RALEIGH – Because I’m just that odd, I’ll be watching closely the results of North Carolina’s local races on Election Night before drawing sweeping conclusions about the significance of the high-profile contests.
There are two sets of numbers that deserve particular attention. One is the partisan composition of North Carolina county commissioners. The other is the outcome of the latest round of local-tax referenda in 16 communities across the state.
The North Carolina Association of County Commissioners maintains a handy compilation of commissioner characteristics going back to the 1970s. The effects of broader electoral shifts are easy to discern. As we all know, North Carolina was a deeply Democratic state for most of the 20th century. Although voters sometimes opted for Republican presidents, and during the 1960s added a couple of Republicans to the state’s congressional delegation, the down-ballot races went reliably Democratic. As recently as 1982, the vast majority of county commissions (89 out of 100) featured Democratic majorities, many of them overwhelming.
But beginning in 1984, with the re-election of Ronald Reagan and Jesse Helms and the election of Gov. Jim Martin, the state GOP’s statewide success began to seep down into local victories. Margins in the legislature shrank. At the county level, Republicans made steady gains throughout the decade. By 1990, the Democratic edge in commissions was 68-32. After a backtrack in 1992, the GOP then leapt forward in 1994, taking control of the state house for the first time in a century, coming close (26-24) in the state senate, and narrowing the county commission gap to 58-42 – and more importantly still, seizing majorities in big urban counties such as Wake, Guilford, and Mecklenburg.
The Republican wave receded, as such waves tend to do, but GOP candidates remained competitive. By 2004, the party reached its high-water mark with 44 commissions. Two years later, the party took a bath up and down the ballot. So going into Tuesday’s balloting, there are 61 Democratic commissions, 39 Republican ones, and Democratic commissioners outnumber Republican statewide by roughly a 60-40 margin.
Will top-of-the-ticket success lift Democratic fortunes enough to expand their local majorities? Or will local GOP candidates, perhaps aided by a last-minute surge for their statewide campaigns, achieve some surprise breakthroughs? There are robust commission campaigns underway in dozens of counties, ranging from urban contests in Mecklenburg and Wake to sparsely populated communities in the mountains and along the coast. I think it’s always worth watching these down-ballot races, in part because today’s county commissioners are often tomorrow’s legislative candidates.
The other set of local election data I’ll be watching involve 13 county votes on proposed sales-tax hikes, two votes on real-estate taxes, and a meals-tax vote in Durham. As Carolina Journal reported earlier this week, the past two cycles of local tax votes have revealed the persistence of a strong vein of fiscal conservatism in North Carolina. While candidates speak about a host of issues, and can sometimes be less-than-forthcoming about their budget and tax plans, a referendum is more of a cut-and-dried affair. Since gaining legislative authorization in 2007 to submit increases in sales or real-estate taxes to the voters, county commissioners have placed 58 separate proposals on the ballot. Voters have turned down 50 of them, including all of the real-estate taxes and a majority of the sales taxes.
I don’t expect the results of the latest round of tax referenda to be dramatically different. Indeed, it seems to me that as public trepidation about the future of the economy has gone up in the past two months, the potential support for tax increases has declined further. When Democrats such as Barack Obama and Kay Hagan are calling for middle-class tax relief, it seems unlikely that voters will be inclined to raise local taxes on consumers and homeowners.
We’ll see soon enough.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.