RALEIGH – Tuesday’s election results tell the tale of two Republican parties.
With the apparent reelection of President George W. Bush, a Republican House, a Republican Senate, and a Republican majority of the nation’s governors, it would be difficult to spin the 2004 election cycle as anything but a triumph for the national GOP. At this writing, the party appears to have greatly exceeded expectations by achieving a net gain of as many as four seats in the Senate and five seats in the House. Many of the races were close, hard-fought contests – but that makes it all-the-more striking that Republican candidates prevailed in most of the them.
North Carolina did its part to help to create and sustain a rising Republican tide. Its voters reelected a GOP majority, albeit a narrow one, among the 13-member delegation to the U.S. House. That meant reelecting Robin Hayes in the 8th District, despite the latest in a string of serious Democratic efforts to upend him, and shrugging off a surprisingly well-financed challenge to Rep. Charles Taylor in Western North Carolina’s 11th District. Most importantly, it meant electing Richard Burr to the U.S. Senate – giving the state two GOP senators and creating, in my view, another national star for the party to complement freshmen Senator nd political demigod Elizabeth Dole.
This is a Republican Party, both nationally and in the Tar Heel State, that is in the ascendancy. It is setting the agenda for national debate on major issues such as tax policy, Social Security, and the war on Islamofascist terrorism.
But once you move down the ballot from the federal races, you find another Republican Party in North Carolina. 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.
With Mike Easley’s decisive reelection, North Carolinians chose a candidate whose skillful campaign and clever advertising portrayed him as a fiscal and cultural conservative. According to the exit polls, about one-third of self-identified conservatives voted for Easley on Tuesday, including 21 percent of “white conservative protestants” and 41 percent of those who thought taxes were the most important issue in the race. Interestingly, voters who were worried about North Carolina’s economy broke heavily for Easley, while Ballantine won support among those giving the economy a positive rating – which clearly shows, among other things, that the latter’s message about the need for change and new leadership was not effectively communicated to the electorate.
Ballantine got at least two bad breaks from which it was difficult to recover. One was the Democrats’ delay of the GOP gubernatorial primary from May until July, almost certainly engineered to exhaust the eventual nominee and reduce his ability to organize for the general election. The second was a last-minute change in election law, again engineered by Easley’s allies in the legislature (I thought the story was that he didn’t have any), which blocked money from national Republican sources that previous candidates had used to ameliorate their fundraising disadvantage.
Yes, GOP candidates did score in some Council of State races. But given the limited power of many of these offices (new State Auditor Les Merritt arguably standing out as a potential exception), they hardly offset the losses in the General Assembly, where state policy is made. And the Republican underperformance was most acute there. Democrats won almost every competitive district and picked off Republicans even in territory normally friendly to the GOP. It was, in short, a debacle – partially the result of the internecine warfare in the House, which resulted in poor candidate recruitment and an unfavorable set of new legislative districts, as well as a significant disadvantage in fundraising and advertising.
National Republicans, flush with victory, meet your counterparts in North Carolina. They’re not doing so hot.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.