by Christopher Cooper
There are year-end lists for everything—music,1 books, architecture, sports, longform journalism, and, of course, politics. So, why not one more?
Here’s my take on the five most important North Carolina politics stories from 2025. I selected stories that tell us something bigger about the state of our politics, and will matter long after 2025 comes to a close. Is this “the” definitive, list? Absolutely not—I encourage you to read and listen to others. But these five stories all have long-term implications for how we understand North Carolina politics.
Thom Tillis’ Retirement.
Politicians retire all of the time. But Tillis’ announcement that he would not run again was different. He was an influential Senator at the top of his game, who was, despite significant pressure from the right, unlikely to lose his primary, and had a puncher’s chance in a general election.
His retirement was also a harbinger of things to come.
Including Tillis, 10 Senators and 44 members of the U.S. House of Representatives have announced their retirement—that’s roughly ten percent of Congress that is choosing to exit stage left. Republican retirements, in particular, are up.2
Tillis’ exit will mark the departure of a rare U.S. Senator with a fairly moderate voting record, a willingness to work across the aisle and a political philosophy that embraces pragmatism over ideological zealotry.3 The fact that a senator who hails from a purple state had to endure death threats, censure from his own party, and the threat of primary opposition is a good reminder that purple state politics should not be confused with moderate politics.
As I wrote in Politico Magazine, “It is perhaps a bit reassuring for Americans to believe that moderate politicians still exist within our impossibly polarized system of red and blue states, and that they often find a hospitable home in purple states like North Carolina. But it’s a convenient fiction.”
The rise of the State Auditor.
The North Carolina State Auditor has been elected statewide since 1868 and, for the better part of 160 years, not much happened to the institutional powers of the office. To be honest, not much has happened with that office, period.
SB 382, a 132 page bill passed in November, 2024, changed all of that.
In addition to a host of other changes, SB382 gave the State Auditor authority over the State Board of Elections and aligned majority control over the State Board of Elections (NCSBE) and the 100 county board of elections with the state auditor. Those changes, not coincidentally, didn’t take place until 2025—when the state auditor switched from Democratic to Republican control.
The ensuing year has seen the State Auditor rise in responsibility and attention from a sideline player on the North Carolina Council of State to one of the five most powerful politicians in the state.4 That’s going to change how we understand the balance of power in the Old North State and will make the 2028 election for auditor one of the the consequential in the state.5
Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: The NC Supreme Court Election That Wouldn’t End.
We’re used to elections being called on election day or pretty soon thereafter. The Jefferson Griffin (R) / Allison Riggs (D) NC Supreme Court election, by contrast, extended six months after election day—making it among the longest of any contested election in American history.
Griffin lost the election, but then challenged the votes of roughly 60,000 people who fell in one of three buckets: (1) so-called “never residents,” (2) UOCAVA voters from four counties who did not provide an ID when casting a vote, and (3) voters who were registered to vote after the National Voter Registration Act and did not have the last four digits of their social security number, or their driver’s license number on file with the NCSBE.6
Soon after the Republican majority NCSBE took over, they embarked on the Registration Repair Project—an attempt to “cure” the registration records of the largest number of voters challenged above.
The six month fight that extended from election day to the day the election ended would be enough to qualify for the biggest stories of 2025, but the content of Jefferson Griffin’s case, combined with the rise in the Auditor’s power made it even more critical to understanding North Carolina politics, election law, and voting rights moving forward.
No State Budget
As the calendar flips to 2026, North Carolina will still not have a comprehensive state budget, marking six months past the beginning of the fiscal year. North Carolina is the only state that has not passed a budget.
The North Carolina press corps has done an excellent job analyzing the reasons for the disagreement (so I won’t rehash them here), but there’s no end in sight and no olive branch that has been extended. President Pro Tem Phil Berger called the House budget a “stunt” and Speaker Destin Hall took to the opinion pages of the News and Observer to argue for the House budget and against the Senate proposal. As a reminder, both the House and the Senate are controlled by Republicans, calling to mind the old adage that “the other party is the opposition; the other chamber is the enemy.”7
North Carolina has been late on passing a new budget before, but it’s never been this late—at least not without frequent and substantial “mini-budgets” to guide the work of government. But, unlike the federal government where no budget or continuing resolution leads to a government shutdown, North Carolina government continues to operate on the “old budget,” thus removing a primary incentive to pass a “new budget.”8
The short-term implications of this are obvious—uncertainty among local and state governments about their future fiscal health, lack of cost of living raises and other budget expansions, and the inability to adjust to new eventualities. Republicans and Democrats, and House and Senate leadership agree that this is bad.
Unlike with the federal government, however, the budget stalemate has not created an immediate crisis for the state, and the vast majority of legislators are in no danger of losing their seats as a result of this inability to complete the most fundamental job of state government.
My concern for the long-term health of the state is that the lack of a budget, like the mid-decade redistricting reviewed below, may become a near-permanent feature of our state rather than an anomaly.
Mid-Decade Redistricting Comes to North Carolina.
Perhaps the biggest lesson from 2025 is that many of the things we once thought were laws were really just norms. Norms, unlike laws, can be broken with no penalty other than that levied in the court of public opinion. Such is the case with what we used to believe was the ban on mid-decade redistricting that we now understand was simply a norm. And a norm that was broken time and time again in 2025.
For the first time in modern North Carolina history, the General Assembly decided to redraw North Carolina’s congressional map in the middle of a decade and without a court order by shifting tens of thousands of people between congressional districts 1 and 3.9
According to the the primary mapdrawer Ralph Hise, “The motivation behind this redraw is simple and singular: Draw a new map that will bring an additional Republican seat to the North Carolina congressional delegation.”
As I argued in a piece for The Assembly, calling his shot like this was a strategic decision that reflected what Hise and the Republican majority believed to be the legal realities—namely, that while claims that a new map might dilute Black representation could draw legal clap back, partisan gerrymandering has received a collective shrug from both federal and state courts as of late.
At least in the short-term, Hise’s strategy paid off as the NC Supreme Court ruled that the maps could stand.10
This story will cause us to rethink North Carolina politics well into the future—most obviously because it will raise the possibility that redistricting will be a near constant feature of North Carolina and American politics.
Two Additional Notes At the End of the Year
Two notable and influential North Carolinians passed away over the last few weeks.
Jim Hunt—the most prominent and influential governor in North Carolina history—passed away at the age of 92. The definitive retrospective on Hunt’s life was written, as it should be, by Rob Christensen, the Dean Emeritus of the North Carolina Press Corps, and Dawn Vaughn. If you read one piece on Governor Hunt’s life, make it this one. For those who want to dig deeper, Wake Forest Political Scientist Jack Fleer wrote a book called Governors Speak in 2007 that relied on interviews with five North Carolina Governors, including Hunt. The interviews themselves are available to read or listen to at the UNC Southern Oral History Program.
On Friday, Speaker Destin Hall and Governor Josh Stein noted the passing of former House Speaker Carl Stewart, Jr. Stewart was, among other things, the first two-term Speaker of the North Carolina House of Representatives (1976-1980)—paving the way for what would soon become the norm. He later ran for Lt. Governor twice and served in a variety of other important roles in North Carolina government.
My thoughts are with the families of both Governor Hunt and Speaker Stewart. I didn’t know either one, but they both left indelible marks on our state. And, for that, we owe them thanks.
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