Voter Backlash to Trump, Bathroom Law Put North Carolina GOP at risk

Teachers protesting North Carolina GOP policies harmful to public schools.

Few states have witness the toxic policies that occur when Republicans control the state legislature than North Carolina where the GOP controlled legislature has pandered shamelessly to Christofascists while ignoring the interest of the business community, engaged in racially based gerrymandering and slashed public education funding.  The irony is that until a few years ago, North Carolina was largely a middle of the road state that prided itself on being open for business and moderation.  Then came the GOP/Christofascist effort to use anti-LGBT animus and promises to Christian extremists to take control of the legislature.  Now, the backlash to Republican over reach and foul policies may be about to sweep over the state, aid by large scale hatred of the Trump/Pence regime.   A Piece in the Washington Post looks at a trend that one can only hope will damage the North Carolina GOP severely in November.  Here are highlights:

APEX, N.C. — The owner of a small vodka distillery near this traditionally Republican enclave in suburban Raleigh says he is so fed up with GOP leadership in the state capital that he took leave from his job to try to defeat a state senator.

A popular local weatherman in the state’s Appalachian Mountains with no experience in politics threw himself into a race to unseat a four-term GOP member of the state House.

And the daughter of a legendary former governor is taking her first crack at a run for office by challenging a Charlotte-area state House Republican with a promise to renew the legacy of her father, Jim Hunt, as a champion for education funding.

An unusual political battle is raging across North Carolina, where national and state Democrats have recruited an army of candidates and are pouring millions of dollars into a campaign to loosen a years-long Republican grip on a state legislature that has turned an otherwise evenly split state into a bastion for some of the country’s most conservative laws. Among them: a limit on transgender access to bathrooms that was ultimately repealed under pressure from business leaders, congressional district maps that courts have ruled were designed to curtail the voting power of African Americans and education spending levels that have sparked mass protests at the state Capitol.

The campaign reflects an often-overlooked subplot of the Democratic Party’s broader push to engineer a “blue wave” across the country in the November midterms — tapping into voter anger over President Trump as well as Republican policies on school funding, taxes and health care to chip away at GOP dominance in state capitals.

And Republican candidates must contend with President Trump’s unpopularity among Democrats as well as unaffiliated voters, whose numbers have been growing dramatically in recent years.

While they [Democrats] face steep odds in their quest to win the legislature outright, some Republicans here have begun to acknowledge their party appears increasingly likely to lose the veto-proof supermajorities that have been key to much of their success in thwarting [Governor] Cooper. For that, Democrats must pick up just four seats in the House and six seats in the Senate.

“If you’re a Republican and you’re not nervous, you should be,” said Carter Wrenn, a longtime GOP operative in the state who made his name working for the late senator Jesse Helms.

Democrats sense a potential voter backlash over what they call Republican overreach on a range of issues — from the bathroom bill and gerrymandering to a new push by GOP lawmakers to block the governor’s power to appoint judges, the state electoral board and other executive-branch panels. Democrats have recruited candidates to run in all 170 legislative districts for the first time that anyone can remember, with the party’s Break the Majority political committee hiring 70 full-time field organizers and banking nearly $6 million — enough to put its spending on par with state Republicans for the first time in a decade.

Indivisible, the grass roots organization that formed after Trump’s election, has launched a “Flip NC” campaign targeting 20 seats in the House and 10 in the Senate.

For Democrats to succeed this year, they will need voters like Marla Sloane, 60, a registered Republican who runs an Internet business selling novelty items from her home. Sloane showed up last week at a meet-and-greet for Searcy, the Democrat running for Senate.

“I don’t hear any state Republicans saying, ‘We’re standing up against ‘Trump,’” said Sloane, who voted for GOP presidential nominees John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012 but could not get herself to vote for Trump. “I think this is a very scary time in America where we’re trying to make sense out of crazy. And I don’t see anyone standing up at the state level saying, ‘This isn’t right.’”

I hope the Democrat effort succeeds.  Similar hatred for Trump and racist and Christian extremist backed policy in large part set the stage for the Democrat sweep in Virginia in 2017.