Hard as it may be to believe at the moment, given all the news and chatter coming out of Jones Street, the 2013 session of the North Carolina General Assembly is about to enter its final phase.
The Senate’s budget will come out soon, possibly including its version of tax reform, and the House will present its ideas shortly thereafter. The two sides will dicker on fiscal items, all the while passing or resolving other important bills on regulation, education, energy, and other issues. Most major disputes will be settled in late May or June.
Once the legislature adjourns — in early July, let’s say — expect a sudden change of focus. The biggest political story in North Carolina will be the Republican contest to take on Sen. Kay Hagan in 2014. The story isn’t unrelated to the legislature, obviously. House Speaker Thom Tillis seems poised to run for the GOP nomination. Some say Senate leader Phil Berger is also interested.
Legislators won’t have the field to themselves, however. U.S. Rep. Renee Ellmers, the second-term Republican from the 2nd District, is seriously looking at the race, with active encouragement from North Carolina and Washington. Perhaps other officeholders will join her. Greg Brannon, a Cary obstetrician, is the only announced Republican candidate so far.*
While the Republican primary will be the primary focus of political chatter and news coverage, Hagan herself will begin to draw public attention. That’s an odd thing to say, I know. She is a U.S. senator. But during most of her first term, Hagan has maintained a low profile. In recent polls, a large number of state voters expressed no strong opinion of her tenure. The phenomenon isn’t limited to her. Richard Burr, now in his second term, also has a relatively low profile. North Carolina has come a long way from the days of Sam Ervin, Jesse Helms, Terry Sanford, and John Edwards — larger-than-life figures with national reputations and, for better or worse, a flair for making news.
I’ve heard two conflicting theories of the 2014 Hagan race, both based on historical trends and polling data. The pro-Hagan theory is that because she has kept a low profile, avoiding controversies and marshalling her resources, she is in a strong position for reelection. A recent National Journal ranking of the ideology of U.S. senators, based on their 2012 votes, placed Hagan near the center as the 52nd most-conservative member. While Hagan may not be universally known, the theory goes, her potential GOP opponents are scarcely known at all statewide and may well spend the next 12 months expensively clubbing each other to political death.
The anti-Hagan theory begins with the observation that there are good reasons to believe 2014 will be a Republican year. Reelected presidents usually suffer a six-year itch — an adverse electoral trend in the middle of their second term. A growing number of Democrats are now joining Republicans in predicting implementation problems for Obamacare, opposition to which was the primary reason Democrats lost the U.S. House and a host of state races in 2010. President Obama isn’t particularly popular among North Carolina voters as a whole, and if these predictions are right he may be rather unpopular with the subset of North Carolina voters who turn out in 2014. The fact that Hagan actually rates fairly liberal on scorecards by Americans for Democratic Action and other groups, and has voted 96 percent of the time with the Obama administration, will then be a major liability, hampering her ability to run as a centrist in an adverse political climate.
Most political prognosticators think it is way too early to know which of these theories will prove to be an accurate prediction. Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball rates North Carolina’s Senate race a toss-up. Stuart Rothenberg rates it as leaning Democratic. So does Charlie Cook.
These seem like reasonable starting points to me. November 2014 is still a long way off. First, we get to watch a fascinating — and in my view a wide-open — Republican primary.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and a contributor to First in Freedom: Transforming Ideas into Consequences for North Carolina.
*Updated to reflect the fact that Dr. Greg Brannon has already announced his bid.