Checking the pulse of North Carolina Eight months out from midterm elections

After a cascade of setbacks lasting over half a year, Democrats have sighted a glimmer of hope. President Biden has gone some way toward restoring confidence in his leadership by rallying the Western Alliance to the aid of Ukraine. The fundamentals, however, remain difficult for the party, and the outlook for this year’s midterm is, if not dire, then certainly challenging. As it so often does, North Carolina reflects the median reality of American politics.

By far the most significant story in North Carolina politics this year has been the judicial arbitration of the state’s electoral maps. In a fairly bipartisan process, state House Members crafted a map that is fairer than any we’ve seen in some years–not that that it is a high standard. The state Senate map is more biased toward Republicans, and the Congressional map was so unfair that the courts stepped in and redrew it according to the principles laid out in law. The resulting Congressional map will reflect North Carolina’s divided politics in a way that a full decade of Republican gerrymandering has cloaked with maps drawn to the predilections of Republican cartographers.

Based on these maps, we can surmise a few things about how our elections will unfurl this November. Never say never, but it’s hard to envision a result in which Republicans regain their supermajority in the state House. A veto-proof majority in the Senate is a bit likelier, but Democratic officials seem optimistic that they will be able to hold their veto-sustaining level in that chamber as well. The Congressional delegation will either be evenly split, with seven Democrats and seven Republicans, or it will favor Republicans by one seat: a fair result that will reflect the state’s center-right politics.

 A new decade’s electoral maps may be the most consequential development in state politics, but the event sure to command the most attention across North Carolina and the country is our Senate race. Prognosticators rate the race as one of the most competitive in the nation. That’s a continuation of the last few decades’ intensely competitive elections; North Carolina had some of, if not the most, competitive elections in America in the ’80s, ’90s, and 2000’s. Republicans currently enjoy a slight favorite status in the 2022 Senate race due to a daunting national environment facing their Democratic rivals. But it would be foolhardy to predict the results of the Senate election with any confidence in a state this competitive with months to go before November.

Republicans face one significant headwind as we move toward November’s elections. They have a Senate primary in which Pat McCrory is (accurately) depicting Ted Budd as a Russia apologist and Ted Budd is calling Pat McCrory a lackey for the Chinese. Note the intensity of these charges, and consider how divided the party may be when they face the strongest Senate candidate Democrats have nominated in a number of cycles. But given the gale-force competition we are sure to see, that observation is little more than food for thought.