Backlash, bathroom law put GOP-led N.C. legislature in play

The owner of a APEX, N.C. — 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 ex-governor is taking her first crack at office by challenging a Charlotte-area state House Republican with a vow to renew the legacy of her dad, Jim Hunt, as a champion of 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 yearslong Republican grip on a state Legislature that has turned an oth- erwise evenly split state into a bastion for some of the coun- try’s most conservative laws. Among them: a limit on trans- gender access to bathrooms that was ultimately repealed under pressure from business leaders, congressional district maps that courts have ruled were designed to curtail the voting power of African-Amer- icans and education spending levels that have sparked mass protests at the state Capitol.

“North Carolina has been a beacon in the South, and I had to try and stop this Republi- can leadership from tarnish- ing our brand,” said the leader of the campaign, Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, who has seen the GOP’s legislative supermajority override his vetoes 20 times since he narrowly ousted a Republican incum- bent two years ago.

The campaign reflects an often-overlooked subplot of the Democratic Party’s broader push to engineer a “blue wave” across the coun- try 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 domi- nance in state capitals.

“Go! Go! Go knock!” Arun Dhar exclaimed at his door on a recent evening in Apex, shooing away Sam Searcy, distillery owner-turned-Sen- ate-candidate, because Dhar and his wife, Sandosh, are cer- tain Democratic votes. “You have my vote, you can rest assured of that.”

The Dhars are from Kash- mir, retired pharmaceutical execs who moved to the Raleigh area 13 years ago, bringing moderate politics and high expectations for govern- ment to fund public schools.

“It’s a terrible thing,” Dhar said of the partisan imbalance in the state Legislature. “It is a long fight. Let’s hope.”

Democrats hold just 45 of 120 seats in the North Carolina House and just 15 of 50 seats in the Senate. While they 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 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 Sen. Jesse Helms.

Even Art Pope, the wealthy GOP donor and former lawmaker who helped choreo- graph the Republican take- over in the state in 2010, con- ceded in a recent interview: “At this point in time, it looks favorable to the Democrats.”

Democrats sense a potential voter backlash over what they call GOP overreach on a range of issues — from the bathroom bill and gerryman- dering 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 orga- nizers and banking nearly $6 million, enough to put its spending on par with the GOP 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. Former President Barack Obamahas backed four state House candidates, with more endorsements expected this fall, and former Attorney General Eric Holder’s group, the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, has contributed $250,000 to the effort. NextGen America, the organization of liberal funder Tom Steyer that focuses on registering young voters, expects to spend $1 million in the state by Election Day.

Some state-level Republi- cans have been invoking rhetoric in recent weeks that suggests a keen awareness of the challenges ahead this fall.

Inthe Charlotte area, incum- bent Republican state Sen. Jeff Tarte will debut a TV spot this week in which a Democratic colleague talks up Tarte’s history of working across party lines. “I served with Jeff, and together we worked together to improve public education for all our children,” Sen. Joel Ford says to the camera.

State Rep. Nelson Dollar, a powerful GOP budget writer and redistricting chairman who has been an architect of some of the party’s policy priorities, touts his role in boosting teacher pay. In an interview with The Wash- ington Post, Dollar also said he would vote to let North Carolina expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act — something he has opposed since Republicans took over in 2010.

Dollar, 57, who lives in Cary, a moderate suburb of Raleigh, is facing a challenge from a high-profile opponent, Julie von Haefen, a Democrat and past president of the Wake County PTA who has led the charge against the Legislature for what she describes as inadequate public-school funding and an unfunded mandate, since adjusted, to reduce class size that prompted local rebel- lions across the state.