Move to center divides G.O.P. in North Carolina

by Richard Fausett, New York Times, July 25, 2014.

The objective of the Republican Party here last year was clear: Unleash the pent-up conservative revolution in a state where the party had not controlled the state legislature and governor’s office for more than a century.

The newly empowered lawmakers cut taxes, pared unemployment benefits and eliminated business regulations. They allowed concealed guns in bars and restaurants, curtailed access to the voting booth and enacted new rules for abortion clinics. It was the most activist session in memory.

But this summer is a different story. One of the leaders of the revolution, Speaker Thom Tillis of the House, is trying to win a United States Senate seat. Another, Gov. Pat McCrory, is eyeing a tough challenge in 2016, and the legislature is unpopular.

That dynamic helps explain why the Republicans this week found themselves stuck in the sweltering capital, locked in an intraparty budget battle over teacher salaries, at loggerheads over how best to manage the state Medicaid system and riven by emerging personal, political and ideological agendas.

The most pressing of those may be that of Mr. Tillis, who is caught between the hard-right face of the last session and his likely need to appeal to more moderate voters as he tries to unseat Senator Kay Hagan in one of the races that could decide control of the Senate.

In the current legislative session, the chamber the speaker leads has struggled to make peace with the more conservative Senate on a number of important issues, including raises for public school teachers and the shape of the state Medicaid system.

“A key factor in this,” said Rob Schofield, research director of N.C. Policy Watch, a liberal group, “is that Thom Tillis has an interest in not ticking people off.”

The budget stalemate has also exacerbated simmering personal tensions between the Senate’s conservative president pro tem, Phil Berger, and Mr. McCrory, a first-term governor who earned a reputation as a moderate in his former role as mayor of Charlotte.

Mr. McCrory has threatened to veto a Senate budget proposal for its planned cuts to Medicaid and elimination of teaching assistant jobs. In a recent radio interview, he said that State Senate leaders had grown too powerful, and compared them to the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, fighting words since Mr. Reid is a Democrat whom Republicans love to pillory.

Mr. Berger has criticized Mr. McCrory for aggressively inserting himself into the budget process, accusing him of “staging media stunts and budget gimmicks.”

North Carolina was once considered such a promising state for the Democrats that they held their national convention in Charlotte in 2012. Last year’s ambitious Republican agenda unleashed a tide of liberal outrage in the state, including the protest movement known as Moral Mondays, which has seen hundreds of activists arrested at the Capitol in civil disobedience actions. In an Elon University poll in April, 27 percent of respondents said they approved of the job the General Assembly was doing.

Such discontent is little threat to most Republican legislators, many of whom will face re-election this year in districts made safe by a 2011 Republican-helmed redistricting.

John Hood, the president and chairman of the John Locke Foundation, a conservative group based in Raleigh, does not believe that Republicans have in any way moderated their agenda “because they were burned by the blowback from 2013.”

“I don’t discount the political value of avoiding controversy in an election year,” Mr. Hood said, “but Republicans are very pleased to go home and run on their record.”

But Mr. McCrory and Mr. Tillis must run statewide in an environment where Democrats remain a serious political threat.

Mr. Tillis, 53, a former management consultant, defeated an evangelical opponent and a Tea Party favorite in a May 6 Republican primary, arguing that he alone had the name recognition and fund-raising clout to defeat Ms. Hagan in November.

Ms. Hagan has long been considered a vulnerable candidate, and outside groups have already spent millions on ads linking her to unpopular Obama administration policies here.

Outside groups have also paid for a number of ads attacking Mr. Tillis and blaming him for cuts approved by the legislature last year. This week, the liberal group Progress North Carolina Action opened a new front in an email blast, accusing Mr. Tillis of campaigning for the Senate instead of trying to solve the state budget impasse, which has stretched out a legislative session that lawmakers had hoped to wrap up by late June or early July.

In an interview on Thursday, Mr. Tillis’s campaign manager, Jordan Shaw, said the candidate was proud of his record in the statehouse. The campaign, he said, would focus on Mr. Tillis’s legislative achievements, such as tax cuts and a decision to take North Carolina out of a federal program that granted extended benefits to the unemployed, a move, he said, that helped businesses avoid steep tax increases. The resulting business climate, Mr. Jordan said, has played a role in an unemployment rate drop from 10.4 percent, when Mr. Tillis was elected speaker in January 2011, to 6.2 percent today.

Mr. Shaw noted that some of Mr. Tillis’s legislative successes came when Bev Perdue, a Democrat, was governor, and required at least some level of cooperation with Democrats.

“His approach is more about getting results more than it’s about ideology or partisanship,” Mr. Shaw said.

Mr. McCrory was elected in December 2012 on a similar promise of practical problem solving, and a reputation as a Republican moderate.

Mr. McCrory, however, did not serve as much of a brake on the 2013 legislature, and in 2016 he will be up for re-election facing the same challenges as Mr. Tillis.

This session, the governor has been more assertive, siding with the House on some of the most contentious issues, including changes to Medicaid, the state and federal insurance program for low-income Americans.

Hoping to contain Medicaid costs, the Senate on Thursday passed a bill that would turn North Carolina’s management of the program over to commercial managed-care companies. Mr. McCrory and the House oppose allowing such companies in.

Public teacher pay has become another hot-button item. The state ranks 46th in teacher pay, according to the National Education Association. Concern over the potential flight of experienced educators was exacerbated this week when representatives from the Houston Independent School District held recruitment fairs here. The Texans recruited a number of North Carolina teachers at a job fair in May.

The governor favors a House plan for a teacher pay raise of around 6 percent (the exact number is a moving target as negotiations are continuing). He has opposed Senate proposals that would give a more generous raise, but cut teacher assistant positions and other items. This month, Mr. McCrory said he would oppose larger pay increases that would require “eliminating thousands of teacher assistants, cutting Medicaid recipients and putting at risk future core state services.”

To Democrats, the Senate’s pay raise proposal is an example of Republicans trying to give voters the programs they want while working under the constraints they themselves imposed by cutting taxes. “They’re trying to do something about it,” said Senator Josh Stein, a Democrat. “But they’ve painted themselves into a corner.”