RALEIGH – There was no doubting the significance of Tuesday’s GOP primary results for North Carolina House. Most metro newspapers played the story at or near the top of their election coverage. Radio hosts across the state discussed it at length. The major political blogs buzzed about it. Certainly I agreed with their news judgment, devoting the entirety of my first post-election column to the subject.
But there were other important outcomes in this first balloting of the 2006 election cycle. Due primarily to the absence of prominent statewide contests on the ballot, voter turnout was low – in the teens in localities with modestly compelling local races, in the single-digits elsewhere. That doesn’t discount the value of analyzing these outcomes. Political power flows from majorities won on Election Day, not from majorities won in random polling samples of the citizenry.
I spent much of Wednesday scanning the state and local results from across North Carolina, and come up with the following grouping of key stories to ponder:
• The Lottery’s Political Impact. Sen. John Garwood, longtime Republican incumbent in the 45th District, got blown out by Watauga County Commissioner David Blust (brother of current Rep. and former Sen. John Blust). The major issue was Garwood’s quasi-support for the state-lottery bill last year. He complained that the result was really about U.S. Rep. Virginia Foxx endorsing Blust, but that was really about the lottery and other issues on which Foxx and most Republican activists believed Garwood was in the wrong.
I would argue that the lottery’s political impact likely extended beyond the 45th District primary. A mirror image of this dynamic happened in the Democratic primary for the 22nd House District. In part because of his opposition to the lottery bill, longtime incumbent Edd Nye lost a squeaker to former Bladen County Commission William Brisson, who had unsuccessfully challenged Nye before in this safely Democratic seat. Brisson not only stressed his support for the lottery but also used the annexation issue effectively against Nye, who had done little to oppose Fayetteville’s involuntary annexation in the Cumberland County part of his district.
And on the heels of a failed half-billion-dollar school bond in Charlotte-Mecklenburg last year, and the manifest unpopularity of a billion-dollar-bond that may get a vote in Wake County this year, voters in Franklin County narrowly defeated a $45 million bond on Tuesday. In each case, a number of factors have been in play, but I think it is undeniable that the creation of the “Education Lottery” is one of them. Many voters, mistakenly, believe that lottery revenue will pay for needed schools, thus relieving taxpayers of the responsibility and eliminating the need for bonded debt. There is concrete evidence of this effect in Wake County: in a poll of voters JLF commissioned last month, 44 percent of respondents said that the creation of the lottery made them less likely to vote for a school bond. It doesn’t have to be a majority to tip the outcome on an already contentious issue.
• The Black Factor. Some of the legislative-primary results on the GOP side were arguably as much a reaction to Speaker Jim Black’s tenure as they were Richard Morgan’s. Campaign mailings and ads targeting Republican voters were full of allusions to the late unpleasantness. Again, I would argue that the impact may have extended further. In Durham’s House 29 Democratic primary, Larry Hall was the top vote-getter and will be in a runoff with former Durham city councilwoman Sandy Ogburn. Hall had publicly reproached Black for his behavior and suggested that he step down. While there were other issues in the race, much of his campaign rhetoric centered on ethics in the General Assembly.
• The Activist Factor. As expected for this Blue-Moon cycle, the most ideologically committed core of each major party tended to determine the outcome of Tuesday’s races. For example, a young, bluntly conservative Republican, Ken McKim, won a four-person primary in Western NC’s Senate 50 and will attempt to retake this Republican seat from the Democrat who won it two years ago: John Snow. The second-place finisher, Sue Lynn Ledford, was a well-connected conservative activist in the region. In Senate 31, previously represented by the late Ham Horton, former Forysth County Commission Chairman Pete Brunstetter won the Republican nomination, and thus the seat, with local conservative activist Nathan Tabor coming in second. While Brunstetter did not go into the race with a conservative reputation, he ended up running strongly to the right on a number of hot-button issues – economic incentives being the only exception (he’s a grudging supporter) – and he and Tabor took a no-new-taxes pledge. The last-place finisher, current Commission Chairwoman Gloria Whisenhunt, did not. Difficult to win GOP primaries anymore with that position.
On the Democratic side, a coalition of progressives in Chatham County – called, straightforwardly enough, the Chatham Coalition – knocked out two pro-business Democratic incumbents and elected a third Democratic nominee. The vote totals weren’t even close. New development controls will follow. And in the five-person race for the Wainwright seat on the North Carolina Supreme Court, liberal Robin Hudson outpolled moderate Bill Gore for the “Democratic” slot on in the general election (the race is nonpartisan, but in practice each party is seeking to get one of its own through the primary to the two-person general election). Hudson, a well-respected jurist, is currently on the Court of Appeals. Gore is a Superior Court judge in the Southeast.
Feel free to suggest other primary-election themes. In the interim, on to (a few) runoffs!
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.