Tar Heel Electioneering

As the mid-term elections begin to amble into focus, my home state of North Carolina, like many locations around the country, contains elements of blatant fuckery by the majority political party as well as signs of hope that there may be a path through the present miasma. 

I’ve written previously that the birthplace of Vince McMahon, John Coltrane and Michael Jordan is a purple state that’s been gerrymandered and re-districted of late to glow red. Republicans hold a 71-49 advantage in the state house of representatives and 30-20 edge in the state senate. Yet as recently as 2022, the state’s Congressional delegation was split evenly 7-7 with Republicans and Democrats. But the state legislature monkeyed with district maps ahead of the 2024 election and resulted in 10 GOP seats out of 14, despite less than 53 percent casting votes for Republicans. 

Hmmm, you might say, that doesn’t appear to be proportional representation. Fear not: they weren’t finished. After President Reflecting Pool called on Republican-led states to change the maps so that more elephants will be elected to Congress, the state drew new lines last year that will likely result in an eleventh GOP rep. To do so, they carved up all eight of the state’s majority-Black counties, which were concentrated in NC’s First District, and splintered them among several conservative-leaning districts (your counter-argument about blue-state gerrymanders is duly noted). 

Similar moves are being played out in several other Southern, conservative-leaning states, with the tacit backing of the U.S. Supreme Court. SCOTUS has chipped away at the 1965 Voting Rights Act in recent years, most recently in Louisiana v. Callais, essentially ruling that race-based voting districts are unconstitutional, partisan gerrymandering is perfectly acceptable, and good luck proving that race is the cause of any sort of voting or representative shortfall. Meanwhile, Republicans who control North Carolina’s state and county election boards want to move early-voting sites away from college campuses and to reduce Sunday voting. Both could impact student and Black voters, who tend to vote Democrat. 

Boliek. Yeah, this tracks.

A New York Times piece reported that three counties were instructed to move voting sites and one county to eliminate Sunday voting, which is popular among Black voters. Democrats and voting rights groups claim that the changes are the result of pressure from a gent named Dave Boliek, the Republican state auditor of election boards. Boliek has held the position since 2024 after the state legislature stripped Governor-elect Josh Stein, a Democrat, of power over election boards. Boliek subsequently appointed Republican majorities and a Republican chairperson to all 100 county election boards. 

For his part, Boliek claimed that pushback is typical partisan griping from Democrats after power shifted from their party to the opposition. He conveniently omitted that legislative scales were tilted to assure said Republican control. 

So where’s the hope, the glimmer of possibility that me and my Tar Heel State brethren aren’t sentenced to one-party rule and representation? Well, the governor’s mansion is a good place to start. Stein was elected comfortably in 2024, which marked the third consecutive gubernatorial election that a Democrat won. In fact, all three of the state’s top office holders, Stein, Lieutenant Gov. Rachel Hunt and Attorney General Jeff Jackson, are Democrats. The Republican-led legislature has done its darnedest to neuter the governor’s powers in recent years but both Stein and his predecessor served honorably. 

Speaking of his predecessor, two-term former Gov. Roy Cooper is running for the open Senate seat that Republican Thom “Unnecessary H” Tillis will vacate at the end of his term. Tillis last summer chose not to run for re-election after opposing Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill because of its cuts to health care and because of increasing discomfort over being forced into GOP lockstep with all things Trump. 

Cooper gives Democrats a solid chance at flipping the seat and narrowing the Republicans’ 53-47 Senate majority. He is polling ahead of GOP candidate Michael Whatley, the former chair of the state Republican party and chair of the Republican National Committee in 2025, a Trump endorsee who has never held public office. Cooper is running a simple, folksy campaign whose primary slogan is Make Stuff Cost Less. He refers to his campaign schedule as the Make Stuff Cost Less Tour. He doesn’t rail against Trump and keeps the rhetoric lukewarm. A favorite refrain is, “For so many North Carolina families, there’s just too much month at the end of the money,” which is about as close to glib as he gets. 

He governed mostly center-left and without scandal, so attempts to portray him as some sort of radical will likely fall flat. The primary GOP accusation against him thus far is: he’s a Democrat, which for many is disqualifier enough. Republicans will sink a fuckton of money into the fall campaign because it’s a contested seat, and the race figures to be tight because, hellooo, purple state. Anyway, not necessarily sturdy limbs on which to climb, but these days you take what you can get.

Tar Heel State Distress

Dispatch from the State Where Wilbur and Orville Mightily Tried to Take Off: A couple of recent developments have roiled the citizenry here in North Carolina, and that doesn’t even include Bill Belichick’s tenure in Chapel Hill. I’ll try to keep it brief, as y’all come to this site for politics and current events like guys go to IKEA for simplicity and serenity. 

The state legislature voted this week to redraw the Congressional district map, in lockstep with the Big Orange Oaf’s directive for Republican-controlled states to do so to maintain, if not increase, the GOP’s narrow hold of the House of Representatives. The current map is already tilted to give Republicans ten seats and Democrats four; the new map is likely to give Republicans an eleventh seat and take away one Democrat rep. It just so happens that the rep is Black, and the redrawn districts split up the African-American constituency. 

This wouldn’t be a big deal if state legislative maps weren’t already gerrymandered to hell and back. North Carolina is essentially a purple state. As recently as 2022 the Congressional breakdown was seven Democrats and seven Republicans. Vote totals in all Congressional races combined are generally within a few percentage points one way or the other. Yet Republicans hold super-majorities in both the state House (71-49) and state Senate (30-20) – thanks, further gerrymander! – and two years ago re-drew the Congressional map for the current 10-4 advantage. 

The legislature has also done its darnedest to kneecap the Democratic governor (previously Roy Cooper, now Josh Stein) to do anything beyond voice strongly worded opposition. Democrats may sue to overturn the map, but in a dandy little turn of self supervision the Republican-controlled State Supreme Court ruled a couple years ago that the Constitution doesn’t expressly prohibit partisan monkeying with voting districts and that courts cannot force change or alter maps, that only the legislature can do so. 

The message to Dems, as Marco the Albanian said to Liam Neeson in “Taken” – Good luck. Meanwhile, more than a year after Hurricane Helene ravaged areas of western North Carolina, state and local officials are still waiting for Federal funds promised by FEMA. 

According to a Washington Post story, millions of dollars in cleanup and recovery funds are hung up by bureaucratic delays and obstacles, which has forced the state and various counties to assume much of the costs so far and stretched budgets beyond their capabilities. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who oversees FEMA, has said that the review process and further scrutiny are needed to root out waste, fraud and abuse. In a statement to the Post, FEMA said that it’s prepared to support states with critical disaster needs, but that its Disaster Relief Fund “is not infinite.” 

Coupled with President Bone Spurs’s remarks earlier this year about possibly shuttering FEMA, and states and local governments taking more responsibility for disaster recovery in the future, folks in North Carolina and elsewhere are a mite skittish about whether the Feds will pony up. Staff cuts to the Federal workforce, FEMA included, have further slowed and complicated the allocation process. Also, Noem, who I wouldn’t trust to oversee cleanup of a garage never mind a multi-billion-dollar disaster, has to sign off on any expenditure over $100,000, and such requests also now go through a DOGE vetting process. 

The Post also reported that so far the Federal government has covered only 10 percent of the damage from Helene, compared to 70 percent of the damage caused by storms such as Katrina, Sandy and Maria. All of which leans into an evolving notion of “You’re On Your Own.” It’s a curious addendum to the current regime’s campaign mantra of “America First.” If the wealthiest nation on the planet is going to slash foreign aid and pull back from alliances and concentrate on matters within, then what parts of America and which Americans come first? To be sure, there are indicators, many of which aren’t promising for those of limited means and influence. Depending on one’s level of discouragement, it might be enough to hop on one of Wilbur and Orville’s machines and take off for distant shores.

TarHeelymander

The next installment of the Most Important Election of Our Lifetime is 18 months away, but the maneuvering and back-channel fuckery is well underway, if it ever ceased. 

I’ll try to keep this brief, because y’all come to this space for political yammering the way guys go to strip clubs for the cheeseburgers. Here in North Carolina, late last week the state Supreme Court overturned a previous ruling against partisan gerrymandered districts. That decision is expected to green-light the Republican-heavy legislature to re-draw districts that will give the GOP more seats in the House of Representatives in the 2024 elections. 

North Carolina is one of a handful of states building conservative legislative majorities disproportionate to actual voter trends, along with Wisconsin and Ohio, and to a lesser degree Georgia, Texas and Florida. The current redistricting kerfuffle began following the 2020 census, when NC’s population increased to the point where the state merited one more seat in the House, a 14th rep. The Republican-led legislature drew up maps that would have all but cemented 10 or 11 GOP seats. Dems and voting rights groups challenged. 

The very same state Supreme Court ruled in Feb. 2022 that state courts may reject district maps that give an unfair advantage to one party in a narrowly divided state and re-affirmed that decision late last year. 

A quick clarification – not the very same state Supreme Court. The previous court was split 4-3 with Democrats in the majority. Elections last November flipped the breakdown to a 5-2 Republican majority, and that was the margin last week. The chief justice wrote that the previous court overstepped its authority to find that the state constitution prohibited partisan gerrymandering, and that voting districts should come under the purview of the legislature. 

“There is no judicially manageable standard by which to adjudicate partisan gerrymandering claims,” wrote chief justice Paul Newby, which is some judicial jiu-jitsu that all but eliminates oversight and redress by anyone outside the gerrymandered legislature. 

North Carolina ought to be a purple state. It’s not. Some numbers: in the 2020 Congressional elections, 2.66 million people voted for Democrat candidates for the House of Representatives, and 2.63 million people voted for Republican candidates. Results seated eight Republican reps and five Democrat reps because of the way district maps were drawn (the results were 10 Rs and 3 Ds in 2018, when vote totals were 50.4 percent Republican and 48.3 percent Democrat). 

When the courts rejected the Republicans’ proposed maps after the 2020 census and used maps drawn up by judges and a more impartial election panel in the 2022 mid-terms, 1.94 million people voted for GOP candidates, 1.76 million voted for Democrats, and the state delegation to Washington D.C., was split 7-7. 

That ain’t happening again, largely because of the Supreme Court ruling and makeup of the state legislature. As of April 2023, Republicans control the NC House 72-48 and the state Senate 30-20, veto-proof margins against a Democrat governor or a rubber stamp for a GOP governor, again because of the state voting district map. The state GOP will get its 10 or 11 House seats. 

If you’re still reading and your eyes haven’t glazed over, you might point out that this is nothing new and that both parties are guilty of gerrymandering. Maryland, New York, Illinois and Oregon are current examples of Democrat district tinkering. Politics and all that. But on the Republican side of the ledger, I’d argue that the current setup is less about convincing voters that their positions are attractive and more about preserving power and limiting access to the “wrong” sort of voter, through legislative monkeying backed by a judiciary increasingly stacked with Dollar Tree Scalias. 

North Carolina is at the forefront of these efforts. Judges tossed a state voter ID measure in 2016 because they found that it “would target African Americans with almost surgical precision.” A Republican strategist named Thomas Hofeller, a California native who eventually settled in Raleigh, was one of the modern gurus of gerrymandering, working in North Carolina and multiple states to create bulletproof conservative districts. His estranged daughter obtained many of his files following his death in 2018 and released them to various media outlets. In a case that originated in NC, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments last term on so-called “independent state legislature theory,” a movement that would prohibit state judges and other officials from changing the rules on Federal elections. It’s unclear whether the court will rule on the case, now that the state Supreme Court has reversed its previous ruling. And in a tandem decision late last week, the state court also threw out a prior ruling that restored voting rights to convicted felons no longer in prison but who have not completed their parole or probation, a move that observers say likely will remove tens of thousands from voter rolls. 

The old saying goes that people get the government they deserve. My concern is that the slow march toward artificially constructed majorities will lessen the impact of overall vote counts, and we’ll end up with government we don’t.