Don’t worry, political junkies. North Carolina’s 2002 election cycle, one of the most pivotal in recent memory, may be over and the 2004 sweepstakes — including competitive races for governor and U.S. Senate — may be a ways off. But this year, 2003, promises to offer some political suspense of its own.
Municipal elections across North Carolina will test whether the resurgence of Democratic mayors in Raleigh, Durham, and Winston-Salem was a temporary phenomenon. Raleigh, for example, will probably pit incumbent Charles Meeker, a Democrat, against city councilman John Odom, a Republican. It’s a nonpartisan race, as are most municipal elections in North Carolina, but this fiction has largely been abandoned over the past decade.
In the more Republican Charlotte, where the partisan politics is official, longtime Mayor Pat McCrory won’t get an easy time of it, either, facing former city councilman Mike Castrano in what will likely be a spirited GOP primary about taxes, mass transit, and funding a new NBA arena in the face of a public vote against the idea in 2001. Democrat Parks Helms, a longtime chair of the Mecklenburg County Commission (though not at present), is probably set to take on the victor.
Other city races to watch will include controversial Cary Mayor Glenn Lang’s possible (though not definite) re-election bid and whether moderate leaders in Winston-Salem, Asheville, Greensboro, and Wilmington will draw either conservative or liberal challengers or both. And will Durham’s Bill Bell, who defeated moderate Republican incumbent Nick Tennyson for mayor in 2001, escape a challenge, either from Tennyson or a similar candidate?
Meanwhile, many NC ballots will include sporadically competitive school board races and, more importantly, votes on big-time school bond packages. Guilford and Wake counties, for example, seem poised to ask voters to approve school bonds large enough to force property-tax increases. Similar efforts have fallen prey to taxpayer-association opposition in communities as diverse as Wake, Lee, Yadkin, and Polk.
Municipal elections aren’t just important in themselves. They also groom candidates for future runs for state office. Several former mayors and school board members of both parties were elected to the General Assembly in 2002, and are already allying with like-minded former county commissioners to press for legislative action on local government matters such as taxing authority, Medicaid cost-sharing, and transportation. Current and former school board members are also preparing runs for the State Superintendent of Public Instruction job that will be vacant in 2004 as Mike Ward steps down. These include Republicans Bill Fletcher of the Wake school board and Michael Barrick of Caldwell’s.
Not much going on in 2003. Just elections for hundreds of mayors, city and town councils, school boards, and whether NC local governments will borrow more than $1 billion more for school construction.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal