant and unaccountable institution with another.

You don't have to own a DSA membership card to think your health insurance company is screwing you. And once a politician convinces you that he understands the problem, he has a head start in selling you the solution.

Who’s in control?

To get a little philosophical, the deeper argument is between an internal and an external locus of control. Basically, whether you believe your life is shaped mostly by your own choices or by forces outside your control.

Obviously, the answer is some of both, but I don’t think it is healthy — politically or personally — to spend too much time telling people that the most important forces in their lives are the ones they have no say in.

I think of it as a version of Pascal’s Wager. If you believe you have control over your life and you’re right, you have a chance to do something with it. And if you’re wrong — if the forces arrayed against you really are that powerful — you’re no worse off for having tried.

That is ultimately where I disagree with Mamdani and Arias and economic populism more broadly. They put more faith than I do in government and collective action as ways to rebalance economic power. There is something corrosive about a politics that continually tells people to look outward for the explanation for their lives.

But I am impressed by their political approach. That is why I have come to think of Arias as Charlotte’s Mamdani. Like New York’s mayor, he is young, likable and unusually gifted at making democratic socialism sound practical and reasonable. I am not persuaded by the product, but I recognize the skill of the salesman.

The broader point is that conservatives can make fun of government-run grocery stores and the like all they want (I do it, too). But voters worried about their grocery bills will eventually choose a flawed plan over a punchline.

Soft socialism will not be defeated by calling it socialism. It will take a better answer to the problems that made it attractive in the first place.

Share

At a premium

Question of the week

Nearly half of you (a clear plurality) agreed with me last week that the thing Republicans most need in North Carolina is a renewed policy agenda.

Accounts such as Libs of TikTok have forced public officials to answer for decisions they might otherwise have made quietly. North Carolina has gotten its share of scrutiny from this sector of the internet, and deservedly so.

But the outrage industry has a major, glaring weakness. It needs a villain, and it often requires one before all the facts can get in the way.

That is how Mecklenburg County Superior Court Judge George Bell became the target this week.

Usually, North Carolina’s outrage-bait examples have fallen into one particular category. It’s typically an offender with a long rap sheet getting picked up by police on a violent charge and sent right back out the door by a local magistrate. That’s what Iryna’s Law set out to address, and it seems to be working.

This one is a little different. This time, a man accused of threatening to kill children at mult…

Read more

Quite a few people in the room had worked on Gov. Pat McCrory’s 2012 campaign or served in his administration. It’s slightly unnerving to promote a political history book to people who lived through the chapters, but it also makes for much more interesting conversations.

That campaign was unlike anything North Carolina had seen, before or since. McCrory took on the Jones Street status quo head-on and, after decades of one-party Democratic rule, promised to bring a new sense of purpose to state government.

Those conversations have me thinking less about this November than about the election four years from now.

The 2030 election will coincide with the Census, which means the legislators elected that fall will draw North Carolina’s congressional and legislative districts for the decade that follows. It could be more consequential than 2026 and 2028 combined.

I still think Republicans are more likely than not to retain sizable majorities in both chambers this year. But the state House is competitive enough that Democrats could pick up seats, and it is not difficult to imagine them chipping away again in 2028. The majority may survive both elections while becoming steadily more vulnerable by the time the truly important one arrives.

North Carolina Democrats held power for more than a century before the whole thing finally grew stale enough for voters to revolt. Republicans are not entitled to the same grace period.

Some house cleaning

Things genuinely improved after the old Democratic regime ended. The first decade of Republican governance had a clear direction centered on making North Carolina more competitive and fiscally sound. There were plenty of disagreements, but it was easy to understand what Republicans were trying to accomplish.

This second decade has felt less directed. The Republican agenda has become moribund, too often reduced to keeping North Carolina “on the track” that made it the best place to live, work and raise a family. That is a strong record to defend, but it cannot substitute forever for an account of what comes next.

I raised this concern in a column last year, and I can’t say much has changed. That is not for lack of good people. The General Assembly is full of lawmakers who sincerely want to serve North Carolina and move it forward.

It is always fashionable to blame legislative leaders, and I still believe those positions should come with term limits. But House Speaker Destin Hall is the man for the job. The challenge is bigger than any one leader, and the necessary house cleaning does not require throwing out the many good people already there. It means clearing away the habits that accumulate when a party has been in power for a long time.

In that sense, North Carolina Republicans may need another campaign in the spirit of 2012 — one willing to confront the corruption of entrenched power in Raleigh.

I don’t mean corruption in the cash-in-an-envelope sense. I mean what happens when preserving power begins to take the place of using it with purpose. Eventually, winning the next election becomes the agenda.

This concern is not mine alone. An excellent recent State Affairs profile describes how disappointed State Rep. John Blust was when Republicans took control of the General Assembly and did not govern as differently as he had expected.

Blust supports a single-subject requirement that would make it harder to slip unrelated policy into budgets and conference reports without proper scrutiny. I’m on board.

The standard rebuttal is that Democrats did the same things when they were in charge. That is true, and they would almost certainly do it again if they returned to power. Why give them the opportunity?

‘A frequent recurrence to fundamental principles’

Near the end of the profile, State Affairs highlights one of the finest lines in the North Carolina Constitution:

“A frequent recurrence to fundamental principles is absolutely necessary to preserve the blessings of liberty.”

I love that phrase, “frequent recurrence.” Returning to fundamental principles does not mean freezing the Republican agenda in 2013. It means continually asking what conservative leadership requires in a changing state.

To that end, Republicans should revive the idea of the 1994 “Contract with North Carolina.” Every two years, legislative candidates tell voters in plain English what they intend to accomplish if returned to office. Starting in 2026 and doing it again in 2028 would help the party arrive at 2030 with a real argument about North Carolina’s future.

That is part of what I want Longleaf Politics to do, help figure out what comes next for conservatism in North Carolina. The first decade gave Republicans a strong record to run on. By 2030, they will also need an agenda.

Share

Question of the week

At this point, the facts are pretty incontrovertible. Roy Cooper is ahead, Michael Whatley is badly outgunned financially and Republicans have spent months attacking Cooper’s record without changing many minds. Unless something radically changes, we’re gonna be faced with Senator Cooper next January.

Now before I criticize the former governor again, I realize that a lot of you probably disagree with me about Cooper, while others are simply tired of reading about him. I laid out my general stance on Cooper a year ago, and stand by it. But I can’t help myself from returning to the subject again.

When it comes to the state of the race, my friend Patrick Sebastian has a different take. He told Roll Call that Whatley can win if Republicans spend enough money to make it competitive. Cooper is formidable, but he has a “glass jaw.” It’s just that no one has ever had enough money to land the punch that breaks it.

I would like to believe that, but I’m simply not convinced.

More money would certainly help. But if it merely buys a louder version of the same attacks that have failed for the better part of a decade, I’m not sure it changes much. Perhaps Republicans do not simply need more money. Perhaps they need a different argument.

That became the subject of my Observer column last week: The question Republicans really need to start asking Roy Cooper. You can read it free through that gift link.

As regular readers know, I am a student of North Carolina political history. The column looks back at how Jesse Helms handled a similar problem against Jim Hunt in 1984. To win, Helms stopped fighting Hunt’s popular image as governor and nationalized the race instead.

Normal voters do not want to debate old vetoes, appointments and budget fights. The whole thing about the prisoner release, which I’ve written about at length, has completely bombed as an attack.

Like it or not, voters think they already know Roy Cooper. Telling them he was actually a terrible governor asks them to discard the judgment they formed over eight years, or 40 years really.

So perhaps the answer isn’t convincing them that they were wrong about Governor Cooper. It is forcing them to think about Senator Cooper.

If there is any opportunity against Cooper, that’s it.

After writing the column, I decided to put together what a campaign like that could actually look like. The result was RubberStampRoy.com.

The site pairs a series of short “Where do you stand?” videos with evidence from Cooper’s record. No campaign or political group asked me to build it. I wanted to test whether this argument could break through to people who do not spend their days following politics.

If Sebastian is right that Cooper has a glass jaw, this is the punch I would try.

And if it doesn’t land, I honestly don’t know what will.

Share

Read a sample chapter of my book

Speaking of Cooper, I wanted to share with you a sample chapter from my book, The Change Agent. It covers the closing days of the 2016 campaign, including the debates, the recounts and the awkward and petty transition between Govs. McCrory and Cooper.

The Change Agent Chapter 20

805KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Then go pick up a copy of the full book!

Get the book

At a premium

Question of the week

Matt Walsh was talking about the horrifying case of Di-Quan Hunt, the 32-year-old Charlotte man accused of filming himself attacking women on the street. In one video, Hunt appears to punch a woman to the ground in Dilworth and stand over her shouting. She suffered serious injuries.

The more you learn, the more outrageous the case becomes, and that is saying something in a media environment oversaturated with rage bait. Hunt had been arrested repeatedly and pleaded guilty just five months ago to assault with a deadly weapon and carrying a concealed weapon. He was sentenced to the 89 days he had already served in the Mecklenburg County jail and released immediately.

Most disturbing of all, Hunt’s own family told WSOC they had spent years trying to get him off the streets.

There is no question the…

Read more

I cannot find another example of a major-party Congressional nominee winning a primary, withdrawing before the general election and being replaced by a district executive committee. There may be some obscure precedent buried in the archives. If you know of one, please send it my way.

For a few hours, the 61 Republicans choosing U.S. Rep. Chuck Edwards’s replacement will become something like Western North Carolina’s college of cardinals. And buckle up, because nobody seems to have any clue who the nominee will be.

The front-runner already dropped out

Until Saturday afternoon, I expected it to be a simple, short meeting without much drama. Republicans appeared to be coalescing around state Sen. Tim Moffitt, widely seen as the favorite.

My gut told me he was the safest choice, too. Then he took himself out of the running, a huge curveball in an already chaotic process.

I can’t really blame him. For the potential candidates, it is easy to see why this opportunity is a huge risk.

Sure, the nominee gets to skip most of the boring parts of running for Congress: a year of county dinners, endless fundraising calls and a bruising primary. Instead, the winner gets to jump straight into a competitive general election with baked-in media coverage and national attention.

But those boring parts serve a purpose. A normal campaign gives candidates time to build a staff, raise money, test a message and discover what their opponents plan to use against them. This nominee will have to do everything all at once and under immediate scrutiny.

Plus, the nominee inherits a three-month sprint against Democrat Jamie Ager, who has built a formidable campaign and a multimillion-dollar war chest. The race was already rated a toss-up before the House Ethics Committee released its report. Ager will be tough to beat, no matter who gets picked.

No clear choice

So that leaves us heading into the meeting with no real clue who will get the nod.

Late Sunday, a NC-11 executive committee member tweeted that Rep. Jen Balkcom was added to the potential nominee list. That makes her the leading candidate heading into tonight’s meeting.

But her election is far from a sure thing. All 61 committee members probably entered the weekend with a name or two in mind.

I’ve written before about why county GOP groups have so much drama. These groups have enough power that the outcomes matter, but they are small enough that political disagreements quickly become personal. Western North Carolina’s party meetings have had more than their share.

I am hoping this meeting will be different. Party insiders will have to put aside old rivalries and grievances. Not to get all hyperbolic about it, but the balance of power in the entire House could be at stake.

There will be no white smoke over the Buncombe County GOP headquarters tonight. But North Carolina — and quite a few people in Washington — will be watching to see who emerges.

Share

At a premium

Top spenders on social media last week

Question of the week

The race to replace Congressman Chuck Edwards on the ballot is about to become a feeding frenzy.

Anyone with a stake in Republican politics in the mountains will spend the next five days trading names, counting votes and deciding whether to make a run at Congress. The N.C. Republican Party’s 11th Congressional District Executive Committee already had a meeting scheduled for Aug. 10. Members now plan to use it to choose Edwards’s replacement.

It’s an incredibly thin tightrope to find somebody who can both please party activists who dominate committees like this while also being electable in a sprint to November. I’m going to go deeper on the dynamics there later.

For now, here are a handful of Republicans who merit consideration, along with the case for and against each. Before you tell me I’m an idiot: I do not pretend to know the internal pecking order of the mountain GOP, but thes…

Read more

That is no longer a hot take or a prediction about how voters might respond to ugly allegations. It is the unavoidable political conclusion from the House Ethics Committee report released Monday.

The bipartisan committee found that Edwards violated the House Code of Official Conduct through persistent and inappropriate conduct toward two young women who worked for him. It recommended that the full House formally censure him.

The report details genuinely creepy behavior and describes two young employees struggling to establish boundaries with a powerful boss before ultimately leaving Congress. I am not going to mine their experiences for lurid details. Readers can examine the report for themselves.

My focus is on what it means politically, and the answer is simple. Edwards cannot run a credible campaign after this.

His campaign’s response makes matters worse. Consultant Paul Shumaker issued a statement claiming that the findings “completely exonerate” Edwards and tha…

Read more

But it still does, even in 2026, and state Rep. Erin Paré just demonstrated it.

After hearing concerns from parents about a male music teacher presenting as a woman at a southern Wake County elementary school, Paré promised to protect the children in her district. She also floated a requirement that public-school employees wear professional attire appropriate to their sex.

The ridicule arrived immediately. She had to know it would, especially in her part of the state.

Paré represents one of the most competitive legislative districts in North Carolina. Her seat is rated R+0 and a true toss-up. She is one of only a handful of Republican House members left in our state’s urban counties.

The politically safe response would have been to sympathize privately with the parents and then move on. Instead, she put her name behind their concern and stepped directly into one of the most treacherous debates in American politics.

That is what political bravery looks like.

If conservatives want elected officials to take risks for them, we need to support the ones who actually do it. You can donate to Paré’s campaign here.

But I also want to take the time to strategize about what the proper response should be, if anything. A statewide dress code isn’t a terrible idea, but it’s legally challenging and probably not worth it. There may be a cleaner avenue.

A legitimate concern

I need to put a caveat here. I do not know any of the details here beyond what Paré posted and the media has reported. But from what I can gather, the parents have raised a legitimate concern that deserves a serious answer.

Anybody with young children understands why. A male teacher presenting as a woman is not really something that can remain entirely separate from the classroom. Children notice. They ask questions. They want to understand why the adult in front of them appears to conflict with what they know about the differences between men and women.

If students are expected to affirm that the teacher is a woman, questions about an adult’s identity can quickly displace actual learning and draw young children into conversations about sex and gender that do not belong in an elementary classroom.

Parents are entitled to ask whether this situation is affecting classroom boundaries or interfering with instruction. I cannot answer that from a few news reports, but the school system should take the concern seriously.

I’d hold off on any rash legislative response, though, because North Carolina may already have a mechanism for getting answers.

State law prohibits instruction on gender identity, sexuality and sexual activity in kindergarten through fourth grade. It also establishes a process parents can use when they believe a school has violated that prohibition.

A parent can submit a written concern to the principal. If the matter is not resolved, the parent can request a State Board of Education hearing or sue the school system for a declaratory judgment. A court can issue an injunction and award attorneys’ fees if the parent prevails.

Does this particular situation violate the law? I do not know. But the argument becomes more substantial if students are being directed to use identity-based language, corrected for recognizing the teacher’s sex or led into teacher-initiated discussions about gender identity. Those are the facts the parents and school district need to establish.

Find the 80/20 ground

There is an obvious larger argument lurking behind all of this, but I’m going to leave most of it alone for now. We have to recognize that the larger argument remains perilous political terrain.

When conservatives confront a sensitive cultural issue, the best approach is often to find the 80/20 position and push on it. That does not mean surrendering the larger argument. It means choosing ground where the facts are overwhelming and the opposition has no credible defense.

Here is the clear 80/20 proposition: Every adult placed in front of children should be safe, competent, honest and professionally fit. North Carolina should have consistent standards for verifying that before someone enters a classroom.

North Carolina is the only state without a statewide requirement for teacher background checks. Local districts operate under a patchwork of policies, creating gaps in how identities, employment histories and misconduct are investigated.

Some districts conduct serious checks, while others rely on limited third-party searches that cover only a few years and skip national records databases and fail to search aliases and previous addresses.

It seems pretty obvious to me that North Carolina should establish a meaningful statewide standard for school employees. At a minimum, districts should verify identity, criminal history, credentials, previous employment and disciplinary records.

The House overwhelmingly passed House Bill 775 last year to strengthen school-employee vetting. Paré voted for it. The bill is now sitting in the Senate Rules Committee.

That is the 80/20 way to go about it. North Carolina can enforce its existing law, give parents a real path to answers and establish statewide standards for the adults entrusted with our children.

It took courage for Paré to raise this issue. Deciding what should come next will require some prudence, too.

Share

At a premium

Question of the week

I know this, and you presumably know it, too. Otherwise, subscribing to a newsletter called Longleaf Politics was an odd decision.

But apparently the U.S. News & World Report disagrees. Its new “Best States” ranking puts North Carolina at No. 13, behind Utah, both Dakotas, Nebraska and — most offensively — Minnesota.

The U.S. News states list does not carry anything close to the cultural weight of its university rankings, which helped reshape admissions and university behavior across the country. This one mostly produces a few scattered social-media graphics.

But since I dove deep on the CNBC rankings that put North Carolina at No. 2 for business, I figured I’d look at this one as well.

On the whole, U.S. News tried to rank virtually everything and discovered that the things easiest to count become the things that count most.

As such, the ranking suffers less from political bias than database bias. If there is a convenient federal data set f…

Read more

You can spend your time cursing and shouting and reminding everyone that the majority is unfair. Or you can accept the arithmetic and figure out how to get something done anyway.

Two Democratic women from Wake County have just offered a useful illustration of this contrast.

Rep. Sarah Crawford recently appeared on the Do Politics Better podcast and talked about her work on the Gabe Torres Act.

Torres was the Raleigh police officer killed outside his home during the 2022 Hedingham mass shooting as he prepared to leave for work. Because he had not yet gone on duty, his death initially fell through a loophole in the state law providing benefits to families of public safety officers killed in the line of duty.

Crawford, a Democrat, introduced legislation to close it. She also understood that a bill with only Democratic support was unlikely to go anywhere in a Republ…

Read more

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 …

Read more

“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.

At a premium

Top spenders on social media last week

Question of the week

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

Share

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.

The newsletter has always grown best when one reader sends an article to a friend and says, “You should read this.” So I’m trying something new: a referral program.

If you enjoy Longleaf Politics, I’d be grateful if you shared it with someone else who cares about North Carolina. Use your personal referral link below—or the “Share” button on any post—and you’ll receive credit when someone subscribes, whether they choose a free or paid subscription.

Refer a friend

• Get a 1 month comp for 3 referrals

• Get a 3 month comp for 5 referrals

• Get a 6 month comp for 25 referrals — and a Longleaf Politics t-shirt

I’ve also added a leaderboard so you can see where you stand among Longleaf Politics’ top recruiters. I’m curious to see who proves best at bringing new people into the fold.

Visit the leaderboard

To learn more, check out Substack’s FAQ.

Thank you for reading, sharing my work, and helping Longleaf Politics reach more people across North Carolina.

I’ll be back in your inbox tomorrow with the regular post.

Andrew

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…

Read more

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.

Share

At a premium

Subscribe now

Question of the week

Share

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…

Read more