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North Carolina State Profile
In few states today is the political climate more polarized
between Democrats and Republicans--and between rural, urban and suburban areas--than
in North Carolina. Bolstered by rapid population growth from other states,
North Carolina, and particularly its suburban areas, has become a hard-fought
battleground, especially over the direction of state government. Beginning in
2010, North Carolina Republicans enjoyed large legislative majorities and
increasing success in winning races at all levels. But in 2018, after seemingly
endless battles over control of the state’s levers of power, voters dialed back
their support for Republicans, electing enough Democrats to break the GOP’s
legislative supermajorities, and in turn bolstering Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s
leverage in policy debates.
In the early republic, when Virginia and South Carolina
produced statesmen and had grand plantation cultures, North Carolina was often
called a valley of humility between two mountains of conceit. It joined the
Confederacy only after those two neighbors did. After the Civil War, North
Carolina developed its tobacco industry and enticed textile mills south from
New England, while its hardwood forests produced raw material for furniture
factories. Textile mills were prevalent in the Piedmont region as owners saw in
the South an opportunity for cheap land, cheap labor and state governments
eager to foster pro-business, anti-union climates. In the following decades,
the industry continued to expand and drastically improved the economy of the
South. The mill industry became the main source of industrial paid labor for
white southerners. While it was one of the lowest paying manufacturing
industries, the jobs were valued because there were few other options other
than agricultural or service work.
The tobacco-textile-furniture trio enabled North Carolina to
grow faster than the national average in the 1920s and 1930s, but the state
began to lag in the 1950s. Then, two developments transformed the state. In
1959, Gov. Luther Hodges established Research Triangle Park between Raleigh and
Durham. With synergy from nearby universities--Duke, North Carolina, and North
Carolina State--the region became one of the leading research centers in the
United States. The second development was Charlotte’s emergence as the No. 2
city in financial assets behind New York, a status that owes much to the state’s
expansive banking laws.
These twin developments explain how North Carolina has
become one of the fastest-growing and largest states. Its population more than
doubled between 1970 and 2018, from 5.1 million to 10.4 million. In the same
period, the city of Charlotte grew from 241,000 to 826,000 and Raleigh grew
from 123,000 to 449,000. Since the 2010 census, the state as a whole has grown
by a healthy 8.5 percent, probably enough to add another seat in Congress, but
several populous counties have expanded by rates even higher than that: Wake
County (Raleigh) grew by 20.3 percent, Mecklenburg County (Charlotte) by 17.2
percent, Durham County (Durham) by 16.4 percent, and Guilford County
(Greensboro) by 8.7 percent, with Buncombe County (Asheville) not far behind at
8.2 percent. As the state has shifted from old-line manufacturing in textiles
and furniture to fast-growing industries, including pharmaceuticals and
aerospace, so have its exports. Fitting for a state that was home to the first
flight at Kitty Hawk, the state’s top export is now civilian aircraft engines
and parts. Just behind are various categories of medical exports; the Triangle,
as the Raleigh-Durham area is commonly known, is one of the world’s leading
pharmaceutical and medical device centers. Highly skilled people from the
Northeast have flocked to the state: The jurisdiction of Cary in the Triangle,
jokingly referred to as “Containment Area for Relocated Yankees,” has grown 25
percent since 2010. High-tech firms are also sprouting farther west in the
Piedmont Triad of Greensboro, Winston-Salem and High Point. In 2017, Site
Selection magazine ranked North Carolina No. 1 in the country for its business
climate, and in 2018, Forbes followed suit. North Carolina has the nation’s
second-least unionized labor force, trailing only neighboring South Carolina,
leaving its labor costs among the lowest in the nation. Immigrants seeking jobs
in construction and in meat and chicken factories have pushed the Hispanic
population up to 9 percent.
Urban, affluent, high-tech North Carolina, however, is not
the only North Carolina: The state ranks second to Texas in its number of rural
residents with 3.2 million. The state’s predominantly rural counties saw
taxable wages decline by 3 percent in the past decade, compared with a 6
percent increase in suburban counties and a 15 percent increase in urban
counties, the NC Rural Center calculated. Most rural jurisdictions lost
population, which, combined with lower education levels, has made attracting
business difficult. “Many rural counties in the eastern part of the state are
40 miles from a natural gas line, a non-starter for some corporations,” the
Wall Street Journal noted. The 2018 federal approval for the $5 billion,
600-mile Atlantic Coast Pipeline, running from West Virginia to Pembroke, North
Carolina, offered some hope for economic progress.
North Carolina’s agriculture sector is significant -- the
state is the nation’s third-ranking producer of broilers, the biggest producer
of sweet potatoes, the second-biggest for Christmas trees. Notably, it ranks
second in hog production, with big feedlots in the southeastern portion of the
state. Hurricane Florence--which dropped a record 30-odd inches of rain in 2018
and ranked among the top 10 most expensive storms in U.S. history--spotlighted
the problems of hog-waste lagoons, dozens of which overflowed amid the
flooding. Concerns over the lagoons have become so contentious that neighbors
have sued for damages to their quality of life--so the legislature, looking to
protect the industry, enacted limits on such lawsuits. The psychic draw of
rural North Carolina runs deep: If Charlotte is proud of its downtown bank
towers and modern art museum, it is also proud of its Billy Graham Museum and
the NASCAR Hall of Fame. But all is not well in North Carolina. The textile
industry largely moved offshore, although efforts are under way to promote a “dirt-to-shirt”
movement akin to “farm-to-table” for artisanal food. Meanwhile, the federal
government’s 2004 buyout of tobacco quotas greatly diminished that sector, with
further concern generated by retaliatory tariffs by China, which buys more
tobacco from the state than any other country. High Point still hosts annual
furniture industry shows, but much of the production has gone elsewhere,
including China. Median income remained in the bottom quarter of states.
Big-government liberalism provided an impetus toward spending
on education, but by 2018 the publication Education Week ranked North Carolina’s
public schools only 40th best in the nation, and teachers marched to the state
capitol seeking higher pay and still more spending on the poorly performing
public school system. The state has historically invested in highways and
amenities, including the nation’s first state-funded symphony and state high
schools for science, mathematics and the arts. A different philosophical
strand, religious conservatism, has provided a communitarian spirit and
charitable impulses, as well as a moral undertone that anchors those who might
go astray. The state’s racial conflicts were never as intense as they were in
Alabama or Mississippi, though the Greensboro sit-ins in 1960 were a pivotal,
and effective, moment in the civil rights movement. Yet in a state with an
African-American population of 22 percent -- the seventh-highest of any state
-- the legacy of segregation persists. Racial tensions divided Durham in 2006,
when its prosecutor wrongly accused three white Duke lacrosse players of raping
an African-American dancer. Race has been an issue in the state’s moves to
tighten its voting procedures and draw congressional and legislative district
lines, and the police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott in Charlotte heightened
tensions in 2016. After the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville
Virginia, in 2017, vandals toppled a Confederate statue at a courthouse in
Durham. The “Silent Sam” confederate statue on the University of North Carolina
campus was also toppled by protesters. It was moved to storage, the subject of
negotiations between a largely Republican-appointed governing board and campus
officials.
During the latter part of the 20th century, Republicans
tended to win federal elections in North Carolina, and Democrats tended to do
well in state elections. The exemplars of these traditions were Republican Sen.
Jesse Helms and Democratic Gov. Jim Hunt, each of whom was elected to statewide
office five times. But in the first two decades of the new millennium, a
polarized, increasingly party-line politics evolved, waged partly on economic
issues but even more on cultural attitudes. Barack Obama narrowly won the state
in 2008, bolstered by high turnout by minorities and affluent whites. But
conservatives fought back. Aided by Democratic sales- and income-tax increases
in 2009, the Great Recession and fatigue from 20 years of Democratic state
government, the Republicans achieved big legislative majorities in the 2010
election, the first period of GOP control since Reconstruction. Two years
later, Republican Pat McCrory was elected governor. He ran as a centrist,
pro-business mayor of Charlotte, but the legislature produced a virtual
assembly line of conservative legislation and dared McCrory to use his veto.
Despite some tensions and a few vetoes, McCrory mostly acceded to their
wishes.
Over the course of several years, the GOP enacted a partisan
redistricting map, a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, cuts to
unemployment benefits, a tax overhaul that eliminated elements of progressivity
in the code, a law requiring voters to show ID along with a shorter
early-voting period, an increase in the waiting period for abortions, and a
repeal of a state law to commute the death penalty if racial bias in sentencing
could be shown. It didn’t take long for a liberal backlash to coalesce--a
running series of protests known as “Moral Mondays,” led by Rev. William Barber
III of the state NAACP. In the meantime, federal court decisions invalidated
all or part of some of the laws passed by the GOP, including the redistricting
and voting measures.
The backlash mushroomed in March 2016, when Republicans
passed a bill known as H.B. 2. The measure had been spurred by Charlotte’s
enactment of a non-discrimination ordinance on sexual orientation. The state
bill preempted local ordinances and required people to use bathrooms that
coincided with one’s birth gender. This time, allies of the LGBT community
peeled off sizable portions of the business community, who feared, with reason,
that national groups would boycott the state. Indeed, PayPal and Deutsche Bank
were among those to pull out of projects in the state, and the NCAA and NBA
canceled major events; the Associated Press projected the full economic hit to
be $3.76 billion over 12 years. Democrats--including McCrory’s Democratic
challenger, Cooper--hammered away at Republicans for inviting economic
hardship. In time, the law became an albatross for McCrory, and after the
election, the two sides agreed to repeal the law in March 2017. On the upside,
the compromise brought back the NBA All-Star game and generally kept the issue
from hindering economic development.
The drama over state government at times overshadowed the
2016 presidential election in North Carolina, but it too was hard-fought and
close. Both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton returned again and again to the
state, and key surrogates such as Barack and Michelle Obama stumped there as
well. Trump ended up winning, doubling Mitt Romney’s two-point winning margin
in 2012 to four points, thanks to a strong showing in rural areas. But in addition
to Cooper’s victory, the Democrats held the attorney general seat he had
vacated and seized a majority on the nominally nonpartisan Supreme Court. In
the 2018 midterms, Democrats finally won enough legislative seats to break the
GOP’s supermajority, and voters rejected the two most controversial
Republican-backed constitutional amendments, which would have weakened the
governor’s hand in filling judicial vacancies and the state election board.
(Voters did support a Republican-backed amendment to require a photo ID to
vote.) A Democrat won a state supreme court seat and the court’s Republican
chief judge resigned. Cooper filled the vacancy with a Democratic appeals court
judge, giving the Democrats a 6-1 majority. Despite Cooper’s increased
leverage, the rest of his first term promised continued partisan battles among
the legislature, the governor and the courts.
North Carolina's Governor's Race
Roy Cooper, a Democrat who had served four terms as North
Carolina’s attorney general, narrowly ousted Republican Gov. Pat McCrory in
2016 amid public dissatisfaction with H.B. 2, a bill that preempted local
non-discrimination ordinances on sexual orientation, requiring, among other
things, that people use bathrooms corresponding with their birth gender. In his
first two years in office, Cooper fought seemingly endless battles with the
GOP-controlled legislature, including against repeated efforts to strip his
powers as governor. But Cooper achieved an important victory in the 2018
elections, as Democrats broke the Republican supermajorities in the House and
Senate, making it easier for Cooper to make his vetoes stick, starting in
2019.
Cooper was born and raised in a rural portion of
east-central North Carolina. He earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology and
political science and a law degree at the University of North Carolina. While
Cooper was still in law school, then-Gov. Jim Hunt, a Democrat, named him to a
state goals and policy board. Upon graduation, Cooper joined the family law
firm, handling civil suits and personal injury and insurance cases; he also
served as a Sunday school teacher and deacon at his Presbyterian church. Cooper
served in the state House from 1987 to 1991, and in the state Senate from 1991
to 2001 -- part of that time as majority leader. In 2000, Cooper ran for
attorney general against Republican Dan Boyce. It was a hard-fought race, with
Cooper airing ads accusing Boyce of overbilling in a class-action lawsuit
against the state. (The overbilling allegation prompted a 14-year legal battle
that ended with Cooper apologizing.) After outspending Boyce four-to-one,
Cooper won the race by five points. He later won reelection three times,
serving 16 years. As attorney general, Cooper oversaw the increased use of DNA
testing and sought tougher sentences for child predators and pornographers. He
took over the bogus Duke lacrosse rape case after Durham District Attorney Mike
Nifong recused himself; Cooper re-investigated the allegations and cleared the
players of all charges.
In 2013, Cooper actively opposed a voter-ID and election
overhaul law driven by the Republican legislature. This and other stances made
it increasingly clear that Cooper was aiming for a gubernatorial run against
McCrory in 2016. McCrory, a seven-term mayor of Charlotte, had run for governor
in 2012 touting a pragmatic, “middle way” philosophy based on pro-business
policies and little emphasis on social issues--an approach that had worked for
him as a Republican serving on the city level, and that embodied the kind of
centrism that had historically carried both Republicans and Democrats to the
governor’s mansion. (Indeed, Cooper’s rise to prominence came as a mirror image
to McCrory’s--he was a moderate Democrat able to win rural and small-town
votes.) Once in office, however, McCrory had to work with a
Republican-dominated legislature that had little interest in pragmatic centrism
and a strong desire to control the agenda, which often included socially
conservative issues. McCrory sometimes clashed with GOP legislators and vetoed
their bills, but more often he signed them, including the election overhaul
bill (later overturned in the courts), a tax overhaul that flattened brackets,
and an abortion waiting period.
The biggest threat to McCrory’s hopes for reelection came
from H.B. 2. The types of business interests who had historically aligned with
McCrory were unhappy, fearing boycotts and economic pullouts that indeed
materialized within weeks. In the campaign, Cooper made opposition to H.B. 2--and
particularly its effect on the state’s economy--a cornerstone of his message.
He also advocated increased funding for K-12 education. Cooper’s approach
resonated--at least, enough to defeat McCrory by a little over 10,000 votes.
Donald Trump carried the state, but McCrory underperformed the top of the
ticket in some of the industrial areas of the Piedmont and western North
Carolina. The McCrory camp raised the specter of election fraud, but election
boards headed by Republicans disagreed. In December, the incumbent
conceded.
Even then, it wasn’t over. In an echo of the then-Democratic
legislature’s actions to remove the governor from the redistricting process in
the 1990s, Republican legislators passed laws to strip some of Cooper’s powers.
In December 2016, the two parties failed to come to agreement on how to repeal
H.B. 2. Finally, in March 2017--after Cooper had become governor and after the
Associated Press had estimated that the state would suffer $3.76 billion over
12 years in lost business--the two sides agreed to a repeal. However, the
repeal measure contained a provision sought by Republicans that continued for
three years a restriction on the types of local ordinances that had
precipitated H.B. 2 in the first place. The three-year moratorium was a bitter
pill for LGBT advocates, and Cooper signed it unhappily, saying it wasn’t his “preferred
solution.”
Rhetorically, Cooper came out in favor of removing
Confederate monuments after the white nationalist march in Charlottesville,
writing, “Some people cling to the belief that the Civil War was fought over
states’ rights. But history is not on their side. We cannot continue to glorify
a war against the United States of America fought in the defense of slavery.
These monuments should come down.” A year later, Cooper pulled back North
Carolina National Guard members from serving at the U.S.-Mexico border in
protest of the Trump administration policy of family separations; he also spoke
out against Trump’s trade policy, saying that retaliatory tariffs would put
millions of dollars of North Carolina agricultural exports at risk.
On a few limited issues, Cooper was able to act without
being blocked by the legislature. He pledged to oppose a Trump administration
proposal to drill for oil and gas offshore, reversing the position previously
articulated by McCrory. He also signed an executive order setting a state goal
of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent by 2025, effectively keeping
North Carolina within the terms of the Paris climate accord, which Trump had
pulled the U.S. out of. In September 2018, Cooper led the recovery from
Hurricane Florence, which left some three dozen North Carolinians dead and
caused widespread damage. Meanwhile, Cooper saw two of his vetoes sustained--one
of a bill that would have let nonprofits hold gambling fundraisers, and another
of a bill that critics said would have permitted the spraying of “garbage juice”
at landfills.
More often--much more often--Cooper’s efforts were stymied.
His campaign pledge to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act stalled,
and his vetoes of budget bills were overridden in both 2017 and 2018. The 2017
bill, he said, “prioritizes tax breaks for the wealthy and corporations and
comes up short for education and the economy.” (The spending plan cut his
office budget by $1 million.) Cooper criticized the 2018 budget on similar
grounds. Both measures were enacted with strong Republican support. By January
2019, Cooper had vetoed 28 bills, including several that sought to limit the
governor’s powers. Many of the bills about gubernatorial authority went through
various stages of vetoes, overrides, lower court decisions and judicial
appeals. One that became law after an override was a bill to make judicial
elections partisan. Another reduced the number of Court of Appeals judges from
15 to 12 through attrition, although by early 2019, Republicans were
considering scrapping it.
The voters spoke on Election Day 2018, when they rejected--by
solid, 3-to-2 margins--a pair of legislature-backed ballot measures to weaken
the governor’s powers. One would have given legislators the power to appoint
election board members, while the other would have enabled legislators to fill
judicial vacancies. All five living former governors, including McCrory, joined
with Cooper in opposition. In an even more important Election Day development,
Democrats won enough seats in the state House and Senate to break the GOP’s
veto-proof supermajority, giving Cooper crucial leverage despite continued GOP majorities.
As the 2020 election cycle began, a Public Policy Polling survey found Cooper
leading in head-to-head matchups against five possible GOP challengers, with
McCrory the closest at 45%-41%. With North Carolina likely to be a presidential
battleground state, the 2020 gubernatorial election is expected to be closely
watched nationally. Republicans plan their national convention in Charlotte in
August 2020.
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