Kate Barr and the problem with party labels
A progressive in a GOP primary isn’t a crisis. It’s a glimpse at how much work party labels are doing in North Carolina.
North Carolina politics went viral a few different ways last week. The first was the Sheriff Garry McFadden clip where he couldn’t answer how many branches of government there are. I’m certain you’ve seen it at this point. I was watching the hearing live, and it was a brutally painful exchange — but I never dreamed it would get as huge as it did.
The second one was less dramatic, but still made national news: Congressional candidate Kate Barr saying on camera that she’s “not a real Republican” and is entering the GOP race as a way to protest gerrymandering.
She’s running in the primary against U.S. Rep. Tim Moore in the 14th Congressional District that stretches from western Mecklenburg County out through the foothills.
Some people were extremely mad online about it, though it’s not exactly breaking news. To be honest, I don’t really get the outrage. People act like they just learned that party labels are strategic tools.
Rather than cry about deceit and trickery, the proper response is actually something counterintuitive. Welcome her to the party.
If she wants to run in a Republican primary, fine. File the paperwork and let voters decide. If we’re going to call ourselves a big-tent party, that’s how a big tent works.
If anything, it’s a good sign for partisans on the right side of the aisle — Republicans as the default option in most of the state, and Democrats increasingly relegated to the fringe.
The problem with party labels
The full interview with the Hometown Holler is worth a watch, but let’s get this out of the way first. I think Barr is a little loony, and she’s certainly extremely liberal.
To me, she’s more interesting as a symptom than as a candidate. She’s pointing at a system where party labels are doing so much work that it crowds out everything else.
I’m not breaking any new ground here to say that there are problems with our country’s two-party system. Every Democrat gets treated as an avatar of the national left. Every Republican gets treated as an avatar of the national right.
Candidates get trained to perform for their base and then pretend they never said any of it when the general electorate shows up.
That’s why then-Gov. Roy Cooper felt pressured to cut a deal to release 3,500 inmates during COVID. It's why Gov. Josh Stein vetoes ICE bills and then a few months later says it's common sense to deport dangerous criminals.
Party labels are doing so much of the work that we don’t know how to talk about anything else. I’ve written quite a bit about how tribalism creates separate realities for the two sides of the aisle and how people have replaced family and faith with partisanship. Straight ticket voting is still a thing, even if you technically can’t do it anymore.
Later in the interview, Barr says: “I’m also curious about what happens when you take the identity crisis out of it.” I want the answer to that, too.
A new one-party state?
Back in 2023, when Rep. Tricia Cotham switched to become a Republican, I wrote a piece about what that could mean for the future of the two parties.
I wrote, “Republicans now have the opportunity to become that big tent party that dominates the political landscape. Being comfortable with disagreement within the party is an excellent way to expand the definition of Republicanism — and expand power.”
That’s the thought experiment Barr is poking at, whether she realizes it or not. When you think of it that way, the Kate Barr stunt looks less shocking and more like the next logical step. At the national level, I think both Democrats and Republicans have the chance to seize a durable majority if they claim the mantle of being the “normal” ones. Neither side seems anxious to make that a reality, though.
Setting that aside, though, I think at this point it’s more likely for Republicans to become the “default.” So let’s actually play it out. What kind of politics do we get if more and more races are effectively decided in March instead of November?
Here’s the best case.
In a one-party system, we might actually have to argue about the things that matter, not just the team jerseys. We might get more honest debates about competence and accountability, because there’s less payoff in turning every race into a national proxy war.
Put it this way: if Stein and State Auditor Dave Boliek were in the same party, maybe we’d be able to discuss the meaningful differences between them rather than argue about partisan labels and tying both of them to the most extreme members of either party. We might talk about how they’d run an agency, what they’d prioritize, who they’d hire, and whether they have the judgment to handle power.
It sounds kind of odd to consider and I’m not calling anybody a RINO or a DINO. But is it really any harder to imagine those two in the same party than it is Terry Sanford and Beverly Lake?
I don’t want to romanticize one-party rule. North Carolina’s long one-party era was not some civic golden age. It was built on the Democratic Party’s white supremacy campaign and resulted in all manner of grift and scandal.
But in a world of destructive partisan politics, I do wonder whether a one-party environment would make anything mechanically better. I believe in conservative policies. I also believe government should work. And conservatives should want a system that rewards serious arguments, not just the right jersey.
A world with fewer tribal labels might force us into better arguments.
In the paper
Speaking of McFadden, I wrote two newspaper columns this week from that Monday hearing. The first one references the insanity, but focuses instead on some testimony that came before the sheriff’s grill session.
I argue the real value of the hearing came from Mecklenburg DA Spencer Merriweather, who laid out a practical blueprint to modernize big-city justice in North Carolina, ideas Raleigh should take straight into the short session.
The Observer got rid of gift links, sadly, but you can read it here: NC House hearing on Charlotte crime got ugly. The testimony was very useful
The second column digs in on some dramatic stats presented at the hearing showing that Mecklenburg County’s ICE detainer pickup rate was so much lower than Wake County’s. I walk through what the law actually requires, where the jail-to-ICE handoff can break down, and what we can do about it.
Read it here: ‘Not my fault’? On ICE detainers, Sheriff McFadden might be right
You make interesting points about a big tent GOP in NC and how that could work.
But Katie Barr isn't a good example of that happening in NC. As you say, she doesn't claim to be a Republican. She isn't trying to get the party to consider a wider range of policy positions than it currently holds.
Terry Sandford and Beverly Lake both considered themselves "real" Democrats.
The widening of the tent will not come from the Party apparatus itself. The votes to censure Burr and Tillis have infected too many party activists with the belief their job is enforce conformity to the Party line rather than getting as many Republicans elected as possible. Trump's dominance in the party for the last decade also limits the range of acceptable debate within the Party. (I see similar issues in the Democrat Party, but that's not my bailiwick.)
The expansion of policy views within the GOP will come from candidates putting themselves out there, winning primaries, and getting elected. To me the question is whether that can happen as long as we are winning the Congressional races and have majorities in the NC Senate and House.
The GOP's dominance in those areas may have to be threatened before something like the article describes happens.