This summer I took calls from dozens of reporters across the country. A couple of questions were repeated time and again: How could North Carolina Republicans have moved so far to the right? How have the state’s politics polarized so much when the Democratic Party barely has budged from its position? I’m quite sure a number of them wanted to add, “Isn’t this all such a terrible business?”
It is undeniably true that today’s state GOP is more conservative than when we last had Republican governors — Jim Holshouser from 1973-77 and Jim Martin from 1985-93. But systematic measures of state citizen ideology — such as that constructed by Richard Fording and his collaborators — show a material move in a conservative direction, especially since 2008, after a slow but perceptible creep leftward in the previous decade was capped by Barack Obama becoming the first Democratic presidential candidate since Jimmy Carter in 1976 to win North Carolina.
In 2012, Gallup found that, at least according to figures derived from residents’ self-identified ideology, conservatives outnumbered liberals here by 20.9 percentage points.
Also, during the Holshouser and Martin years, the legislative Republican party was puny and those chief executives necessarily pulled the party to the center in order to please the state’s median voter, whether for Martin’s re-election in 1988 or, as in 1976 and 1992, when the governor was term-limited, to secure a political and policy legacy in the form of a Republican successor. The current state GOP, on the other hand, is led by large majorities in the House and Senate. Lawmakers have partisan and homogenous constituencies and powerful leaders.
It is no coincidence that the conventional model of the American legislative process — to paraphrase FDR, it is the duty of the chief executive to propose and the legislature to dispose — cannot adequately explain the recently ended session of the General Assembly. House Speaker Thom Tillis and Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger offered lengthy conservative agendas that largely had been kept under wraps since they acceded to the leadership in 2011 because of Democratic Gov. Bev Perdue’s veto.
Gov. Pat McCrory, having campaigned as a problem solver rather than an ideologue, did not put himself in a position to challenge them. Instead, he often waited for bills to come to his desk, reacting rather than initiating. His secondary role has been demonstrated recently by legislators’ votes to override vetoes on bills having to do with drug testing for welfare recipients and penalties for businesses hiring illegal immigrants.
Republicans, then, have both followed and attempted to lead the public in a conservative direction. Because of their assertiveness, there is still the nagging question of overreach that I’ve written about before. It is a proposition that will get its first real test in the 2014 elections.
What of the Democrats? Are they really no different today? In some ways, it is quite difficult to ascertain. The party is in the minority in both chambers of the General Assembly and its state organization rudderless. The Democrats will win power back again, if not in the immediate future and if not always in toto.
North Carolina is even now tinged purple, and, like just about everywhere else, its public’s views are thermostatic — they tend to react negatively to many new policies and frequently wish to have them tempered. When the Democratic Party does emerge from the doldrums, however, I find it hard to believe it will be the moderate party it has been characterized as in the past.
Business leaders and their money once supported Democrats because they held power, not because there was any great meeting of the minds. Now that Republicans hold all the cards, these resources have flowed freely into GOP campaign coffers.
Large corporations may back competitive Democrats occasionally for policy reasons. They often like regulation because it puts smaller competitors at a disadvantage. But because politicians of both parties can be persuaded to deliver businesses specific benefits — such as relocation subsidies and tax breaks — corporations will tend to invest in incumbents and shift with the wind.
Without the solid allegiance of businesses large and small, the North Carolina Democratic Party will be pulled leftward by the biggest supporters it has today: African-Americans (and possibly Latinos), public-sector unions, and liberal professionals.
Democratic candidates sometimes may win the votes of swing moderate groups; suburban women, for example, seem deeply perturbed by elements of the GOP’s current agenda, especially on issues like public education, abortion, and guns. But without the counterweight of business, the Democrats are as likely to overreach as the Republicans seem to have at times this year.
The result is a new polarized North Carolina politics. To some, this may be distressing, condemning us to abrupt changes in public policy and frequent gridlock if one party controls the governorship and its opposition the General Assembly. To others, it might be refreshing.
Two competing parties with distinctly different programmatic approaches may increase citizens’ interest in state politics and provide them with meaningful and clear choices come election time.
Andy Taylor is a professor of political science in the School of Public and International Affairs at N.C. State University.