A bleak future for N.C. Republicans

Until conservatives can coalesce around a leader or vision, the Democrat machine will keep dominating governor and AG races

At this point, it’s practically a given: North Carolina votes Republican for president, but chooses a Democrat for governor and attorney general.

The media still seems baffled by this stubborn tendency, but the answer is really quite simple. State Democrats have perfected a system to accomplish just that.

This week, N.C. Republicans are celebrating President Donald Trump’s victory and apparent clean sweep of statewide judicial races. But to be honest, last week’s results were not good for the state GOP.

The party comes out of the election cycle leaderless, directionless and with a particularly bleak future. The problems run deeper than a bad candidate. They’re systemic.

Despite periodic victories, Republicans in North Carolina have put zero effort into building a framework that will outlive an individual candidate. Instead, the party’s factions have torn each other apart rather than rally around a cohesive vision or leader.

Meanwhile, the state’s Democratic political machine continues to chug right along.

Welcome to the Machine

Political machines get a bad rap, but boy, they certainly can be effective. 

By now you probably know the Cliff’s Notes version of the state’s political history. Democrats ran North Carolina as a one-party state from 1900 until 2010, when a confluence of broader national trends pushed Republicans to victory in a census-year election. Since then, the General Assembly has solidified Republican control, but hasn’t held on to statewide executive power.

But what’s truly fascinating is just how few people have actually controlled the levers of power across that entire time period. Over the century of Democratic control, North Carolina politics were dominated by a virtually unbroken series of dynasties that dictated the direction of the state. The last such dynasty is the longest-running of them all — and it’s still operating today.

While powerful, these political dynasties don’t have a perfect record. In the latter half of the 20th century, Republicans were able to luck into a handful of statewide victories on the coattails of popular national leaders¹.

But none of the three Republicans who managed to be elected governor were adept enough to build a party structure that could keep their success going. Thus, North Carolina has had only a single two-term governor² and a single two-term lieutenant governor³. A Republican has yet to be elected state attorney general since 1896.

The Democratic political machine’s tactics have changed over the decades. Instead of staging violent coups or bribing county officials as they once did, Democrats today cultivate big-money donors and methodically hand-pick their future successors. The party stashes its future governors in the lieutenant governor’s office and Department of Justice, and identifies talent at early ages.

Four-term Gov. Jim Hunt launched the political careers of both Marc Basnight⁴ and Roy Cooper⁵ when they were in their early 20s, and that dynasty is still going strong more than 50 years later.

The weak Republican party

North Carolina Republicans have never done anything similar. They’re consistently outspent in high-profile campaigns, and have never strategically lined up candidates for higher office. They don’t communicate a vision with the electorate and even attempt to rally around a leader or vision.

That’s the difference in N.C. politics. While the conservative movement has made great strides in states like Florida and Virginia over the last half-decade, North Carolina now has little prospect of gaining ground in the next 20 years.

Instead, the blame typically goes to the candidates themselves, or perhaps the voters.

In a post-election press conference, Senate president pro tem Phil Berger described North Carolina as a “default Republican state.”

“All things being equal, good Republican candidates can win by several points,” Berger said, per Carolina Journal. Emphasis is mine.

State Treasurer-elect Brad Briner had similar sentiments: “Voters, I think, looked for reasonable Republicans, and they found a number of them,” he told Business North Carolina magazine.

They’re both right, of course, which makes the party’s inability to hold on to higher office all the more inexcusable. Mark Robinson was a historically bad candidate whose weaknesses were well known years ago. He deserved to lose, and he did in a landslide.

But candidates don’t just appear out of nowhere. They’re nominated and vetted by their party.

Or at least they’re supposed to be. NCGOP chairman Jason Simmons basically threw up his hands last week when asked about it by Carolina Journal.

“What we see from a party perspective is our bylaws are prohibitive in allowing us to engage in primary activity, so the party has to maintain a position of neutrality… We’ll continue to take that position as we continue to move forward and making sure that the voters of North Carolina have their voices heard.”

As the state’s Democrats have proven, that doesn’t have to be the case. Bylaws aren’t that hard to change. Winning over the primary electorate just takes a strong leader, coherent message and some money.

Even if the party were to get serious about candidate recruitment, there’s precious little hope for Republicans in the coming years. What sane Republican will want to run into a $100 million Stein buzzsaw in 2028? And Cooper could very well grab a U.S. Senate seat in 2026 from a hamstrung Thom Tillis.

That puts Attorney General-elect Jeff Jackson well-positioned to run for governor in 2032 and 2036, with no Republicans of similar stature on the rise.

Will Jackson then lead the next great Democratic dynasty? Almost certainly, if the Republican Party doesn’t change.

Important reads

• Mark Robinson’s Predictable Implosion (The Assembly)

• Parties Poured Millions Into a Wilmington Race. The Incumbent Won Easily (The Assembly)

Top spenders on social media last week

As you might expect, political advertising has dropped virtually to zero now that the election is over — for now. Google has cut off political advertising indefinitely following the close of the polls, while Facebook hasn’t updated its political ad library since Election Day.

We’re going to keep this feature going to highlight how candidates message outside of peak periods. But for this week, we just don’t have any data.

Longleaf Politics readers like unfiltered election results

Last week, we asked you how you planned to follow the election results. The majority of you like to get vote totals straight from the source — the N.C. State Board of Elections. I’m right there with you.

What’s your favorite way to watch election returns?

• State Board of Elections website: 53%

• Cable news: 27%

• Twitter/X: 12%

• Candidate watch party: 4%

• None…I wait until it’s all over: 3%

Question of the Week

1. Republican Jim Holshouser was elected governor in the 1972 Richard Nixon re-election landslide, and Jim Martin won the office in 1984 during Ronald Reagan's re-election. Pat McCrory’s win was different, but also fluky. He won only after the sitting governor announced at the last minute that she wouldn’t run for re-election as the state reeled from the Great Recession.

2. Martin, re-elected in 1988

3. Dan Forest, re-elected in 2016

4. Hunt appointed Basnight to the state transportation board in 1977. He’d go on to serve nine terms as Senate president pro tem.

5. Hunt appointed Cooper to the State Goals and Policy Board while Cooper was still in law school in Chapel Hill. Cooper's father was a close Hunt advisor and campaign chairman.