Eight years ago, hours after George W. Bush won a second term as president and Mike Easley won a second term as governor, I wrote in this space that Republicans in North Carolina had essentially created two separate parties. One had given Bush the state’s electoral votes by an overwhelming margin, elected Richard Burr to the U.S. Senate, and helped maintain the GOP majority in the U.S. House.
But, I continued, if you moved further down the ballot, a different Republican Party presented itself:
It’s a party that hasn’t elected a governor in 16 years, that hasn’t exercised real power in the General Assembly since 1998, that appears to have no effective farm team of candidates being groomed for higher office and little effective means of raising and deploying resources to win competitive races. Fundamentally, it’s a party that has been unable to frame a clear, coherent message that distinguishes its candidates and agenda from those of the Democrats.
Regardless of what happens tomorrow in other states, here in North Carolina a retooled, reformed, and rejuvenated Republican Party will likely cap three years of electoral progress with the best political cycle in its history. Pat McCrory will win the governor’s race handily. It seems likely that Democrats will lose one or more additional offices on the Council of State. Thanks to favorable redistricting, superior candidate recruitment, and a significant fundraising advantage, the GOP will retain control of both houses of the state legislature, for the first time since the 19th century, and win as many as 10 of the state’s 13 congressional seats.
It’s not just in North Carolina where state Republican parties seem poised to maintain recent, historic gains, or even add to them. Montana and possibly New Hampshire will replace Democratic governors with Republican ones. That will take the partisan split of governorships to 31-18 or 32-17 Republican.
At the state-legislature level, 2010 was the GOP’s best cycle since the 1920s. It gained 720 seats and control of an amazing 23 legislative chambers. Republicans now control 59 of the 98 chambers elected on a partisan basis (Nebraska’s legislature is nonpartisan and unicameral) and constitute about 55 percent of state legislators nationwide. In 2012, there will likely be only marginal changes in state capitals. Arkansas sticks out like a sore thumb as the only state in the South where Democrats still run the legislature, but both of its chambers are in play this year. Republicans are also taking a run at the senates in Iowa, Nevada, and Washington. Democrats’ best prospects are retaking the Colorado house, New York senate, and Minnesota house.
A generation ago, ridicule would have greeted the prediction that Republicans would become the majority party in state capitals and the U.S. House while Democrats would enjoy greater success in presidential and Senate elections. The pattern had been exactly the opposite. In the two decades from 1968 to 1988, the GOP won all but one presidential race (1976) and held the U.S. Senate for several terms in the 1980s. But the party never came anywhere close to taking the U.S. House, and Democrats ran most of the country’s states and localities.
From 1992 to 2008, however, Democrats won three of the five presidential races – four if we use the popular vote rather than electoral vote to gauge the trend – while Republicans actually held Congress for much of the period. The GOP also made substantial gains at the state level, holding a majority of the nation’s governorships during several cycles and steadily gaining strength in legislative politics.
In the latter case, much but not all of the change occurred in the states that formerly made up the Democrats’ Solid South. Why did it take North Carolina so long to join this trend? I credit the political talents of former Gov. Jim Hunt, the true leader of the Democratic Party since the 1970s. Indeed, Hunt was out on the campaign trail again this year, trying to work the old magic one more time.
It isn’t going to be enough.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and author of Our Best Foot Forward: An Investment Plan for North Carolina’s Economic Recovery.