I always knew there was an outside chance Democrats could flip the state House. In a sufficiently bad Republican year, plenty of things become possible. But for a Democratic takeover to become the actual prediction?

This is the stage of an election when everyone becomes a kid shaking presents under the Christmas tree. We’re desperate for any sliver of information that could help us see what’s coming in a week’s time. While these clues are often deceiving, it’s still looking like N.C. Republicans are in line for a big old hunk of coal.

I won’t go too deep into the State Navigate forecast since it is proprietary and behind a paywall. Yes, I did pay to look at it, and no, it doesn’t tell you a whole lot more than what we kind of already know.

The approach is pretty standard. It starts with previous e…

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Tillis has been on the media circuit the past few weeks promoting his new book, How to Lose Friends and Antagonize Presidents. I read the book and wrote about it in my Observer column this week, which you can read here free with gift link: If Thom Tillis wanted to save his party, he should have run again

The gist is that if Tillis was serious about saving the Republican Party from itself, the best way to do that would have been to run again. Tillis acknowledges that his words mean less without his name on the ballot, but I guess that’s all moot at this point.

Anyway, the media appearance I found particularly interesting was this interview with Politico’s Jonathan Martin. While chowing down on country ham at a west Charlotte breakfast spot, Martin pressed Tillis on what he meant by offering “help from the outside” to rebuild the GOP.

“For one thing, it’s going through North Carolina and torching every bad leader at the county, district level,” Tillis said, accusing them of targeting moderate Republicans who would better fit their districts. He mocked leaders who “feel like Karl Rove” because 70 people elected them at a county convention.

I did not expect that answer. My first question, naturally, is “Why?” And then my second one is “How?”

Why Tillis wants to do this

The why is easier to answer. Tillis got sideways with the party activists who pushed through his censure at the 2023 state convention. This would be a bit of payback.

For the record, I opposed that censure because disagreeing with your senator is one thing, and formally condemning him for failing a platform purity test is another. President Ronald Reagan is widely credited with saying “The person who agrees with you 80 percent of the time is an 80 percent friend and not a 20 percent enemy,” and it’s a point well-taken.

That said, I do think the Republican Party structure in North Carolina is incredibly weak and that shows up in a short bench in statewide elections. Leaning in to the county party system is the natural place to start, and there are plenty of issues to solve there.

I’ve written a ton on the issue, including a piece on why county GOP groups have so much drama, but I don’t share Tillis’s vitriol toward county leaders. Most are hardworking people trying to do the right thing.

But county parties do often reward a kind of politics that makes building coalitions and winning statewide elections harder. The Republicans who run these organizations don’t necessarily reflect the broader electorate.

Former Gov. Jim Martin’s party-building in the 1980s emphasized developing candidates and governing ideas. Tillis himself recruited candidates and raised money to help Republicans take the House in 2010. Both built influence by helping other Republicans succeed.

I’d be glad to see Tillis put that experience back to work, though “torching” county leaders doesn’t suggest that’s quite what he has in mind.

How he could do it

So let’s get into the how.

People forget politicians quickly, as I write about in The Change Agent. An ex-pol’s opinion is typically about as welcome as a bucket of warm spit, especially among people who didn’t much like him in office.

And Tillis’s record of picking winners is mixed: He helped Sam Page against Sen. Phil Berger, but backing Bill Graham did little to stop Mark Robinson.

To actually replace county leaders, it will take a lot of tedious grassroots work, and I’m not convinced Tillis wants to do it. Finding someone to run for county chair is only the beginning. Somebody has to work the phones and keep after people until they actually show up for the convention.

My suspicion is that Tillis would rather endorse somebody, help them raise a little money, and rip into the other guy. That probably won’t be enough, and is more likely to backfire. If you’re a county chair facing a challenge, having Tillis publicly threaten to take you out is a pretty good way to get your people to the convention.

Again, I like the idea of Tillis putting his connections and experience into party-building. My concern is his attitude. Plenty of good Republicans would welcome help making their county organizations more effective. Fewer will want to enlist in a retired senator’s revenge tour.

If Tillis follows through, I hope he spends more time helping people succeed than explaining why everyone else is an idiot. He’s already written that book.

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Question of the week

So let’s talk about an interesting idea from BEST NC, a nonpartisan group of business leaders that has become something of a quiet powerhouse in state education policy.

Look at its membership and you’ll find Ann Goodnight and Erskine Bowles alongside Art Pope and Bubba Rawl. That’s an unusual coalition in North Carolina politics, and I suspect it helps explain the group’s ability to get a hearing across Raleigh.

Their latest effort, called TeachReadyNC, is a patch on a problem we’ve been discussing for more than a decade without fixing.

When you think of new teachers, chances are you’re picturing fresh graduates of university education schools. But according to BEST NC, “alternative entrants” now outnumber graduates of UNC System teacher preparation programs nearly two to one.

These are college graduates who didn’t train as teachers, including people changing ca…

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This year, though, I actually voted for U.S. Rep. Alma Adams.

The reason is that her Republican opponent, a 20-something Charlotte banker named Jack Codiga, has taken his campaign down a really dark path over the last few weeks.

In his recent social media videos, he’s embraced an angry, burn-it-all-down approach to politics, blaming shadowy figures for the nation’s ills and lambasting Adams as a “traitor” and a “puppet” of Israel. It’s truly gross stuff.

Normally, I’d be inclined to ignore a campaign like this. Why draw attention to it? But I interviewed Codiga during the primary, and while I never explicitly endorsed or supported him, I feel like I owe it to my readers to explain what’s going on.

Back then, Codiga came across as earnest and well-meaning, with a faith-based mess…

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Court of Appeals judge Tom Murry, who played on the team as a state representative, reports that North Carolina won by eight points, with then-representative, later-Labor Commissioner Josh Dobson leading the scoring. There’s even a highlight video.

I love things like this. An autographed, game-worn NCGA jersey has to be a collector’s item, and I would pay an unreasonable amount of money for one. If you have one sitting in a closet, please get in touch.

I’m not sure when the tradition started, but the rivalry continued at least through 2015, when South Carolina beat North Carolina 66–63 in Columbia.

Sen. Benton Sawrey has the right idea. Bring the game back.

Naturally, I’ve taken the liberty of assembling the roster. Current members of the General Assembly are eligible, along with the Council of State.

The starting five

I’m building this team around Rep. Charles Smith. The Cumberland County Democrat was a 6-foot-5 forward at Emory & Henry, and a two-time team MVP at Fayetteville Academy (he’s now in the school’s athletic Hall of Fame).

That’s our franchise player. Smith starts at center, though I’m viewing him more as a point-forward. Everybody else’s first job is to get him the ball.

Sawrey gets the start at point guard. Since the Johnston County senator is advocating for the game’s return, he gets the ball and the responsibility that comes with it.

Rep. Jennifer Balkcom is my shooting guard. The Henderson County representative played basketball at East Henderson High School, along with volleyball and softball, and ran track. Even if she wins her race for U.S. Congress next month, I still consider her eligible to play.

Rep. Allen Buansi starts at small forward. The Orange County representative was a 5-foot-11 wide receiver at Dartmouth. He may be undersized for a traditional basketball team, but the stakes are lower (pun intended) in legislative basketball. And you can’t teach athleticism. He gets South Carolina’s toughest perimeter assignment.

Sen. Danny Britt gets the starting power-forward spot. The Robeson County senator played football at Appalachian State, so I’m asking him to set screens and rebound, with the understanding that basketball officials may have a different interpretation of an acceptable block.

On the bench

That gives us a starting five. On the bench, Gov. Josh Stein returns as our veteran and honorary captain. Thirteen years have passed since those photos were taken, so we’ll give him shorter shifts this time.

Destin Hall should be one of the first players off the bench. The House speaker was a soccer goalkeeper and third baseman at West Caldwell. I’m betting some of those reflexes carry over. He can also work the officials, although being speaker should not entitle him to extra free throws.

Dante Pittman gets a place in the rotation, too. He represents Wilson and Nash counties and serves in the North Carolina Army National Guard. I’m taking a chance on him as another perimeter option.

Reps. Jonathan Almond and Brian Echevarria round out the roster, giving Cabarrus County two seats on the bench. I’m not sure if Echevarria has game, but at least his sons do. His oldest is an edge rusher and youngest is a quarterback. I’m hoping they got some of that from Dad.

State Auditor Dave Boliek is the coach. He led a church league basketball program in Fayetteville, which seems like useful preparation for this assignment. An auditor should have plenty to say about wasted possessions, too.

We’ll also need Reps. Grant Campbell and Tim Reeder on standby courtside. Campbell is a physician who served in the Army, and Reeder practices emergency medicine at ECU. With this much enthusiasm and this many years since high school, having two doctors available seems like the responsible decision.

Now somebody needs to call South Carolina and find a date. I would happily watch this team try to turn all that legislative experience into a functioning offense, and I suspect plenty of other North Carolinians would, too.

When it’s over, put the signed jerseys up for auction. I’ll be bidding.

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Question of the week

I’m still working through the Trusting News fellowship, and I’m thrilled with the response to my mission video. There’s a new survey out as a part of it. Would you consider taking it?

And thank you if you did the first one, as well. This new one is shorter.

Take the Survey

When your children come home this afternoon, do you know what they’ll have learned about the man behind the holiday? Chances are you don’t, and that’s by design.

Readers may remember my piece last year about what children hear first about their country’s history. With Columbus Day coming around again, I went through the state’s curriculum to see what schools are actually expected to teach. (You may have noticed that this has become something of a project around here.)

As it turns out, North Carolina offers some guidance on Columbus, but no clear sequence for what children should learn about him at different ages. However you feel about the man, surely we want children to graduate from high school knowing who he was. So their education has to begin…

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At the federal level, I honestly don’t have much to say in their defense. Voters gave Republicans the White House and both chambers of Congress in 2024 expecting them to bring down the cost of living. Nearly two years later, they’ve failed to deliver on that promise.

Here in North Carolina, though, it’s a different story.

Republicans like Reps. Mike Schietzelt, Erin Paré, Tricia Cotham, Brian Echevarria, Jonathan Almond and Allen Chesser are in fact working on ways to bring costs down.

I don’t tend to get very partisan here at Longleaf Politics, but these are special people. We need more people like them in public service. I’d hate to lose them because everybody’s fed up with Washington.

The gas tax debate is a good place to start.

Last week, the General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to suspend the state’s 41-cent tax on gasoline and diesel through November. The legislation replaces the lost road funding with state reserves.

As I wrote last week, I support a short break like this since we’re covering the road money and sticking to an end date. Democrats have criticized this as an election-season move, which isn’t completely unreasonable.

But these lawmakers have plans that go well beyond a few weeks of cheaper gas. Some have been on the table for months.

Last week, I sat down with Rep. Schietzelt and we talked about quite a few of them. I highly encourage you to watch the conversation here:

Schietzelt posted a reminder on Facebook late last week about his Energy and Housing Affordability Act, filed this spring.

It would make Duke Energy’s shareholders absorb 20% of fuel costs above the utility’s forecast, instead of passing the whole overage to customers as it stands today.

The bill would also encourage big electricity users to develop or contract for their own on-site generation, helping meet new demand without sticking the rest of us with as much of the cost.

Chesser has also taken the lead on a bill to eliminate the 2% local grocery tax, with Paré and Schietzelt among its primary sponsors.

This is the kind of work I want my legislators doing. Find something government can actually change, explain how it would help and try to get it done.

You can be disappointed with Republicans in Washington and still think we have some good ones worth keeping in Raleigh. That’s where I am.

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Question of the week

But groceries are getting expensive, and even his family’s kitchen counter is looking a little bare these days.

It’s a problem he’s hearing about constantly as he knocks on doors in northern Wake County. Voters are worried about the cost of living, property taxes and whether new data centers will send their power bills through the roof.

I sat down with Schietzelt for the latest Longleaf Politics podcast to talk about what state lawmakers can actually do about these problems, and whether Republicans have done enough.

Schietzelt doesn’t let Washington off the hook. He’s critical of President Trump’s tariffs and the economic fallout from the war in the Middle East, both of which he believes have made life harder for families already struggling with higher prices.

But he also makes a pretty good case for what Republicans have accomplished in Raleigh. We talked about the gas tax, electricity costs and his successful push to keep tolls off Capitol Boulevard.

There’s a lot more to Schietzelt than policy, though.

He grew up poor, raised by a single father who worked two jobs. A donated trumpet helped change the course of his life, eventually leading him to college, a career performing on cruise ships and service in the Marine Corps. He never expected to end up in politics.

And despite everything he’s seen during his first term in the General Assembly, he’s still remarkably optimistic about what government can accomplish.

“You have to be practical,” he told me. “But you can’t let practicality morph into cynicism.”

We covered a lot of ground in this conversation, from his father’s extraordinary military service to what he’s learned about getting things done in Raleigh and why he wants another two years representing northern Wake County.

In a fundraising email this summer, Cooper accused Republicans of targeting their political opponents for persecution. He said Donald Trump’s Justice Department was “fomenting phony investigations that destroy trust in our judicial system.”

That’s a serious accusation. It’s also a remarkable one coming from Cooper.

On October 18, 2016, Cooper was North Carolina’s attorney general and the Democratic nominee for governor. During a televised debate with incumbent Gov. Pat McCrory, the two sparred over campaign contributions.

Cooper dropped a bombshell.

“If you want to talk about political contributions, governor, you’re the one who now has an FBI criminal investigation,” he declared.

There was just one problem. It wasn’t true.

The FBI had examined prison-maintenance contracts involving …

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That something tends to be suspending the gas tax. States like Georgia, Indiana, and Ohio have all approved gas tax holidays over the last few weeks, and now North Carolina looks ready to join them.

As you may have heard, over the weekend House Speaker Destin Hall and Senate leader Phil Berger announced a special session to address fuel prices. House Majority Leader Brenden Jones says lawmakers are coming back this week, with temporarily eliminating the gas tax among the options.

As Democrats have been quick to point out, there’s obviously a bit of political theater here, with November’s elections a month away. Lawmakers need to be seen as doing something about gas prices — especially diesel that’s now consistently over $6 a gallon.

My gut reaction was to criticize a potential gas tax holiday in North Carolina as shortsighted, but I get why lawmakers are reaching for it. They can’t do much about world oil prices or the conflicts disrupting supply. They can take some of the tax off the next fill-up.

That’s one of the few ways they can help people quickly, and I certainly understand why they’d want to.

About North Carolina’s gas tax

As anybody who’s ever driven across the border into South Carolina to fill up knows, North Carolina has one of the highest gas taxes in the country.

North Carolina’s motor-fuel excise tax is 41 cents a gallon, plus a quarter-cent inspection fee. That puts our state 10th-highest among the 50 states, according to the Energy Information Administration. South Carolina’s statewide taxes and fees total 28.75 cents, Tennessee’s 27.4 cents and Virginia’s 42.4 cents.

After a small environmental allocation, 75% of the remaining fuel tax revenue goes to the Highway Fund and 25% to the Highway Trust Fund. The Highway Fund primarily pays for road maintenance and operations. The Trust Fund helps pay for new road construction and expansion.

Why our gas tax is so high

North Carolina has been taxing gasoline since 1921, when a penny-a-gallon tax and a $50 million bond issue helped then-Gov. Cameron Morrison build roads connecting our county seats. The Good Roads State had to pay for those roads somehow.

There are really two big reasons why North Carolina’s gas tax is so high. The first is that our state government builds and maintains a lot more roads than most other states do.

North Carolina took over county roads in 1931, and the N.C. Department of Transportation now maintains an 81,000-mile network that includes a ton of roads that counties handle in many other states.

The second reason is that North Carolina has chosen to collect much of the money to build and maintain that network from drivers — but without relying on tolls so much. Gas taxes, taxes on vehicle purchases and DMV fees supply most of our state transportation funding.

My analysis of federal highway figures shows that fuel taxes supplied 36.5% of North Carolina’s state-government highway receipts, excluding borrowing. The national figure was 20.3%. Only Indiana and Alabama relied on fuel taxes more.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s simply a trade-off. So how do states that depend less on the gas tax pay for roads? Mostly by supplementing gas taxes with other tax revenues.

Virginia supplements its fuel taxes with dedicated sales taxes. Texas uses portions of sales-tax collections and oil-and-gas production taxes. North Carolina has started moving that way, too, now sending 6% of net state sales-tax collections to transportation.

The reality is that taxpayers pay for roads one way or another. Collecting more at the pump means less need to raise that money through income taxes, sales taxes or tolls. A high gas tax can leave room for lower taxes elsewhere.

What a gas tax holiday would do in N.C.

Say North Carolina does go ahead with a gas tax holiday. What would drivers get out of all this? If the entire 41-cent tax cut reached consumers, a 15-gallon fill-up would cost $6.15 less. While that’s not life changing, it is real money, especially if you drive a lot.

But drivers may not get the full savings. A Wharton study of gas tax holidays in 2022 found that consumers received much of the benefit, though generally less than the whole tax cut.

In North Carolina, Wharton estimated that a gas tax holiday would net out to a reduction of 30 cents per gallon in gas prices. That would save about $4.50 on a 15-gallon fill-up.

I suspect the bigger effect would be psychological. You’d see a lower number on the sign and feel like somebody was trying to give you a break. When every trip to the gas station feels like bad news, that counts for something.

On the flip side, the same model puts the revenue loss from a two-month gasoline-and-diesel tax suspension at about $401 million. If the General Assembly chooses to suspend the gas tax, I’d expect lawmakers to appropriate general-fund money to cover the gap, as Ohio just did.

A holiday won’t solve the problem

The reality is that there’s only so much a tax holiday can do. It doesn’t put any more gasoline on the market. In some ways, it can be counterproductive: If cheaper gas encourages people to buy more while supplies are tight, the price of the gas itself can rise and eat into the savings.

That puts a limit on how much relief Raleigh can deliver. And there’s also the inconvenient reality that the tax would have to come back at some point, and nobody wants to be responsible for a huge, sudden jump in gas prices.

Still, I can support giving people a short break this session. Replace the lost road money, set an end date and be honest that we’re just getting a little relief while we wait for the bigger supply problems to ease.

What I wouldn’t support is letting road projects fall behind or extending the holiday every time that end date becomes politically inconvenient.

Longer-term, I do think it’s worthwhile for North Carolina to start weaning ourself off the dependence on gas tax revenue. Cars keep getting better at using less of it, and that’s a problem even after prices come down.

I’m open to cutting the gas tax permanently and paying for roads another way. If this special session gets that conversation started, it could do more good than a few weeks of cheaper gas.

Question of the week

On a lighter note, I’m a big fan of all those online quizzes that let you answer some questions and determine what type of philosopher you are or what your political typology is. But I had yet to see one specifically for North Carolina. So I made one myself.

Have at it: Which North Carolina political tradition fits you? Answer 24 quick questions to find your closest comparisons and a result worth sharing.

Take the Quiz

You’ve likely started seeing maps floating around (like this one from Carolina Forward) showing what a Democratic wave could do in the General Assembly elections next month. It’s pretty grim.

If you take the generic ballot polls at face value and apply them to the individual districts, things get pretty apocalyptic pretty fast. Republicans lose the House. The Senate hangs on by a seat or ends in a tie. Push the numbers further and Democrats take the whole legislature.

Now, before we all start hyperventilating, it’s worth slowing down and remembering that we don’t divvy up legislative seats based on a generic ballot.

I’m not saying results like those above are outside the realm of possibility. But there isn’t a generic Republican running against a generic Democrat in each of these districts.

Rep. Allen Chesser is running in Nash County. Reps. Mike Schietzelt and Erin Paré are running i…

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That physical distance helps explain a metaphysical one — the longstanding, well-deserved gripe that the people running North Carolina don’t pay enough attention to what happens west of Asheville.

That is starting to change, albeit slowly. As we marked the second anniversary of Hurricane Helene, the Governor’s Recovery Office for Western North Carolina released an economic recovery plan that tries to look beyond repairing the damage to building a stronger regional economy.

At the outset, the report says it draws upon the Marshall Plan, the one proposed in 1947 to help Europe recover from World War II — and prevent Soviet communism from spreading.

It’s not the most natural comparison. Yes, they’re both about rebuilding but in dramatically different scenarios. In the Marshall Plan, the early aid supplied food, fertilizer and fuel to a ravaged continent, followed by raw materials and machinery to get industrial production going again.

We’ve been doing some of that work already with the recovery money going into western North Carolina. There’s been real success reopening roads, though getting people back into homes has gone much worse.

This new report takes on something more difficult than restoring what was there. Britain and France had been economic powers before the war. Western North Carolina had serious economic problems long before Helene, and they’d still be there even with a successful storm recovery.

This plan is an attempt to address those problems, too.

What’s actually in here

The report is a bit of a hodgepodge. It talks about storm recovery, a few projects already underway, as well as ideas for growing the economy over the next decade.

The goals are mostly things every part of North Carolina wants: more jobs close to home, more housing, child care and health care. The idea is that you could grow up in a mountain town, find a decent job nearby and afford to raise your family there.

That’s harder than it sounds. Like much of rural North Carolina, the region has lost major employers and watched its population age. But many mountain towns also face pressures that some inland communities down east don’t — like wealthier retiree newcomers and vacation-home buyers bidding up housing.

The report is at its best when it stays particular to the mountain region. There’s a good bit of discussion of Spruce Pine’s quartz deposits and how they could support more manufacturing nearby. It also contemplates how more of the region’s timber and farm products could be processed locally, keeping more of the work and income there.

Put all that together, along with the housing and infrastructure work, and you’re talking about a substantial amount of money. The report doesn’t give a total, so I tried to put one together. My back-of-the-napkin estimate comes to about $25 billion over roughly a decade, including ongoing projects and private investment.

Some of that spending is already in motion. The plan includes highway projects around Asheville and farther west, as well as a federally supported manufacturing research and training center called the Futures Factory.

Others have a long way to go. For example, the plan envisions passenger rail between Salisbury and Asheville, with three daily round trips by 2035. While this has been a goal of the WNC Rail Committee for years, actually getting trains running remains a long way off.

Where I land

I don’t have the same ideological concerns I had with Stein’s statewide economic plan. That one seemed to assume the hard part of generating growth was behind us. This one understands how much work remains.

I suspect that’s because Sharon Decker, Pat McCrory’s former commerce secretary, led the effort. I got to know her as I wrote The Change Agent, and I give her credit for trying to put all this together.

My concern is more practical. Nobody knows what the economy will look like in 10 or 15 years, and there’s only so much a state-driven committee can do to shape it. The real recovery will happen town by town, and I’d rather see the administration spend its time, energy and money helping more towns carry out plans like the one Canton is working on.

Led by indefatigable mayor Zeb Smathers (my favorite Democrat in North Carolina by far), Canton is trying to figure out what can sustain the town now that the paper mill is gone. Redeveloping that property is a big part of its plan.

In a recent Kudzu Project interview, Smathers described his goal as building “the hometown of tomorrow,” where children and grandchildren have an opportunity to come back after finishing school.

That’s a big reason I like him so much. He’s thinking about whether the next generation will actually be able to make a life in the town he loves.

How to do that will look different in each town. A while back, I wrote about how Mount Airy is leaning into its Mayberry image to attract investment without losing what people like about it.

Other towns could use some help. The recovery plan highlights Spruce Pine’s quartz deposits, but as I wrote earlier this year, the town also has a $34 million downtown streetscape plan and an annual general fund budget of roughly $3.35 million. Helping the town figure out how to pay for its plans would be a useful place for the Stein administration to start.

That’s the part of the Marshall Plan I’d like to see us borrow. These towns have people who care deeply about their future. A little more help could go a long way.

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So much for doing things differently this time.

We saw versions of this during COVID with unemployment benefits. We saw it after Hurricanes Matthew and Florence with ReBuild NC. And now we’re seeing some of the same problems with Renew NC.

Even after all of that, we’re still just not very good at walking lots of people through a complicated government process.

The Assembly published an excellent piece yesterday about the program. Nearly 8,000 people applied for Helene housing help. Just 157 families have made it back into completed homes. More applicants had been rejected or dropped — mostly for missing documents — than had been accepted.

Now, I do think you have to be a little skeptical of some of the individual complaints.

People miss emails. They forget forms. They swear they sent something that they didn’t. And disaster rec…

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“Clearly, he’s not familiar with the way these cameras work,” Hopkins said in the exchange shared on X. “I have literally caught people cheating on their spouses by accessing this data. That’s how readily available the information about you is.”

That is a striking claim, and one worth slowing down to examine. Is this true? And if so, how is she getting this data?

The background

Hopkins is running for House District 35 against Republican state Rep. Mike Schietzelt. She owns the Raleigh Law Center, and her campaign identifies her as a board-certified family law specialist. Presumably, this means she handles a lot of divorce cases.

Both Raleigh and Wake Forest use Flock cameras to collect searchable records of vehicles passing particular locations. Raleigh’s description of its system says those records include the license plate number, date and time, camera location, and basic vehicle characteristics. The system does not identify the driver, according to the city.

It is easy to see how that information could help in a marital dispute. A vehicle sighting might contradict someone’s account of where they were. Repeated sightings might suggest a pattern worth investigating. The records wouldn’t establish an affair on their own, but they could contribute to a case.

Getting access to them is another matter.

North Carolina’s license-plate-reader law restricts obtaining, accessing, preserving and disclosing covered police data to law-enforcement purposes. Those include criminal investigations and prosecutions, locating missing or endangered people, and recovering lost or stolen vehicles. Investigating infidelity for a divorce case is not on the list.

The statute also makes the records confidential and excludes them from ordinary public records. Unauthorized access or disclosure can constitute a Class 1 misdemeanor.

The local safeguards are fairly specific, too.

Raleigh says each search must involve trained department personnel, a legitimate law-enforcement purpose and a case, warrant, dispatch or other identifying number. The city says use is audited monthly, with results reported to the police chief. Records are ordinarily deleted after 30 days unless preserved for a criminal investigation.

In October 2023, Wake Forest announced that its police department was leasing 25 Flock cameras. The town credited the newly activated network with helping recover stolen vehicles, locate a missing juvenile, recover a firearm and serve outstanding warrants.

Wake Forest Commissioner Adam Wright later described the safeguards after asking police how they used the system. According to his account, access is restricted, searches require a case number, offense type and documented reason, and the system is audited for compliance with state law and department policy. He also described a 30-day retention period.

Those are the public explanations of how these systems are supposed to work. Neither describes routine access for divorce lawyers investigating suspected affairs.

So how is she getting the data?

Let’s take her account at face value and consider how it might have happened.

One possible explanation is that she obtained records through a subpoena or court order. But “she’s a lawyer, so she can subpoena them” doesn’t really settle the question. Police-held plate records have specific statutory protections. We would need to know what was requested, who provided it and what legal authority permitted the disclosure. This process also doesn’t really match up with the cavalier way Hopkins said she accessed the data.

Another possibility is that the records came from privately operated cameras.

Beyond police departments, Flock also serves homeowners associations, apartment communities and businesses. The company says customers own their camera data and control access. It separately says private customers cannot access law-enforcement data through its system.

The News & Observer reported on Flock cameras operated by the Princeton Manor homeowners association in Knightdale, including residents’ concerns about who could inspect the records. Its reporting also identified cameras in nearby Mingo Creek.

Depending on the circumstances, an attorney might seek particular records from a private camera owner through litigation. Flock’s evidence policy generally directs subpoenas, court orders and other legal demands to the customer that owns the data. The company says it does not disclose customer records in response to legal process unless required by law.

A third possibility is that Hopkins was referring to a different source of vehicle-location data.

Flock is one supplier in a larger market. Delvepoint, for example, advertises historical vehicle sightings, including locations and dates. But its product page limits that service to specified insurance-related uses by insurers and insurance support organizations, including qualifying investigators.

Which brings us to the final possible explanation: improper access. But the quotation alone gives us no basis to conclude that happened.

Questions Hopkins should answer

Hopkins may not have realized it, but she made a pretty extraordinary statement on that stage. She makes two claims: that she used camera data to help establish infidelity, and that her experience shows how readily available information about the rest of us is.

I would like to hear more about what she was describing. She needn’t reveal the intimate details of her clients’ marriages to explain how she obtained the information. But she owes us more information on how she got access to this data.

These are the questions I would ask:

1. Were the records specifically from Flock? Or were they from another license-plate database, ordinary surveillance cameras or another source of location information?

2. When and where did this happen? What years were involved, and were the records collected in northern Wake County, elsewhere in North Carolina or another state?

3. Who held and supplied the information? A police department, homeowners association, business, private investigator or someone else? If an investigator supplied it, where did the investigator obtain it?

4. What did “accessing this data” involve? Did you personally search a database, ask someone else to search it or receive a limited set of records obtained for a case?

5. What authorized the access or disclosure? Was there a subpoena, court order, consent or another basis? Can you provide a redacted example showing the process?

6. What did the camera records establish? What other evidence supported the conclusion that someone was cheating, and what about your experience supports the broader claim that this information is readily available?

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The school board fired the superintendent it had just brought back. The chairwoman gave up her leadership post but will remain on the board even as the district attorney asks for an SBI investigation into contracts she’s approved.

I’m at the point where I’d welcome the General Assembly coming in and dissolving the school board and putting the school district into some sort of receivership. That’s unlikely to happen, but a Democratic friend suggested the state could send Superintendent of Public Instruction Mo Green down to clean things up. I have plenty of criticisms of Mr. Green, but honestly, that might be the best course of action.

But let’s back up a minute. My newspaper column today is about how school leaders keep weakening their own case for more funding by how they handle the money they already have.

As I mentioned on Instagram yesterday, districts across the state are shrinking, even in places where the population is booming. That got me wond…

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My old friend Colin Campbell’s recent story for WUNC about state-owned historic homes in downtown Raleigh falling into disuse and disrepair was exactly that.

Within a block or two of the Executive Mansion, the state owns a slate of beautiful century-old houses that have been allowed to deteriorate. Several are long-vacant, while others serve only nominal roles. One is actually being used to store fire extinguishers, though state officials say the house is unsafe to even enter.

I’m chairman of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Historic Landmarks Commission, so you might guess how I feel about all this. If a historic home in Charlotte were being treated this way, we’d have a serious problem with it. Our own state government doing it is inexcusable.

A lot of problems in state government have no clear owner, but this isn’t one of them. Responsibility for these homes falls squarely on the governor. Former Gov. Roy Cooper can take some of the blame, but the onus now is on Gov. Josh Stein to answer for what’s happening in his own neighborhood.

I held former Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson to the same standard last year when I wrote about what had happened to the historic Hawkins-Hartness House, the lieutenant governor’s office.

Previous Lt. Gov. Dan Forest and his wife, Alice, had spent years restoring the house, raising private money and putting enormous care into making it something North Carolina could be proud of. By the time current Lt. Gov. Rachel Hunt took over, rooms were largely bare and some of the furniture was deteriorating in the basement.

What I said then bears repeating again now. Public service means stewardship. You’re entrusted with something for a little while, and you have a responsibility to leave it better than you found it. Rarely is it more tangible than with the pieces of North Carolina history put in your care.

I highly encourage you to read Colin’s story and look at the pictures. It’s hard to understand how the state can own places like these and be content to use them this way.

Look, I get it. A governor has a lot to deal with. But taking care of your own neighborhood ought to be a priority.

And it can be done. As I write in my book, Pat McCrory made state property a priority through Project Phoenix, including selling historic houses around Blount Street. One was the Heck-Andrews House, which NC Realtors has since restored.

I’d like to see Stein give the remaining houses that kind of attention. I love North Carolina, and I want us to keep the places that make it feel like North Carolina. I’d hate to see us lose them simply because we never got around to taking care of them.

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President Donald Trump came to Gaston County last week to stump for U.S. Senate candidate Michael Whatley, and it didn’t go so well. So much so that I think the visit did more harm than good to Republicans up and down the ballot. Read my column on that here, free with gift link: Trump came to NC to help Michael Whatley. I think he made things worse

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The first step is a baseline survey to understand what my audience already finds credible and reliable. It will give the researchers something to measure against — and help me better understand why you turn to Longleaf Politics and what you expect from me.

If you have about 10 minutes, I’d appreciate your help. Take the survey here.

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Seeing as how I have a kindergarten student myself, I have a pretty vested interest in this. And if you asked me, I’d rattle off a few things like counting to 100, writing your name, tying your shoes, telling time, counting change, a little simple addition and maybe, by the end of the year, reading a “See Spot Run” book.

If we’re feeling ambitious, we could work in an understanding that you live in a city, which is in a state, which is part of the United States. I’m not even introducing counties at this point.

As a stretch goal, we could expect a kindergartener to have a favorite book and be able to explain what they like about it.

That strikes me as a reasonable course of study for 5- and 6-year-olds.

Now let’s look at what the state of North Carolina actually says kindergarten students should learn.

The “quick reference guide” is an astonishing 52 pages long, which is far from quick in any reas…

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Two years ago, Democrat Woodson Bradley beat Republican Stacie McGinn by just 209 votes in Senate District 42, an open-seat election after Rachel Hunt decided to run for lieutenant governor. With more than 124,000 votes cast, that was a margin of less than two-tenths of a percentage point.

Now they are doing it all over again with Bradley as the incumbent and McGinn back for a rematch. Their race through southern and eastern Mecklenburg County is once again among the relatively small number of legislative contests that could plausibly go either way.

I wrote after the last election that the McGinn campaign could have gone harder after Bradley over her leadership in a multi-level marketing company called Fortune Hi-Tech, which was ultimately shut down as an illegal pyramid scheme in 2013. Then as now, Bradley is an excellent saleswoman, but what she’s selling is a scam.

Back then, Bradley tried to distance herself from the MLM. Bradley’s campaign told WFAE in 2024 that she did not own Fortune Hi-Tech, was not a party to the government’s case and disputed any suggestion that she defrauded anyone.

What’s fascinating — in a bad way — is that Bradley is not running away from that history this time. She is trying to rewrite it.

Her campaign is now sending a mailer with this remarkable line:

“I survived an abusive relationship — only to be targeted by a pyramid scheme preying on survivors of abuse. I swore I’d never let that happen again … to me or anybody else.”

That is an astonishing rewriting of what happened. Bradley was not merely “targeted” by the scheme. She became one of its most public faces.

Bradley was selling the scheme

Bradley, who then went by Woodson Gardner, was not some poor sap suckered into Fortune Hi-Tech’s enormous network. As one of its senior salespeople, she appeared in promotional and training videos and addressed rooms of recruits, teaching them how to sell the opportunity to still more people.

In one recruiting speech, she told a story of leaving an abusive relationship and then connected it to the MLM.

“If that happened to you, you take that, you run with that, and you ensure that no one in your life ever lives hell on earth again,” she said. “And that’s what you have your hands on here.”

By then, Bradley had risen far beyond the rank and file. Fortune Hi-Tech promoted her as a “Platinum Sales Manager” and placed her in its “Ring of Honor.” A now-deleted LinkedIn profile described her as one of its largest earners.

In a 2013 motion seeking a temporary restraining order, the FTC identified Bradley by the Fortune Hi-Tech rank of national sales manager and cited statements from her presentations multiple times while arguing that the company emphasized recruitment.

Why this matters

I don’t think every bad decision from 15 years ago should follow someone forever. If Bradley wants to say she made a mistake, got in over her head or came to regret her role in Fortune Hi-Tech, voters can decide what to make of that.

But that is not what she is doing.

Bradley is bringing the episode back up herself and using it to sell voters on something admirable about her character. In her version, she was targeted and then became the protector, determined to keep the same thing from happening to anyone else.

There is no way a normal reader would see this mailer and understand Bradley’s documented role. She has taken the most damaging part of her public biography and recast it as a story of personal courage.

That is what makes the mailer important. It is not only about what Bradley did years ago. It is about how she handles an uncomfortable truth about herself now.

Bradley likes to talk about being on “Team Normal.” She wants suburban voters to see her as the practical mom in the middle, far removed from the strange people and ideological crusades that have come to define politics.

But there is nothing normal about turning a record that placed you near the top of a pyramid into a campaign story about being one of the people trapped at the bottom.

Candidates matter

Democrats currently lead the national generic congressional ballot by about seven and a half points, and races like this one often get reduced to a broader fight over the balance of power.

But I live in this district, and I don’t think this race should be treated as one more square on a statewide scoreboard. Voters here are choosing between two actual people, not two generic party labels.

Bradley is a sitting state senator asking them to trust her judgment and her account of her own record. They should consider not only what she did with Fortune Hi-Tech, but what she is telling them about it now.

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The campaign was mercifully short and mostly involved texting a few neighbors. But now I need to figure out how to be better at the job.

If you’ve never heard of these teams, you’re probably in good company. The concept dates back to 1989, when North Carolina began to offer school districts more freedom from state rules in exchange for taking responsibility for results. To get those waivers, you had to have a school improvement team.

Reforms in 1996 made these teams mandatory at every district-run public school in North Carolina, and the next year lawmakers added procedures to elect parents to them.

The intention of the law is for parents sit alongside teachers and administrators to develop a plan for improving the school, and state law says we’re supposed to have a “substantial role.”

But when I joined last year, I had virtually no idea what to expect. It felt like I’d walked into the middle of something and struggled to catch up. The goals were set, the plan was underway, and everybody else seemed to know what we were doing.

I learned a lot and appreciated the chance to ask questions. I had a harder time figuring out how to make an impact.

Sadly, there’s really not a whole lot for parents to go on. The state Department of Public Instruction and the North Carolina PTA put out a parent handbook in 1997. There hasn’t been much of anything since then.

That’s what I want to fix. But I need your help

It’s so easy for school improvement teams to become a box-checking exercise.

I’m working on a practical guide to help myself and other parents across North Carolina figure out how to make the most of the job.

That’s where I could use your help. Have you served on a school improvement team? What did you accomplish? What got in the way? What do you wish you’d known going in?

Parents, teachers, principals — I’d like to hear from all of you. Send me your experiences, tips and tricks, especially examples of something your team actually changed.

The end result will be a practical handbook that parents across the state can use to make their schools better. I’ll share it with you when it’s done.

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Top spenders on social media last week

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.

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