RALEIGH – Partisan gerrymandering is abhorrent. Reflecting a combination of racial gerrymandering and old-fashioned incumbency protection, it renders most of North Carolina’s congressional and legislative races uncompetitive. It interferes with representative government by reducing public knowledge of their elected officials (I’m in whose district? Since when?) and giving longtime incumbents in safe seats excessive power to tax, regulate, and restrict our freedom without fear of public backlash.
If all that wasn’t bad enough, gerrymandering in North Carolina also tends to reduce major-media coverage of politics. Few of the truly competitive races are in Charlotte, the Triangle, or the Triad, where the largest newspapers and broadcast outlets are based. In the General Assembly, there are swaths of important races along the coast, in the Sandhills, in several Piedmont counties, and in pockets of mountain communities. And when it comes to Congress, there are only two key races to watch – Rep. Robin Hayes’ 8th District and Rep. Heath Shuler’s 11th District.
In the general election, the rematch between the Republican Hayes and Democratic challenger Larry Kissell will probably get a far amount of big-media attention given that the district stretches from southern end of the Triangle TV market to Charlotte. I suppose this might also happen in the far-west 11th District, too, but you couldn’t tell it by the scant attention the state press corps has given the Republican nomination contest among Asheville City Councilman Carl Mumpower, former Henderson County Republican Chairman Spence Campbell, and Highlands attorney John Armor.
If 2008 proves to be the Democratic year originally forecast – with Jeremiah Wright spending the weekend trying to destroy Barack Obama’s campaign, it’s hard to predict anything with confidence now – Heath Shuler would probably be the favorite no matter which Republican gets the nomination. Within the Democratic caucus in Nancy Pelosi’s House, he’s obviously a moderate. He won his 2006 race against longtime Rep. Charlie Taylor by a large margin, and has amassed a strong financial base for his 2008 run.
But the 11th remains a GOP-leaning district. Unless the electoral earth moves significantly underneath his feet, Shuler will always have a precarious perch there.
It’s too bad that WNC is so far from the natural habitat of the press corps, because the GOP primary would have made good copy. It’s been a wild and wooly race. Mumpower and Armor are both fascinating political characters who say what they think and seem unconcerned about the consequences. Campbell is a more of a conventional candidate, though hardly unafraid to defend himself forcefully.
Mumpower – who I must note, in the interest of full disclosure, is a member of the board of the John Locke Foundation – is a clinical psychologist and author who was first elected to the Asheville council in 2001 and is very much the odd man out in that left-leaning body. While sounding traditional Republican themes on many issues, he has broken with the Bush administration with his opposition to the Bear Sterns bailout, which he savages as “corporate welfare,” and to the administration’s intelligence-gathering policies, which he views as encroaching on civil liberties. Campbell and Armor side with Bush.
Campbell is a retired Army colonel and Vietnam veteran who has worked in real estate and insurance in Hendersonville. He supports Bush’s policies on Iraq and taxes, while differing with the president on immigration and federal spending. “I have a pretty good understanding of international circumstances,” Campbell said of his years of military service abroad. “I would bring that to the table as a qualification that not too many people in Congress have.”
Armor ran against Taylor in the 2006 GOP primary. An author and columnist who often alludes to American principles and the Founding era, Armor spent much of his career as an attorney litigating constitutional issues. I first ran across Armor’s work years ago when researching the impact of term limits on state politics. His study of gubernatorial term limits revealed that they clearly increased electoral competition. He’s done work on legislative term limits and ballot access, among many other causes. Armor defends a continued U.S. military presence in Iraq.
As is the case with many other races this year, it’s exceedingly difficult to get anyone to predict the outcome of the Armor-Campbell-Mumpower race. Because of his office, the latter likely has the name-recognition advantage in Buncombe County, which offers the largest cache of votes, but Campbell has enough money to be on the air and hails from Henderson County, also vote-rich in the GOP primary. Armor has a flair for the dramatic and comedic that has earned him a good amount of free media.
Wouldn’t it be great if there were many more districts in North Carolina where the fall results weren’t preordained, so that the May primaries would command public attention?
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.