North Carolina GOP’s extreme ticket may backfire with voters | Opinion
The campaign website of Hal Weatherman, the Republican nominee for lieutenant governor, lists his top five priorities as: “Donald Trump, building the wall, deporting illegals, Second Amendment and pro-life laws.”
But on the Republican Party’s statewide ticket, Weatherman is a relative moderate.
Driven by MAGA fever, the North Carolina Republican Party is offering voters in a purplish state the most extreme lineup of statewide candidates in modern North Carolina history.
On a ticket that will be headed by Trump, now a convicted felon, the Republican candidates include: For governor, current Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, a candidate known for his inflammatory statements on race and LGBT people and a background that includes multiple bankruptcies and failure to pay taxes; for attorney general, Rep. Dan Bishop, a Freedom Caucus warrior who as a state lawmaker sponsored the notorious “bathroom bill” that targeted transgender people and triggered national boycotts of North Carolina; and for superintendent of public instruction, Michele Morrow, an activist who thinks public schools indoctrinate children and has called online for the execution of prominent Democrats.
Rob Christensen, a former longtime News & Observer political columnist who has written a book on the history of North Carolina politics, “The Paradox of Tar Heel Politics,” said the Republican Party has shifted far to the right under Trump and is now nominating “fringe candidates.”
“What’s going on here is what’s going on nationally. If you look around the country, there are really right-wing people that have been put forward by the Republican Party,” he said. “I don’t know that you would call them conservative. It’s anti-establishment, it’s populist, it has a strong racial edge to it, it’s anti-gay, its really anti-modern.”
Such nominees invite defeat, he said, but the party is so in the thrall of Trump that it can’t do otherwise. “It’s almost like a spell has been cast on the Republican Party,” he said.
A state that sent Jesse Helms to the U.S. Senate for 30 years has a strong conservative streak, but Christensen said North Carolina voters have preferred more moderate candidates for governor.
“We’ve had a fair number of conservatives elected in this state — Helms being the most prominent example – but when it comes to governor, North Carolinians have tended to want a centrist, somebody who was going to build the roads, fund the schools and try to get businesses to come to the state,” he said. “We have no history of electing really right-wingers to be governor.”
Simon Rosenberg, a national Democratic strategist known for accurately predicting that there would be no red wave in the 2022 midterm elections, said Republicans choosing extreme candidates have led to Democratic victories.
“We saw in 2022 that the extremist candidates that Republicans ran across battleground states all lost and Democrats dramatically outperformed expectations,” he said. “I think that Republicans are in danger of replicating that same losing strategy in both North Carolina and Arizona in particular, where you have candidates that are far out of the mainstream.”
Rosenberg said “fear and opposition to MAGA has been the driving force” behind Democratic victories in recent cycles and North Carolina’s Republican ticket will add to that force.
“The Republican Party of North Carolina is presenting itself as one of the most extremist parties in the country,” he said. “I don’t think many moderate voters in North Carolina are going to go for that in the election.”
Republican Party staffers did not respond to my calls to Republican state headquarters.
Democratic Party Chair Anderson Clayton said offering voters an extreme ticket is self-defeating: “People are looking for common sense, not crazy.”
Whatever Republicans have done wrong in choosing their statewide ticket, they’ve done one thing right: They’ve given voters a clear choice.
Associate opinion editor Ned Barnett can be reached at 919-404-7583, or nbarnett@ newsobserver.com
