Welcome, at least for a time, to Blue NC. (Hat tip to the writers James Protzman and Steve Harrison who ran a very fine blog of the same name in the Bush era, when hope for a Democratic North Carolina was beginning to dawn.) I’ll offer some numbered thoughts about the election, concluding with a touch of hope.

1. 1. This was a devastating rejection of Trump that will probably be recorded as a significant moment in American history. Democrats not only swept the traditional swing states, as Trump did to much acclaim in 2024. They cut deep into the heart of Red America, with victories in South Carolina, Texas, Kansas, and perhaps Mississippi—states that weren’t considered competitive even in 2008. Politically, Trump is finished.

2. 2. I was deeply moved and amazed by the changes we saw in the South. I am hopeful that Democratic victories in the “Old Confederacy” (a moniker I hope we will soon retire) reflected a willingness by voters in this region of all races to cross the color line and vote for the party of civil rights. There has always been a party of white supremacy in America, and there has always been a party of civil rights. The South nearly always preferred the white supremacists, but last night that ugly history ground to a stop.

3. 3. Consider Georgia. Georgia was one of the most brutal Jim Crow states. Jimmy Carter wrote about growing up in an atmosphere of crushing racism, which he eventually abjured in the process of becoming one of the great champions of human rights. Last night, Georgia elected a Black woman as governor. She was the first Black woman ever to hold that office in the South.

4. 4. And Mississippi. Mississippi! Democratic operatives in the Magnolia State are optimistic that Scott Colom, an African American district attorney, will defeat Cindy Hyde-Smith. Hyde-Smith is a cartoonish racist. She once was photographed wearing a Confederate uniform. And Booker T. Washington once said that Mississippi had “national supremacy in cotton and lynchings.” Donald Trump won at least 80% of the white vote there in 2024, according to Fox News exit polls. Even if Colom loses narrowly, he won a greater share of the white vote in Mississippi than any Democrat in many, many decades.

5. 5. North Carolina’s Jim Crow police state was less severe than Mississippi’s or Georgia’s—but it was solid and our state’s Dixiecrat leadership defended it as ardently as any segregationist from the Deep South. Last night, North Carolina very much did its part to contribute to the wave of racial progress we saw below the Mason-Dixon line. Anita Earls, a brilliant African American civil rights attorney, won a dominant victory over a white opponent who was closely tied to our white, conservative political establishment. Jesse Helms wept.

6. 6. Tom Jensen of Public Policy Polling is looking characteristically intelligent today. Years ago, Tom noted in despair (which I shared) that it would take a twenty-point popular vote victory for Democrats to retake the North Carolina legislature. Cooper won by twenty points—and his coattails pulled Democrats over the finish line in the House and very nearly the Senate. The Senate may flip, though I am skeptical that it will. Tom is the Tar Heel prophet.

7. 7. Cooper disproved one of the criticisms he has occasionally received since getting elected governor in 2016. Some analysts, mostly on the right but also progressive sociologist Theda Skocpol, have faulted Cooper for lacking coattails. In other words, in 2016 and 2020 his campaign didn’t serve as a “firewall” for other Democrats like Jim Hunt and Mike Easley did in their eras. Cooper has achieved the greatest victory we have seen by a candidate at the top of the ticket since Hunt himself—and Cooper’s coattails were prodigious.

8. 8. I do not expect North Carolina Republicans to be gracious in defeat. They believed that they owned the legislature, that their voters were the only legitimate voters, and that Democrats deserved to spend a century in the wilderness. I highly doubt that most of them have changed their minds in the last 24 hours. I expect a brutal lame-duck session in which Republicans will do everything they can to limit the powers of the incoming Democratic leadership.

9. How about Destin Hall? The young speaker’s majority lasted one term, and now he’s about to be demoted. Some hardliners in his caucus thought he was too kind, too conciliatory to the Democrats, and were rumored to be interested in having him replaced as Republican Leader. Representative Brendan Jones is more in tune with the populist histrionics his caucus relishes, and it wouldn’t surprise me to see Jones or someone else take a run at Hall’s position.

   10. Hope. Hope. Hope. I grew up in the South. I remember being taught straight-up Confederate apologia in middle school and seeing “flesh”-colored colored pencils, which were the color of my Caucasian flesh. But from time to time it has seemed like there was a willingness in this region to consider trying to build goodwill between white people and Black people and brown people, a touch of willingness to strive for atonement. Nothing can undo the harm that slavery, Jim Crow, lynchings, and incarceration did to African Americans. But—even being mindful of my whiteness—I think there is a chance for us to construct a future that I had very recently thought was impossible.

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Many North Carolina Democrats seem afraid to embrace the signs that their party is likely to do extremely well. It’s a bit of learned helplessness, imbued by years of disappointment in a state that was supposed to be trending blue. But there is a good reason to believe that the Democrats should attempt to liberate themselves from their long-held sense of shellshock. The future, as always, is undetermined. But I believe that the 2026 midterms could see a major Democratic wave.

Leading Democratic commentators in North Carolina have laced their analyses with caveats that the party may underperform expectations. This represents a healthy intellectual humility. But given the current state of electoral politics in North Carolina, wary warnings that the Democrats could disappoint are at odds with what the data indicate. Democrats have held strong leads in nearly all of the opinion polling, which has likely become more accurate as the election has approached and the electoral picture has coalesced. Though polling is an exceptionally fuzzy science, public surveys match the dynamics we have seen in early voting so far. Democrats are not spluttering toward disappointment. They are fulfilling the scenario that polling has projected for over a year.

How? So far, Democrats have dominated early voting. According to Professor Michael Bitzer, Democrats and independents combined for 77% of the early vote as of yesterday. Bitzer is a careful, judicious, and truly nonpartisan analyst, and he seldom indulges in piquant language. But he employed forceful verbiage to describe the partisan dynamics we’ve seen in early voting: “A Week’s Worth of In-Person Voting Has Locked In the Democratic-Unaffiliated Dominance.” The gross vote totals are even more striking than the Democrats’ proportional dominance. So far, Democrats have cast 452,221 votes, compared to 280,097 in the last midterm. Unaffiliated voters have cast 356,952 to 207,110 in 2022. Unaffiliateds have leaned strongly to the Democrats in opinion polling this year, making it reasonable to suppose that their robust turnout should be encouraging to Democrats.

While the raw numbers should excite Democrats, the most instructive indicator that this will be a strong Democratic wave year comes from the differences between Republican and Democratic turnout. Democratic turnout has been forceful and prolific; Republican turnout has flatlined. In the first week of early voting, Republican voters cast 239,079 votes compared to 235,174 in 2022. That amounts to an increase of about 3,900 votes compared to the last midterm. The Democratic difference has been a growth of 170,000 relative to the 2022 elections. Democratic enthusiasm is drowning Republican hopes in a deluge.

One of the wisest things Democratic consultant Thomas Mills has ever written was that “when Democrats turn out in North Carolina, they win.” This maxim has been vindicated in each of the three electoral cycles Democrats have dominated here since 2006. And there is a further nuance that should encourage Democratic partisans. Democrats are turning out and Republicans, so far, seem to be shunning the voting booth. This is a direct inversion of the turnout dynamics that have allowed Republicans to win consistently in our state since the early 2000s. The shift resembles what Democrats saw in the fabled 2008 election, which members of the Tar Heel Donkey Party have yearned to replicate for 18 long years.

I am not—and forgive the cliche but I must repeat myself, I am not—predicting that 2026 will be as glorious for Democrats as 2008. North Carolina Democrats have invoked that shibboleth far too often for such a prediction to be credible. After all, 2008 was not only a once-in-a-lifetime but a once-in-American-history event. (The first-ever election of an African American president can only happen once.) But the turnout patterns we are seeing today bear a closer resemblance to the 2008 landscape than we have seen ever since that year. Even incorporating a modicum of caution, those dynamics should be very encouraging to Democrats.

It is still possible, despite all the positive tidings, that this election may underwhelm the most hopeful Democrats. But I think the party should feel optimistic about what is to come. And I have something of a theory for why the Democrats are so dramatically outpacing the Republicans. It has to do with the strengths and weaknesses of each party’s base.

The Democrats, no less today than in the Obama era, have a base disproportionately made up of infrequent voters. Republicans have a different problem. Their base has turned out in fearsome numbers to support the God-Emperor of Red America, Donald J. Trump. But their loyalty to the Mad King has been so intense that it’s consumed the party’s entire political culture. Politically, Trump’s decline has sent the signal that it was time to drink the Kool-Aid. At the end of this midterm, Republican performance may be weak enough that Trump Country resembles the political equivalent of Jonestown.

In American politics, high gas prices are lethal. Surging fuel prices contributed to the political collapse of George W Bush’s administration. Both Barack Obama and Joe Biden faced some of their stiffest political headwinds when gas prices rose. We are a nation of drivers. Captive to an automobile culture, Americans suffer a fundamental economic blow when the cost of gasoline makes transportation more expensive. The nation’s political leaders take the blame—whether their culpability is real or not.

What is particularly devastating about the current, expensive state of gas is that Donald Trump absolutely deserves the blame for it. Gas was perfectly affordable before Trump started his splendid little adventure in the Middle East. When the bombs fell, they killed both innocent people and the ability of Americans to afford fuel. Trump is directly responsible for Americans’ anguish at the pump. And Republicans in our state are fully aware that Trump’s disastrous forays into the morass of Middle Eastern warfare will cost them badly this Fall.

Hence the gas-tax holiday. I suspect that Senator Berger, an astute political strategist, does not believe that a 41-cent discount on $4 gas will salvage his party’s electoral prospects completely. But Republicans seem to believe they can convince struggling voters into laying off at least a little bit of their frustration with the GOP. The gas-tax holiday is a political stunt, but Republicans are hoping that voters lack the sophistication to recognize that they are being bamboozled. At least enough to salvage the supermajorities.

Putting aside the minor effect of a 41-cent tax cut when a sprawling, car-dependent state can’t afford to fill up, the politics of the tax holiday are fundamentally unworkable for Republicans. That’s because Trump is essentially the sole cause of the gas crisis, and the GOP’s brand is inseparable from the hijinks of the Orange King. Especially in North Carolina. Since 2016 Tar Heel Republicans have enthusiastically embraced Trump as the commanding, brand-defining colossus of their party. Former State House Speaker Tim Moore even invited (facetiously, one assumes) Trump to deliver his State of the Union address in North Carolina. As Duke professor Mac McCorkle told The New York Times, the NCGOP is the most MAGA state party in the country.

NC Republicans have luxuriated in the swamp of populism for a decade. And it has delivered them solid victories based upon the wild popularity of Trump among rural white voters. But the other side of the coin is that they cannot escape the Trumpism they have embraced as their state party’s brand. With Trump’s deranged military adventurism driving gas prices to excruciating highs, the Tar Heel Trumpers will face a reckoning. A gas-tax holiday will be nice for voters. It will not prevent them from delivering a well-deserved dose of punishment to the most MAGA state party in the country.

National Republicans made extraordinarily deep investments in North Carolina. Starting earlier this year, the Senate Leadership Fund spent $30 million largely on attack ads against Roy Cooper. It seems that national Republicans were overconfident. Like many observers in DC, the GOP elite may have exaggerated North Carolina’s red lean. They interpreted North Carolina’s persistent support for Republican presidential candidates as evidence that we were a Southern red state, ripe for the seductive charms of conservative demagoguery. The reality is that North Carolina is, yes, Southern, yes, conservative, and, yes, as infected by stubborn spirits of bigotry as any American state. But we are no Mississippi, and Roy Cooper was hardly an easy mark.

Nevertheless they spent. They cut ads telling florid tales of violence, blaming Cooper, and hoped that this racially tinged skullduggery could return North Carolina to the ugliest Southern traditions that made us a red state. It’s hard to know how extensively Whatley influenced the Senate Leadership Fund’s strategy. But his campaign’s official messaging closely resembled the themes of SLF’s ads. Whatley passed out orange placards at his primary-night party reading “Cooper for Criminals,” with a drawing of handcuffs dangling from the lettering. Both Whatley and his (former) DC allies seem to have decided that the way to attack Roy Cooper was to portray him as a quivering apologist for criminals and to lie shamelessly about Cooper’s record. The strategy yielded them no discernible results.

As disgruntled conservatives have observed, the GOP has begun articulating excuses for Whatley’s failure. The easiest copout is to say that Cooper is simply invincible. Cooper’s never lost an election, and Whatley’s failed campaign just puts him in the company of Pat McCrory, Dan Forest, and other hapless opponents who lost to Roy Cooper. This may be true to a degree. But Cooper has had competitive elections. What makes Cooper’s electoral record so impressive is that he has defeated solid Republicans in elections a weaker Democrat probably would have lost. I’m not sure any other Democrat could have beaten Pat McCrory, a Republican incumbent in a Republican wave year. And Cooper’s victory that margin that cycle was extremely thin. Michael Whatley could have made this Senate race competitive with a better campaign.

He did not. This race, in a highly competitive but red-leaning state, has taken the course of a boring procession toward an overdetermined outcome. Given North Carolina’s fundamentals, I think it is fair to say that Whatley fell short of what a generic Republican would have achieved. Michael Whatley has shown that he is simply not a talented politician and has remarkably poor instincts for someone who rose to the pinnacle of the political profession. He chose a deeply misguided message to attack Cooper and never even established himself as a known entity in the state. This was blunt, simple failure.

What Democrats need to do now is to try to make sure Cooper has serious coattails. It has been years, decades really, since the Democratic Party dominated a top-of-the-ballot race here. With Whatley facing abandonment, Republicans have no firewall to shield their candidates from a blue wave. For the first time in this cycle, I think it is possible that Cooper will win by double digits. A win that big would bring a crushing hammer down on the GOP in North Carolina, and possibly reset state politics for years. Fasten your seatbelts.

The gender gap did not always identify Republicans as the male party. Until the 1980s, women tended to vote for Republican candidates. But, not coincidentally, the 1970s rise of second-wave feminism and growing numbers of women in the workforce activated a latent sexism in conservative politics. Conservative evangelicals rose from a political slumber that had begun with the Scopes monkey trial to fight back against feminism’s challenge to traditional American patriarchy. Republicans starting with North Carolina’s Jesse Helms and, most significantly. President Ronald Reagan, embraced the rising religious right as a potent asset in electoral politics. Henceforth, Republicans would be the party of men.

As the party committed to defending old-school patriarchy, Republicans preferred to nominate strong masculine figures for president. Reagan was a tall movie star who looked virile riding horses on his California ranch. George H. W. Bush’s masculinity wasn’t as immediately identifiable as his former boss’s—to the point that Newsweek questioned his manhood with a headline titled “The Wimp Factor”—but Poppi Bush had grown up being considered as something of an athletic stud. His son brought a cowboy’s swagger to the White House.

But these men’s masculinity was tempered by an old-school ethos of restraint and male self-mastery. Reagan may have made crude jokes in private, but he always carried himself with presidential dignity. George W. Bush made a forceful case against Islamophobia after 9/11. This was the masculinity of Humphrey Bogart and other golden-age stars, not the whirling-dervish masculine destructiveness of “Scarface.”

In other words, Republicans were the party of “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” They were the party of "freedom itself was attacked last night by a faceless coward. And freedom will be defended.”

In a culture where patriarchy has deep roots, the Republicans’ performative masculinity drew a growing number of men to their side. The 2000 election saw the largest gender gap that had ever been seen, with men voting heavily for George W. Bush and women equally emphatic in their preference for Al Gore. Democrats had benefited from their support for female voters, but Republicans even believed (in a way that was clearly sexist) that their party’s machismo would attract married women and gender traditionalists. The meme, as it was then called, of “Hot Mitt" represented this narrative’s descent into self-parody.

If there was a limit to the Republicans’ growth among men, it seemed to lay very far in the future. While Barack Obama had overperformed among male voters, Donald Trump embodied and supercharged the Republican Party’s brand as a party for men and masculinity. He spewed vicious, unfiltered misogyny. He derided women’s physical appearance. He bragged about committing sexual assault. This vile stew of demagoguery and woman-hatred appealed to millions of American men somewhere deep in the prehistoric parts of their brains, and Trump began attracting support from men across the social and racial spectrum.

Trump’s rise as the male vindicator coincided with an ugly spasm of toxic masculinity in our society. Women have made striking gains over the last sixty years. By the 2010s, women had clearly surpassed men in educational achievement and held a majority of professional and managerial jobs. A growing number of women outearned their husbands. Some men accepted this, more or less. Many, many other men—particularly men from the working class who had lost the most ground socially—responded with an old vindictiveness that fueled misogynistic podcasts, a festering “manosphere,” and a striking rise in toxic masculinity.

Fans of this new-model maleness were unlikely to be drawn to stern, dignified men like Reagan and the Bushes. It was Donald Trump and his brutish assertion of male power that drew millions of young, working-class, nonwhite and other nontraditional male Republican voters to the banner of the GOP. These men were frustrated in life and resentful of women. Many of them relished the dark magic of toxic masculinity. Trump was this masculinity’s merchant, and he made the Republican Party into a vehicle for its political expression.

A wave of toxic men emerged across the country. We have seen some of the tawdriest examples of this new cohort in our own state. Bo Hines ran ads showing him literally flexing his muscles. Mark Robinson was the apogee of masculine garbage, saying that women were “called to be led by men” and screaming bloody murder about how “if you kill that child” by having an abortion “it’s murder!”

Republicans were no longer the party of “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” They were the party of “some folks need killin’.”

The Trump-led GOP was hardly the first political party to exploit the ugly, bigoted edges of American culture. In the early 20th century, Mississippi Governor James Vardaman said white people should lynch every Black person in his state rather than allow African Americans to vote. The California Workingmen’s Party of the 1870s ran on the slogan “the Chinese must go.” We are a country, alas, that has harbored and weaponized many forms of human hatred. And these viruses have inhabited our political bloodstream.

But I have hope. I have hope that this toxic masculinity, while powerful and likely to endure with the fuel of male resentment, will represent the limits of bigotry as a political tool. Trump’s misogyny won him the 2024 election but also triggered an ongoing backlash led by women disgusted at his brutish sexism. College-educated men became increasingly resistant to Trump and his cultural vibe in 2024. These men are not morally superior to working-class men (see Elon Musk). But, as elitist as it may sound, scholars like psychologist Steve Pinker have found that moral progress often originates with the educated class. I think a backlash to male-vengeance politics has begun to brew, and that in the next decade the forces of misogyny will finally lose a round.

They are extraordinarily confident in this view. Leading state-level Republicans believe that their conservative “reforms” have led to success so spectacular that it almost defies description. They revel in hyperbole. It’s a “Conservative Revolution.” We’ve had “conservative successes.” And believing their own propaganda, they have brainwashed themselves into the conviction that they have the wisdom to govern every aspect of public policy in the state. Hence the property tax amendment, shifting control over local revenues from county seats to the ugly, angular concrete mess that is our state’s legislative building.

Critics of the amendment have emphasized that it will constrain local governments’ ability to fund core services. They mention schools, roads, libraries, and public safety as some of the likely victims. This is all correct. But I am concerned that the case against the amendment has been too abstract for the public to fully understand the consequences of placing local tax policies in the hands of the arrogant crew on West Jones Street.

Let’s consider. If Republican state legislators are empowered to set limits on property taxes, local public services will quickly begin to resemble the public structures at the state level. Imagine if your local library received funding similar to that North Carolina public schools. Or try another thought experiment, perhaps even more alarming. Say that local police departments became as underfunded and beleaguered as state prison guards. In the GOP era, North Carolina prisons have become violent, ungovernable and cruel.

The NCGOP wants to defund the police.

Yet they are gleefully hurdling toward this constitutional amendment. They are almost certain to limit the growth of local property taxes to a rate determined by inflation and population growth. This is called “TABOR,” and it’s the draconian stricture Republicans have adopted for state government. Confident in their superior wisdom, they will make local governments budget like stingy reactionaries. It’s inconceivable to them that their policies could have detrimental consequences; just look at the juggernaut of prosperity their tax cuts have created in the Old North State.

They believe it but they’re delusional. The amendment, while likely to pass, will inflict another round of harm onto a public sector whose ability to serve the people is already in steep decline.

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North Carolina’s cities have continued to prosper despite the baleful policies coming down from the legislature. This can be overstated: Raleigh grew 46.3% in the 2000s (when Democrats were in charge) but only 15.8% in the 2010s, the era of Phil Berger’s “conservative successes.” But the urban Piedmont has done pretty well all things considered. Urban North Carolina has been able to draw strength from public investments made years ago that have continued to pay dividends.

The “crown jewel,” as the old but true cliche has it, of the Piedmont’s economic strengths is the UNC system. But another institution adjacent to the universities is Research Triangle Park. RTP was founded in 1959 by civic-minded business leaders and Governor Luther Hodges. It’s an example of Hamiltonian economic development, using the public sector to drive industrial progress and economic growth. Because of RTP, an enormous portion of the state’s economic development has gravitated toward the central Piedmont, now called the Triangle.

We wouldn’t have had a Research Triangle Park if Berger-style reactionaries had controlled state government. Any role for government in stimulating economic growth is anathema to them. In fact, in 2013 Berger’s state Senate launched direct attacks on several entities that were crucial in building and promoting Research Triangle Park. Senator Bob Rucho (D-Mecklenburg, but really Massachusetts) tried to defund the North Carolina Biotechnology Center. Governor Pat McCrory’s thoughtful response was he wanted to “take another look.” Brilliant.

But the Research Triangle Park has continued to attract companies and new investment. Now the Park faces another set of challenges. Artificial intelligence may radically reshape the operations and workforces of RTP’s companies. In a way, RTP may have to recapitulate one of its original purposes. When Hodges and his allies founded the Park, part of their intention was to provide better economic opportunities for North Carolinians who were suffering from a stagnant economy. Park leaders worked over the next several decades to help former textile workers and tobacco farmers adjust to an economy that severely undermined those industries. The Park’s next challenge may be to help the people who have thrived in the era of the knowledge economy to adapt to a world where tech workers’ skills will become far less valuable.

I wouldn’t bet against Research Triangle Park.

Whatley likes to call himself as “son of North Carolina.” He derides Roy Cooper as an exponent of alien, big-city values while he stands proudly as the champion of the callous-handed tobacco farmers and lintheads. [In case Whatley doesn’t know, “linthead” was a nickname given to people who toiled in atrocious working conditions in textile mills.] This is an effort to appropriate a key trope of populist authoritarianism. The populist, the hard man, gives voice to the true soul of the people. His enemy, the alien, stands for grotesque, foreign values.

Whatley’s effort to pose as a tribune of the humble Tar Heel was clumsy. It was also a fraud. Whatley’s biography does not establish him as a “son” of North Carolina. He has spent much of his life in other parts of the country doing the bidding of the national Republican Party. He was born and spent most of his childhood in Michigan. His childhood memories probably include more snowstorms than hurricanes and his accent still bears a trace of Midwestern flatness. He got degrees at UNC-Charlotte and Wake Forest before returning the Midwest to study at Notre Dame. That’s quite a tuition bill. But he’s a regular Joe.

What has he done with his law degree? He’s not Atticus Finch. Instead of working the courtrooms of rural North Carolina, he spent most of his professional career sparring with liberals as an operative for the national Republican Party. He helped George W. Bush’s infamous election-recount team in 2000 and received a patronage appointment to W’s Department of Energy. He then multiplied his income by many factors on K Street as a lobbyist for the oil industry. He dipped his toe into North Carolina politics as Elizabeth Dole’s (Congressional) chief of staff. Then, at last, he put down roots in his supposed home state by moving to the Charlotte exurbs and becoming chairman of the NCGOP.

This is not a man with roots in North Carolina. This is an amoral partisan hack with few regional roots who has devoted his life to the Republican Party. He is not rooted in a “native patch of land,” as the Victorian novelist George Eliot evocatively put it. He is rooted in the seedy world of partisan politics and his spirit is devoted to that world’s emperor, Donald J. Trump. Nodding along while the president denigrated us is the sort of scummy, undignified greasy-pole hackery Whatley has spent his life performing.

North Carolina values. Whatley says he stands for “North Carolina values.” Well, one Southern value is definitely a prickly sensitivity to condescension from northeastern elites. We’ve taken plenty of it down here. “Tar Heel” was a classist slur meant to denigrate people (most enslaved Black people or very poor whites) who worked in the dirty business of tar boiling. Walt Whitman snidely used the epithet. Walt Whitman was a cultural snob but one of America’s greatest poets. Donald Trump is America’s only dictator. This louche, greedy New York real estate schmuck trashed us virulently, and Michael Whatley stood with him.

I wonder how it would go down in Washington, where Whatley's heart is.

Dirty politics has a long history in North Carolina—and even more so in South Carolina. Our sometimes-deranged neighbors to the south play politics in a kill-house with all the restraint one would expect from the state that started the Civil War. North Carolina’s history is also rife with instances of skullduggery. In the 1930s, O. Max Gardner, the kingpin of the powerful Shelby-Dynasty political machine, passed a paper bag with $50,000 in hard cash across a table and instructed his accomplice to do his worst. The purpose of this dirty payment was to take down a progressive challenger who wanted to substitute Gardner’s textile royalism with a “New Deal in North Carolina.”

And the record of scandal contains iniquity committed by progressives, Republicans, and other actors who stood for different ideologies than did the Shelby grandees. I’m afraid my man Kerr Scott engaged in the dirty game in 1954, facing an aggressive conservative campaign that was likely to become inflammatory as the election approached. One of Scott’s top lieutenants squirreled a conservative political operative away in a hotel room, plying the man with beers and steaks, and babysat him until the election was over and the risk that the operative would blow up the campaign had passed.

These scandals have often made for delicious anecdotes. But this legerdemain typically stopped at the boundaries of dirty politics, rarely dipping into true depravity. Michael Whatley’s behavior was sociopathic. With malicious intent, he deceived a murder victim’s parent into testifying for a political cause that the father did not even support. He exploited a loving parent’s terrible grief. He used the man as a pawn. This is ghoulish moral turpitude. This is morally disqualifying.

In 2026, the proper response to Michael Whatley’s despicable exploitation of a grieving father is to expel Whatley from politics. Our country holds political figures to a higher moral standard than it did 10-15 years ago. For example, Graham Platner and Eric Swalwell were quickly and forcefully driven out of politics when women made credible accusations of sexual assault against them. Whatley has not been accused of anything as serious as sexual violence. But his behavior was more than immoral enough to justify ejecting him from the political arena.

The Republican Party seems untroubled by Whatley’s behavior. He is, after all, the truest kind of Trumper, a gut fighter without boundaries who is willing to do almost anything in the holy cause of defeating “woke” Democrats. But that is the Republican Party’s problem. North Carolina, on the other hand, has an opportunity to uphold moral standards in a way that emphasizes our commitment to decency in politics. Whatley will continue to run his losing campaign against Roy Cooper, flailing and fuming against a far better man. But the people of North Carolina can respond the right way: By ending Whatley’s political career.

The first stirrings of urbanization feel like ancient history. But the same political dynamic, with suburban growth empowering the rise of the Republicans, was still evident as recently as the 1990s. Raleigh and Charlotte were two of the 1990s’ preeminent boom towns. And each of them had a Republican mayor with a political base centered on transplant-packed suburbs. Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory would later parlay his city’s stellar growth record into a successful campaign for North Carolian governor.

The trends that led to a swelling suburban GOP have now met with a striking reversal. Wake and Mecklenburg Counties are now thoroughly dominated by progressive Democrats. Mecklenburg, which was one of the first counties to show Republican strength, has only two Republicans in a legislative delegation number nineteen lawmakers. Republicans are similarly scarce in the capitol county. The decline of the GOP in Wake reached something of a comic nadir in 2025, when the Wake County GOP lost so many races that their only victory celebration was for a Zebulon City Councilmember.

This is a striking rend—but its statewide impact may seem to have been limited. In the 1990s, when Republicans were building momentum in the suburbs, Democrats still controlled state government. Now the rural GOP has towering majorities in both houses of the General Assembly. Woe the urbanite, who never gets to make a majority.

However, the GOP’s collapse in urban North Carolina has had significant and ongoing consequences for state politics. Republicans have assembled impressive majorities based upon rural and exurban white voters. Despite their current strength, the Republican Party’s weak standing in the urban areas has frustrated their ambitions to completely dominate the state.

It has prevented them from achieving a realignment.

The peak of North Carolina Republicans’ power came after the 2012 general election. After driving unpopular Democratic Governor Bev Perdue into retirement and trouncing an underfunded Walter Dalton, Republicans had attained the governorship for only the third time since Reconstruction. Their legislative majorities were vast, remarkably so. Phil Berger led a Republican Senate caucus of 34 members, far above the threshold for a veto-proof majority. The GOP also controlled the state Supreme Court and dozens of county commissions. At this moment of hyperpower, some Republicans insisted that their party had achieved a realignment.

Their argument was premature, but it had some plausibility. At the time Republicans were not governing the state as a minority in a political system that gives rural whites excessive clout. They had built, at least for a moment, a coalition that fused rural white conservatives with solid portions of the upper-middle-class suburbs around Raleigh, Charlotte, and Greensboro. Republicans held a majority of the Wake County legislative delegation—with the help of gerrymandering. But they also controlled the Wake County Commission, which had not been gerrymandered, and Mecklenburg County had elected some of the most influential Republicans in the legislature.

Uniting rural whites with suburbanites had created a formidable coalition for the Republicans. But they have so repelled their former suburban supporters that the Democratic Party is back off of its back and in the game. To my immense frustration, North Raleigh* continued electing hard-right Senator Neal Hunt well into the 2010s. His grim, severe brand of Southern conservatism is now toxic here. We were represented by LGBTQ disability-rights lawyer Lisa Grafstein until the Republicans gerrymandered her seat to punish her for being an outspoken LGBTQ woman. Now we have Senator Jay Chaudhuri, a leading progressive, and Grafstein has outfoxed the Republicans by moving to another part of Wake County and winning a seat there.

The suburban seats that put the finishing touches on Pat McCrory’s North Carolina are now solidly blue. Professor Michael Bitzer has a useful term for them: “urban suburbs.” And the urban suburbs, combined with urban neighborhoods where Republicans sometimes get as little as 8% of the vote, have boosted the Democratic Party back into contention. In fact, Republicans are relying on countermajoritarian institutions to maintain control of the state. Democrats won the popular vote for state legislature in 2024. The GOP’s unshakeable control over North Carolina government is now a product of gerrymandering.

I resist the bright optimism that demographic change gives some North Carolina Democrats. The state has been urbanizing for 50 years, with steady predictions that our new demographic character would do in the reactionary right. But Jesse Helms still won—again and again. And Republicans maintain a very impressive record of victories in federal races. That, in contrast to the makeup of the legislature, is not a false majority built on cheating.

But the Democrats have gained enough power in the fastest-growing parts of the state that they will very likely remain competitive for decades, no matter the GOP’s prowess at disfiguring the map of districts. Democrats seem to be on a positive trajectory right now. Republicans once looked out at the sprawling subdivision empire of the North Carolina Piedmont with the satisfaction of a victor. How long will it last?

As Whatley’s campaign has flailed ineffectually, I’ve found myself curious as to how he’s turned out to be such an incompetent Senate candidate. He is not an unintelligent man. As NCGOP Chair, he regularly showed a sophisticated and nuanced understanding of the political landscape. His mind seemed more analytical than propagandistic. Unlike so many strutting political operatives, he didn’t seem to have lost his critical acumen in the fog of partisanship.

It wouldn’t have been particularly surprising if Whatley’s political mind just failed to translate into charisma and stump presence. The skillset of a political operative is different from the skillset of a political athlete. But the reason his poor campaign has me so flummoxed is that he has not merely struggled to become a dynamic campaigner. His campaign strategy has been obtuse. The man who seemed so careful and exacting in his analysis of North Carolina politics has run a campaign badly mismatched with the voters’ mood.

I don’t think I overestimated Whatley’s intelligence. I think I underestimated the degree of his indoctrination. Whatley seems so trapped in the intellectual morass of modern conservatism that he cannot develop a critique of Roy Cooper that consists of anything but GOP dogma. There seems to be a simple equation in Whatley’s head. “Cooper is a Democrat. Democrats are woke lunatics. Therefore Cooper is a woke lunatic.” And Whatley summons all the cliches of Republican attack politics, concentrating heavily on the GOP’s bread and butter: crime. Whatley’s mind is sharp enough when he needs to analyze the electorate. But when partisan combat commences, he’s a drone, a hack, and a dullard.

I think Cooper will win this election solidly and Whatley will return to his preferred vocation. He’ll be a lobbyist for industry. He’ll be a cheerleader for Trump. And he will probably move back to DC and away from North Carolina, the state he claims to love so much.

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I know I’m not the only person to feel visceral anger at Robert F. Kennedy, jr. The crackpot has translated his lurid fantasies into public policy, with the result that children are getting measles, parasites are infecting our food, and pediatric cancer research grants are getting chucked into the dustbin.

This man is a blight on America. He belongs in an extremist commune somewhere far from civilization, where his sinister ideas can’t damage anyone but his deluded fellow travelers.

But I do have one grievance against Bobby that I haven’t heard expressed anywhere else. It is Kennedy’s fixation on autism. RFK, jr. talks about autistic people as though they were Medieval lepers. He describes autism as an unspeakable abomination, something that desperately needs to be excised from our world. To Bobby, autistic people are monstrous and horrifying. The sanctity of the village demands that autism be eradicated.

I compared Kennedy’s autism obsession to the loathing of Medieval lepers. But it has another implication. Kennedy’s zeal to prevent the proliferation of neurodiversity comes across as a particularly crazed expression of eugenics. Eugenic thinking is always sinister. But RFK, jr.’s apparent desire to cull autism from the collective gene pool is especially, maybe uniquely, sick for a Kennedy. The US Secretary of Health and Human Services had an aunt with a developmental disability. RFK jr.’s grandfather had her lobotomized, dispatching her as an inconvenience in his drive to establish the Kennedy clan as America’s new royalty. RFK, jr. hasn’t called for that kind of direct attack on people with disabilities. But his thinking doesn’t seem all that different from the ruthless inhumanity of Joseph P. Kennedy, sr.

The toplines of the poll were favorable to Democrats. In the Senate race, Roy Cooper leads Michael Whatley solidly, 50% to 41%. Analysts (particularly optimistic Republicans) keep predicting that the race will “tighten.” But despite running months of harsh, provocative attack ads, Whatley has not gained any ground against Cooper. The poll did show something about the dynamics of the race that surprised me: Cooper’s numbers have fallen into negative territory. I do not, however, think that his decline portends an imminent surge for Whatley. It’s simply not that difficult to raise a politician’s negatives in this intensely anti-political climate.

Democrats also lead on the generic legislative ballot and Josh Stein remains popular. These numbers reflect that Democrats are in a strong political position at this moment. But the political environment is always fluid and, more than once, North Carolina Democrats have seen healthy summer leads end in bitter disappointment when voters cast their ballots in the Fall. I don’t think the boost this poll gives to Democratic spirits, however, will be merely ephemeral. That’s because the poll showed trends favorable to Democrats that I have never seen in polling in North Carolina.

The most remarkable finding was that the Democratic Party was slightly more popular than the Republican Party. The gap was scant: Democrats were underwater by 20 points while Republicans were underwater by 22. But that finding is so starkly at odds with everything I have ever seen in a North Carolina poll that I cannot dismiss it as a minor triviality. For years, North Carolina Democrats have been encouraged to see their Republican opponents unpopular, but quickly chastened to learn that their party’s favorability was even worse.

This was the case when Democrats were most desperate to defeat Republicans, as in the brutal, historic legislative session of 2013. The Democratic brand was just chronically weak. But now, after many years in which they lagged Republicans no matter how destructive the GOP’s radicalism was, the Democrats have become pulled even with the Republicans. Even if it doesn’t last, the fact that the state was even capable of rating the Democrats more favorably than the Republicans seems to reflect a landmark shift in the state’s political dynamics.

Like the Republican Party itself, Donald Trump has proven frustratingly resilient in North Carolina. No politician better illustrates Republicans’ ability to overperform their polls here than the Orange Autocrat. Even more so than in other battleground states, he has maintained unshakeable support from white, rural, very conservative voters, and those people are numerous enough in North Carolina to have kept Trump as king of the mountain no matter how bitterly we loathed him in the suburbs. Polling tended to reflect that staying power in that he was seldom for than 3-5 points underwater here, no matter his standing in the broader country.

No longer. In Gary Pearce’s poll, Donald Trump had an “approval” rating of 37% positive to 57% negative. That spread is exactly the same as Trump’s national approval rating according to Nate Silver. The steel jaws Trump has always kept clamped on our state’s electorate seem to have loosened significantly. Starting as early as the 1940s, North Carolina Democrats have been working to move the state closer to the national mainstream. Our racial politics and rurality have stymied that project for generations. But we are getting closer.

In his post on the poll, Gary characterized Trump’s remaining support as “hardcore MAGA.” I’m not sure we’re quite there yet, but we’re getting close. North Carolina Democrats’ success in 2024 left an open question, of whether they’d won because they were running against extremely flawed candidates or whether the state’s shift toward Democrats indicated a trend that would persist beyond Mark Robinson’s meltdown. In Florida, the 2018 midterms confirmed the 2016 suggestion that the state was moving right. In North Carolina, it is possible—though certainly not assured—that we will continue to see this red state become steadily more purple.

UPDATE: I initially wrote that the poll showed Cooper leading Whatley 50%-49%. He was leading him 50%-41%.

North Carolina politics has been a bit livelier this week than it has been for most of this hot, baking summer. We’ve had a couple of polls on the Cooper race and a revolving carousel of candidates for the congressional seat up in the Mountains. It feels like state politics are already picking up a bit of momentum as we advance toward Labor Day.

I continue to think that many people are misinterpreting the polls in our Senate race. Democratic analysts, for the most part, have correctly judged that Cooper’s lead is strong and durable. But I keep hearing other observers say the race is “tightening.” It demonstrably is not. Nearly every poll continues to find Cooper ahead of Whatley by 7-10% points, regardless of Whatley’s growing name recognition. Whatley just hasn’t been able to build more support in this political environment.

Noteworthy—and I haven’t yet seen this point made in the press—is that Roy Cooper now clears above 50% in most polls. Change Research and Gary Pearce found Cooper at 50% in their poll. That result alone—assuming that it will correctly project the final outcome—takes a bite out of the Republican argument that Cooper can’t make it to 50%. But several other polls have shown Cooper performing even more strongly than Gary’s did. Both Fox News and Elon University showed Cooper at a robust 53%. Polls are not predictive at this stage of the race, if they ever are. But no North Carolina US Senate candidate has received that much of the vote since Richard Burr in 2010. Based on those polls, the narrative should be that Cooper has a commanding lead, not that he’s in a precarious spot and vulnerable to Whatley’s improving name recognition.

I love North Carolina’s Inner Banks. Now largely overlooked, the labyrinth of brackish rivers and hot, buggy swamps was where much of North Carolina’s early history took place. Bath, now a postage-stamp hamlet perched on the Pamlico River, was the first town founded in North Carolina. It was also Blackbeard’s place of residence for several years. Places like Pamlico County are my favorite parts of rural North Carolina because they are so rustic and pristine that they still have the feel of the wilderness.

The GOP has sent a vigorous “fuck-you” to the people of the Inner Banks. In their budget, Republican legislators introduced a new toll for ferry rides in North Carolina. The overwhelming majority of ferry traffic takes place in the Inner Banks. This is because the web of unbridged rivers is impossible to navigate by car and people need to hop onto a boat to get from town to town. They have no choice, they haven’t asked for special favors, and Republicans are now going to make the region’s North Carolinians pay a toll for the ferries their tax dollars pay for.

It’s callous and obnoxious. But it’s also an example, writ small, of the damaging changes coming to North Carolina government. The GOP is hellbent on eliminating the state income tax and legally prohibiting any future legislature from raising it by 1%. Just cut spending! conservatives would cry. But the General Assembly has already inflicted spending cuts so deep and long-lasting that even they are turning to new revenues to keep the state solvent. Hence the regressive fees. Hence the ferry tolls.

This is an example of one of the most flummoxing pathologies in the NCGOP. North Carolina Republicans are a rural party. The Inner Banks—my beloved Inner Banks—are the essence of rural Trump Country. No Democrat has represented Pamlico County since 2010, and despite the blue trending taking root in the town of Oriental, that part of the state will probably be represented by MAGA Republicans for a generation. AND REPUBLICANS ARE IMPOSING REGRESSIVE FEES ON THE INNER BANKS! They are so blindly possessed by a drive to impose absolute conservative orthodoxy on our state that they are directly hurting their own citizens to make room for another upper-bracket tax cut. This is a trend we’ve seen with regard to school vouchers, property taxes, and the legislature’s 12-year blockade of Medicaid Expansion that allowed numerous rural hospitals to close.

North Carolina Republicans are willing to directly degrade their constituents’ living standards and quality of life so that the rich can pay nothing in income taxes and the state can stand as the grand, grotesque epitome of conservative ideology run amok.

Two decades later, as the Woke wave crested and crashed, Democrats would have been unlikely to appear at a NASCAR race. Their preferred sports league was the NBA, a mostly blue-state league that was explicitly progressive. Sports are political. Politicians and parties use the imagery and cultural associations of big-time sports to signal where they stand in the culture wars. But deserting “NASCAR dads” was just a minor and quirky part of the Democratic Party’s departure from cultural triangulation. They largely stopped trying to appeal to downscale, culturally “red” voters and embraced cultural cosmopolitanism as their avenue to a majority.

The politics of the late 2000s and 2010s made it appear that the Democrats had made a good decision. Barack Obama built a multicultural coalition based upon demographics that were growing as a share of the electorate and marshalled their support to win two presidential elections. The electoral math seemed to show that a new Democratic majority was emerging. The implication of this good fortune seemed to be to embrace cultural cosmopolitanism and maximize the impact of the party’s growing demographic strength.

The power of the Democrats’ emerging coalition seemed to have set a new baseline for American politics. Democrats were confident. Even Republicans, in their famous “Autopsy” of the 2012 election, accepted the basic premise that the country was moving left and that the nation’s coming political battles would feature an effort by the parties to win Black, brown, and Millennial Obama voters.

Hello, Donald Trump.

The crude, boorish racist from New York dynamited the political elite’s consensus. It is hard to imagine a candidate more determined to smash the Republican Party’s demographic outreach than Donald Trump. He announced his candidacy with a crazed, rambling diatribe about Mexican “rapists” and Chinese people ransacking the American heartland. Both elites and most minority voters recoiled from his bigotry. And most observers—myself included—thought Trump was dragging the Republican Party into an historic electoral debacle. But his populist appeal electrified white rural America. It brought millions of blue-collar whites to the polls to elect their idol president. Trump made a mockery of the Democratic Party’s confidence that demographics were moving the country inexorably to the left.

After the party’s devastating loss to Trump, some Democrats have reconsidered the wisdom of defenestrating the party’s culturally red wing. Whereas Barack Obama won 25% of the rural counties in America, Joe Biden won only 9%. In the (supposedly competitive) Southern state of Texas, the talented Democrat Beto O’Rourke seldom managed to garner more than 30% of the vote in the state’s vast rural outback. The party made a mistake by retreating from competitiveness in culturally red districts. And after several cycles of punishing defeat, culturally moderate Democrats are making a comeback.

Call them the New Country Democrats. These people are materially closer to the cultural values of red-state and rural working-class voters. Many of them have been endorsed by the Congressional Blue Dog caucus. But unlike the earlier Blue Dogs, who largely ceased to exist after the 2010 Republican wave, the New Country Democrats are not direct descendants of the conservative Democrats who dominated the South during segregation and lingered in office for decades afterward out of public familiarity. New Country Democrats are part of the party’s broadly pro-equality liberalism. But they present a notably different image than the social progressives who dominated the party almost completely in the Woke era—and who lost almost uniformly in red districts.

The most prominent New Country Democrat may be James Talarico of Texas. Openly religious and cautious in his political positioning, Talarico appears to be running a campaign that may be strong enough to win in Texas, the stronghold of Red America. But the best example of the New Country style is Jamie Ager in North Carolina. Ager is a Democrat as true to his district as a purple mountain sunset. He is a farmer and a Western North Carolina native. His family has built decades of prominence and trust in the region. And he seems to have the elusive, hard-to-define but crucial quality of political horse sense. He breathes the air of his district’s politics.

Most importantly, Jamie Ager’s localism is not merely cosmetic. I respect Tim Walz. But national Democrats oversold biographical details like Walz’s hunting hobby when the man was clearly a creature of the social-justice left. Ager is a progressive in the broad, North Carolina way. He supports universal healthcare and conservation. He even supports comprehensive immigration reform! (Mountain Democrat Heath Shuler advocated “self-deportation.”) But Ager is careful to emphasize his political moderation, to nod to the individualism and self-reliance that his districts prefers over the influence of a powerful central government. He is firmly centrist and rooted in the Mountains. He is the best example of the promise of the New Country Democrat.

It would be churlish not to acknowledge the suffering of crime victims and their families. That is not my intent, nor has Cooper shown any callous indifference toward their woe. But to truly honor the suffering of victims and account for the harm that criminals do requires us to grapple with the truth. Misrepresenting the issue turns a genuine tragedy into a dishonest, malignant political ruse. And the Whatley campaign, by suggesting that Cooper flippantly released dangerous people, is exploiting victims’ grief to score points in a political campaign.

In reality, Roy Cooper fought the prisoner-release orders and took a harsher line toward prisoners than at least one red-state governor. In 2020, left-liberal litigators pressured Cooper to release thousands of prisoners, allegedly to ease overcrowded conditions during the COVID pandemic. Activists used cloying rhetoric to insist that prison conditions were intolerably squalid for incarcerated people, and implored Cooper to take executive action to commute thousands of prisoners’ sentences. Cooper stood firm. The governor refused to commute the sentences of thousands of prisoners rather than let them out of prison.

Cooper did, however, follow court orders forcing the release of prisoners in 2021. The Whatley campaign has aggressively harped on the 3,500 inmates the Cooper administration released from prison. But progressive legal activists had initially requested that the governor release 18,000 prisoners. Legal activists were dourly moralistic about Cooper’s recalcitrant stance. Said one activist: “The idea that, you know, Roy Cooper is somehow being attacked for doing too much here is the most absurd thing I’ve ever heard… what we saw was a constant sort of reluctance to provide meaningful release.” That indictment was much closer to capturing the truth of how Cooper handled the court order than the dark rigmarole in Whatley’s ads.

If Cooper disappointed progressive activists, he outdid at least one Republican governor in limiting the scale of prisoner-release. The Deep South’s criminal justice system was described by historian Robert Caro as “something special,” a study in harsh retribution. But some of the most conservative governors in the region released prisoners during the pandemic. Arkansas and Tennessee, for example, are extremely red states with active death penalties—and they, too, followed court orders to release prisoners. Red-trending Iowa released 4,700 inmates, roughly half of the state’s incarcerated population. By releasing 3,500 inmates, Cooper merely did what other governors were forced to do—obey the will of the judicial branch.

The notion Whatley is pushing—that Cooper is some left-wing critic of the carceral state, eager to release prisoners no matter the cost—is hogwash. The truth is that Cooper is like my political hero, Jim Hunt. He’s a Democrat with broadly progressive views who takes a stern line against criminals. Whatley is distorting the story of COVID, Cooper, and prisoner release. Cooper fought left-wing activists to keep 18,000 prisoners from being released in 2020. He was more cautious than Republican superstar Kim Reynolds, the governor of Iowa. The facts are quite different than Whatley and his ad-makers would like North Carolina to believe.

OK. Paré’s strange strictures on the transgender community’s ability to live openly in public are likely to command more national attention. Anti-trans legislation is ubiquitous in red states. But Pare’s bill is much more like HB2 than the cookie-cutter oppression that’s spread across Red America in recent years. It is unique, original, and ridiculous. Like the North Carolina-born bathroom bill, Paré’s legislation subjects trans people to a type of public repression never (to my knowledge) seen before. And it’s simply twisted and bizarre and makes Paré, and the state, look like deluded, backwater bigots.

I am quite confident that there will be an intense backlash if like Paré’s proposal passes. We are not Mississippi. In this case, I do not mean that we are more progressive. Rather, I mean that we aren’t just one of a dozen or so Southern states with cretinous reputations. We have the unique status of having introduced ourselves to the world as anti-trans bathroom warriors. The first. The original. The “pioneers in bigotry,” as the New York Times said. If we pass a provocative, eye-catching anti-trans bill, the reaction will be worldwide, outraged, and/or at best incredulous. I don’t know if the nation still cares enough about trans rights to hammer us with economic sanctions. The transphobic virus has spread. But I know we will be reascending to the global stage for the most embarrassing possible reason.

UNC Chancellor Lee Roberts has another scandal on his hands. At least that’s what it sounds like. UNC football General Manager Michael Lombardi has apparently committed some sort of misconduct related to “human resources.” I won’t be irresponsible and speculate on what he did until hard information comes out.

But hard information is what Lee Roberts has made conspicuously scarce.

In response to this looming football fiasco, Roberts has attempted to deflect questions and prevent the story from growing. This is the way Roberts, a political operative once employed by the scandal-ridden McCrory administration, likes to respond when UNC’s Republican overlords make another piece of damaging news. He just affects a knowing smirk and mouths platitudes that he clearly does not believe. The best thing I can say about his secretive crisis-management style is that he doesn’t seem to actively enjoy controversies, as his bosses on the UNC Board of Trustees clearly do.

Roberts’s reticence is predictable but foolish. In the era of social media and stricter consequences for wealthy men’s misconduct, Lombardi’s story is almost certain to come out, perhaps soon. The administration’s efforts to suppress the facts will only stoke a greater appetite for the truth and undermine what little is left of their ethical credibility. I’m not a public relations expert. You don’t have to be. It’s clear that the UNC administration cannot hide anything from a world that has seen this great institution misgoverned by a little blue car full of bad-faith clowns. I don’t know what Lombardi did, or if he did it. But if there’s an ugly truth to reveal, I do not believe Roberts will be able to keep the broader world from seeing how his football program is once again bringing disgrace on the University of North Carolina.

The impetus for Paré’s proposal was that a local elementary school had hired a transgender female music teacher. Paré insisted that allowing a trans woman to teach in an elementary school would expose young children to “age-inappropriate” ideas about gender identity. This is a dubious claim. No one believes children of any age should be subjected to age-inappropriate material. But this teacher has no record of exposing children to inappropriate ideas or behaving inappropriately with children. Paré holds that merely interacting with a trans woman is harmful to children. Paré is pathologizing transgender identity itself.

If being around trans people is harmful to children, it would seem that the proper course of action would be to ban transgender people from expressing their identities in any public place. After all, children do not only encounter trans people in classrooms. Trans people, whether religious conservatives like it or not, are visible members of the community, apt to come across anyone. Some trans people are even parents. Many more care deeply for children, and the charge that they threaten kids is a libel.

Rep. Paré is marshalling old, ugly taboos around gender, sexuality, and identity. Homophobes have long sought to justify the exclusion of LGBTQ people by portraying them as perverts and pedophiles. In the late 1970s, social conservatives famously defeated an LGBTQ anti-discrimination ordinance with the slogan “Save the Children.” The allegations toward LGBTQ people are scurrilous lies. They take advantage of people’s rightfully profound fears for their children’s safety to enforce LGBTQ people’s confinement to the closet.

In North Carolina, the white cis majority has often sought to stoke fears for schoolchildren’s safety. In 1898, the News & Observer printed a cartoon showing a leering Black man looming over young white girls at the state school for the blind. The horrific scene was part of a campaign to build support for Jim Crow laws, which would result in Black people being roughly expelled from white people’s institutions and forced to live as second-class citizens. Soon after the N&O’s (and the Democrats’) White Supremacy Campaign came to culmination, Black people would be excluded from jury boxes, white schools, public transportation, and public accommodations. The white lunge to banish Black people would define our state’s social institutions for almost a century.

White fear never ceased to occupy the highest seat in North Carolina’s hierarchy of paranoias. But as explicit racism became taboo, North Carolina conservatives sought to portray LGBTQ people as threats to the safety of children. In the 1980s, Jesse Helms presaged Rep. Paré’s proposal by calling to ban homosexual teachers from public schools. He was playing with a promising source of anxiety: Polls showed broad opposition to gay teachers in North Carolina. But his crude and direct attack on gay people repelled many people in the state, and Helms discarded the idea.

If Helms-like Republicans had controlled the legislature then, as they do now, a ban on gay teachers might have passed. Paré seems genuinely interested in imposing a dress code on trans people that would, in effect, require them to disguise their identities in return for the privilege of teaching in public schools. The underlying logic of this transphobia is that trans people are presumptively threatening to children, no matter how they have actually behaved, and that the cis majority should build a wall around them. North Carolina conservatives seek to police the boundaries of the commonwealth. The rest of the world will take notice.

Dave Boliek is the chief executor of the Republican Party’s plans. Rarely one for subtlety, Boliek has been frank and direct in his role as the GOP’s principal anti-voting enforcer. He’s hired ultra-partisans and offered minimal rationalization for their presence on his staff. He’s expanded the phalanx of operatives at his disposal and unabashedly put them to work suppressing Democratic voters. Boliek is no longer the state’s smiling accountant. He’s the democracy-killer.

It’s ugly, if typical, that North Carolina is facing another round of democratic erosion. But as the situation has played out, I’ve begun to find myself feeling unexpectedly encouraged. That’s because the GOP has faced stern opprobrium from the state’s chattering class and opposition from Democrats and advocates. Voter suppression is the norm in North Carolina government. It has not yet become an accepted part of our political culture.

Democracy’s resilience in North Carolina is a bit surprising. Much of our state’s legacy media has long since made peace with the regime and began to offer weak, nonjudgmental coverage of GOP governance, even when Republicans violated important democratic norms. When Boliek and his enforcers began this latest round of voter suppression, it appeared that the state’s response might be dangerously muted. No longer. Boliek’s attacks on young people, Black people, and other inconvenient obstacles to his party’s complete dominance have aroused expressions of outrage from many corners in our state. Justice Brandeis’s dictum about the cleansing effect of government transparency is evident in North Carolina.

The stout resistance to Republican authoritarianism has a notable, and heartening, implication for our state’s political culture. It shows that our democratic birthright is strong. This is not obviously what one would expect from the historical trends that shaped our government. For much of the state’s history white people have exercised strict control over the levers of power and, more often than not, forcibly excluded African Americans. If democracy is “in our DNA,” its influence has been blunted by white supremacy. And yet we have had a prickly, outraged response to Boliek’s efforts to preempt any electoral backlash against his regime. The embers of self-government have long burned faintly in this Southern state, but the fire has not gone out.

1. Population growth

Something must be going right in a state that’s gaining population. This seems like commonsense, but some contrarians attempt to argue that the South’s growth is simply an artifact of the cost-of-living. The problem is that some of the cheapest states in the country are losing population. Mississippi and West Virginia both have very low housing costs and declining population. Sometimes a low cost of living can reflect poverty rather than abundant land and housing. While some parts of North Carolina, notably northeastern NC and the poorest parts of the mountains, fit that description, we are mostly growing because we offer attractive amenities to people in other states.

Charlotte is the crown jewel. I love Charlotte, and when you go there you can feel the sense of bustle and enterprise that pervades the city’s civic culture. In the last year, Charlotte grew faster than any other city in the country. Forty-nine-thousand people moved to the city, a larger gain than the gains seen in California. It’s as if the entire population of Burlington, Vermont moved to Charlotte, and then 7,000 more people followed them. Charlotte is growing about 20% faster even than Austin, Texas, often the champion metro for population growth.

That’s great news for Charlotte—but what about the rest of the state? It will surprise no one that the Raleigh metropolitan area and retirement towns around Wilmington are also attracting thousands of new residents. But the narrative in our civic discourse often suggests that rural North Carolina, almost all of it, is losing young people and businesses. I would have thought the same thing. But according to the state Budget Office, 72 North Carolina counties have gained population since 2020, which by definition means that more a few rural communities are growing, in spite of the common perception. It may be time to adjust our assumptions about growth and loss in North Carolina—and to think much harder about the systemic racism that may underlie so many northeastern, African American counties losing population while much of the state grows.

2. Economic growth

North Carolina has seen its economic growth outpace the national average in recent quarters. In the third quarter of 2025, the state’s GDP grew by a robust 5.6%. The Raleigh metro area continued to boast some of the strongest job growth in the country. As John Hood, a well-informed conservative analyst, observed in the Triangle Business Journal, even many rural counties performed relatively well according to some economic metrics. We have picked up solidly in the last year or two.

The NCGOP likes to exaggerate North Carolina’s economic record. Since they took control of state government, our economy has basically tracked the national average and wage growth has been slacker than the country’s, not a surprise given our history of low wages and pronounced rural poverty. Tax cuts have not created an economic miracle in North Carolina. But many North Carolinians have prospered since the pandemic, and it would reflect a hidebound obstinance not to take note of and appreciate this relative success.

3. Achievement among high-end students

The best breakdown of America’s education challenges came from writer E.J. Dionne. Rebutting the narrative of an overarching crisis, Dionne delineated three separate challenges facing the country’s students. The first was that the poorest students were being failed severely. The second was mediocre performance among the broad mass of relatively average students. And the third challenge was that America’s best students were not being offered coursework with enough rigor to compete with their peers in other countries.

The highest-achieving students are now doing a bit better on international tests than they were when Dionne wrote his column. They tend to perform equally with high achievers in other Western countries but do worse than the best students in East Asian countries. I want America’s brightest students (and all of its students) to lead the world, but I am not apoplectic that they lag some Asian students on standardized tests. East Asian countries like South Korea often generate sterling test scores but only by pushing their students so hard that their mental health suffers tremendously. We don’t need to worsen our youth mental-health crisis.

How about North Carolina? In our state, there are indications that the highest achievers may be reaching new levels of success. Participation in AP classes has increased in recent years. Further, the state’s students are scoring higher on the ACT. North Carolina’s ACT scores remain troublingly below the national “benchmark” for college readiness. But I think it is reasonable to stipulate that North Carolina’s best students are putting in better performance in coursework and standardized tests, and that the group of high-achieving students in growing, at least based upon AP classes.

North Carolina has long had this kind of lopsided achievement curve. In the twentieth century, the state built an exceptional public university system to educate the sons (and later daughters) of executives in the burgeoning cigarette and textile industries. The textile executives were content to let the state’s public schools languish—and may even have preferred a poor public school system to the degree that it left workers uneducated and less likely to challenge the authority of management. But we made an effort to offer a world-class college education at least to the privileged few.

Unfortunately, inequity persists today. North Carolina’s reading scores are falling and math scores are doing no better than the nation’s other students, which is not well. But we are selling our schools and our students short if we do not acknowledge the excellent achievement some kids are posting at the highest levels. Public education is resilient in North Carolina—and we have the capacity to do so much better.

Sports have always been a kind of golden calf in North Carolina higher education. A false object of worship. Originating over 100 years ago, college football and basketball have been wildly popular sources of mass entertainment here. Higher education administrators who deigned to challenge the supremacy of the hardcourt have risked being chucked into the professional dustbin. The legendary Frank Porter Graham, for example, arguably came closer to losing his job as UNC president when he tried to curtail college sports than when he ended the Jewish quota at Chapel Hill’s medical school or defended the right of a Communist Party politician to visit and dine with a UNC professor.

College football elicited passionate screams from Carolina sports fans in the first half of the 20th century, a fan following that would be exceeded in fervor when the state (and State) began to win big-time basketball tournaments. The enterprise always had an ugly ethical underbelly. In the 1950s, the state’s universities were embroiled in a sordid athletic scandal called the “point-shaving” affair. UNC system president Bill Friday tried to impose some measure of restraint and reason on the carnival of college athletics after the scandal. But he was up against hopelessly powerful headwinds, and the domination of North Carolina universities by professionalized sports only became greater and more expensive over the following decades.

NC State coach Jim Valvano was the first person to face serious professional consequences for the excesses of college athletics. In the 1980s, the News and Observer ran a series of exposes on the Wolfpack program’s use of financial compensation to attract and retain top ballplayers. The team had paid star players between $14,000 and $60,000 to play at the university.

How quaint.

Athletes at UNC, NC State, and private powerhouses like Duke University now make well into the seven figures. Malone, the UNC coach, tried to coax his star big man Henri Vessaer to play one more year for the Tar Heels by offering him $4.5 million in “NIL money.” That sum equates to the yearly earnings of roughly 25 full professors at UNC or roughly 150 university cafeteria workers. To play basketball under the school’s giant and possibly soon-to-be-replaced b-ball rotunda and pretend to be a “student.”

Belichick is worse. To attract the grizzled NFL legend, GOP-appointed UNC leaders John Preyer and Lee Roberts agreed to massively increase the program’s NIL budget and lower academic standards so Belichick could recruit better football players without demanding that they crack a book once in awhile. Like administrators at football factories like the University of Alabama, Roberts and Preyer have dispensed with any pretense of an emphasis on education and attempted to build Belichick’s “thirty-third NFL team” at the expense of the school’s academic focus.

Forgive the cliche, but this is insanity. Forgive this cliche too: college sports are out of control. Athletic departments are throwing around vast sums of money at a time when our public universities are facing budget cuts, firing employees, and considering their first tuition increases in a decade. It reflects the decadence of late capitalism and the know-nothing ignorance with which administrators like Lee Roberts have mismanaged our state’s educational treasures. I do not expect Belichick to go anywhere anytime soon, though one can hope. But perhaps we can at least begin to have a conversation as a state about whether we want to make a mockery of higher education by fielding professional sports teams to the cheers of lusty crowds.

In his latest role, Woodhouse was meant to be a sort of freelance enforcer. He worked for auditor-cum-electoral-overseer Dave Boliek as an “elections integrity” consultant. Little of what he did seems to have had anything to do with ensuring election integrity. Instead, as in so many other roles the partisan street-fighter has held, Woodhouse swooped in from his Raleigh perch to crush any institutional structures that might have allowed Democrats to vote in large numbers.

He was the chief voter suppressor. Now he’s gone.

I don’t quite understand why. Woodhouse’s role was never really hidden from public view. Informed observers knew his modus operandi. And he played the thuggish, hackish role he was given with the same zeal as ever—but not, notably, with any more aggression than he had exhibited as NCGOP Executive Director, campaign manager, or brawling intraparty combatant. He didn’t embarrass Boliek and, regardless, North Carolina Republicans are rather immune to embarrassment on the topic of suppressing Black, young, and Democratic votes.

My best guess is that the NCGOP has decided Woodhouse can better serve them in another role. I have no inside dish to support this theory. But Boliek seems to be firmly in command of the voter-suppression operation, with Woodhouse having contributed his thuggish energy to the effort and the rest of the autocracy machine freshly lubricated and ready to pounce. Woodhouse doesn’t stay in any given position for very long, but he doesn’t stay on the sidelines for very long either. Watch out for him before November comes.

Governor Stein signed the state budget into law last week. I think he made a sound decision. The budget gave little to teachers or state employees and poured a couple-million-more dollars into the right-wing “School of Civic Life and Leadership” promoting Trumpism and transphobia at my alma mater, UNC. But those provisions would be baked into any budget written by North Carolina Republicans.

What made this budget a meaningful step forward was present in its handling of tax cuts. Phil Berger must be heartbroken that he will not get to fulfill his dream of eliminating personal income taxes in our state. But this budget goes further to frustrate Berger’s crumbling ambitions than even I had realized. The budget halts the automatic tax cuts that Republicans had put in place until the 2030s. Income tax rates will not automatically fall based upon “revenue targets” devised years ago, without any foreknowledge of what state needs would be in the 2020s and 2030s. There will be one more tax cut next year, but otherwise the reduction in tax rates will be put on pause and revenue safeguarded for almost a decade. This is a genuine victory for Stein and other Democrats. I’m glad Stein stayed open to compromise while the budget was being negotiated and endorsed the flawed, but better, final product.

Finally, Public Policy Polling released a new survey of the US Senate race in North Carolina that deserves widespread attention. The poll shows a much smaller lead for Cooper than previous surveys by other pollsters, 48-44 instead of 50-43 or 48-34 or any other foretelling of a landslide. PPP’s poll is much more realistic than the polls showing Cooper with gaudy leads. North Carolina is a red-leaning battleground state that has elected Republicans in five straight Senate elections. Despite Whatley’s weakness and Cooper’s strength, the race was always bound to tighten instead of radically defying our state’s partisan fundamentals.

48-44. Hmmmmm. Cooper is below 50% in this poll, if only slightly. I think Republicans are demonstrably wrong to say that Roy Cooper has a “ceiling” of 49%. Cooper defeated Dan Forest 51.5% to 47% in 2020, running several points ahead of Joe Biden. He can clear the 50% mark. But the polls we’ve seen this year do tend to show Cooper with a little less than 50%, typically 49% or 48%. I think this reflects that Cooper still needs to lock down the support of a smattering of moderates and conservative independents who may be sympathetic to him, but not quite ready to send a Democrat to Washington. At the least, it shows that the Cooper campaign has more work to do to finish out this race. I don’t think Whatley has the appeal or the talent to win, at the end of the day. But statewide races are never a cakewalk in North Carolina, and it is useful for those of us on the left to be reminded of this fact.

See you soon.