Partisanship has taken a brighter spotlight in North Carolina courts in recent months as candidates for a seat on the Supreme Court have tried persuading judges up and down the judicial system to rule for them in a case that could decide who wins the closely contested seat.
Looming over the procedural jockeying, which has played out in federal court, state superior court and North Carolina’s top appellate courts: the political affiliations of judges and the party balance of appellate panels who will rule on a judicial race between partisan candidates.
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It’s causing some state legislators to dust off an old debate over how North Carolina picks its judges.
North Carolina judges and justices are elected in partisan elections with an “R” or a “D” next to their name on the ballot, just like any other politician. Democrats in the state House and Senate have filed bills seeking to return state judicial elections to being nonpartisan contests — longshot efforts in a Republican-controlled legislature, but amplified because of recent rulings.
Confidence in the nation’s courts plummeted to an all-time low in 2024, according to polling from Gallup, which found just 35% of Americans expressed trust in the judiciary — down from 59% as recently as 2020.
In recent North Carolina cases judges and justices at all levels of the court system have tended to rule in alignment with their parties’ interests. That has been particularly true for political lawsuits — such as ones involving elections laws and redistricting — as well as for some criminal appeals focused on allegations of racism by prosecutors or jurors.
When Democrats controlled the North Carolina Supreme Court from 2017 until 2023, rulings on political cases frequently broke down along party lines and in favor of Democrats. In the two years since Republicans flipped the court back, rulings in political cases have continued breaking down along party lines, only now in favor of Republicans.
That led to whiplash in late 2022 and early 2023, when a Democratic majority on the state Supreme Court used rare procedural moves to speed up lawsuits on gerrymandering and voter ID — rushing to hear the cases before that year’s elections — and then issued rulings against the Republican-led legislature.
Then, Republicans flipped control of the court in the 2022 elections and quickly undid both those rulings, using rare procedural moves to rewrite the court’s opinions in both cases to be in favor of GOP lawmakers. All the rulings came down entirely along party lines.
Similarly, in 2024 when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. endorsed Donald Trump for president and ended his own presidential campaign, he did it too late to get off the ballot in North Carolina. Kennedy sued to get off the ballot anyway, fearing it could harm Trump’s chances of winning this key swing state, and he won in a 4-3 ruling from the state Supreme Court. That ruling came down mostly along party lines, with one Republican justice defecting from the GOP majority to vote with Democrats in dissent.
The politicized climate of state courts has been amplified by the fight over the 2024 election for a Supreme Court seat between Republican Judge Jefferson Griffin and Democratic incumbent Justice Allison Riggs.
Riggs had 734 more votes than Griffin in the November election for the seat. But Griffin, who remains a state Court of Appeals judge for now, alleges that more than 60,000 people who voted shouldn’t have been allowed to cast ballots in the race — a contention rejected by state elections officials, as well as at trial in a ruling by a Democratic judge.
Now the case is before the state Court of Appeals, which has four Democratic judges and 11 Republican judges, including Griffin, who has recused himself from the case.
If Griffin wins his appeal, he expects to win the race. If he doesn’t, the case would go to the state Supreme Court, which has a 5-2 Republican majority, including Riggs, who has recused herself from the case.
The state Supreme Court has issued several rulings on procedural issues in the case, including a decision to allow Griffin’s lawsuit to proceed in the first place. So far Griffin has won in 4-2 rulings, with one Republican — Justice Richard Dietz — joining Democratic Justice Anita Earls in dissent. Dietz is also the same justice who broke GOP ranks in the RFK Jr. ruling.
The battle over the 2024 election for the court — just the latest controversial lawsuit in North Carolina to gain national attention — hangs in the background as Democrats make their push for taking politics out of the state’s judicial branch.
‘On-brand for Democrats’
Democrats who are making the push for nonpartisan judicial elections say it would help restore public trust in the judiciary — in part by reducing pressure on judges themselves to act like politicians to win elections, and in part by encouraging voters to do more research on the candidates before voting.
“In an environment both at the national and state level, we see the judiciary being attacked — and becoming more partisan,” said Sen. Jay Chaudhuri, D-Wake, who’s backing the bill in the Senate. “The appropriate way for us to elect judges is without partisan labels.”
The Democrats’ push also comes as their party has lost almost every statewide judicial election since those elections became partisan nearly a decade ago.
Republican legislative leaders — happy with their party’s recent dominance in judicial elections and the subsequent court rulings that have gone in the legislature’s favor — are highly unlikely to allow either of the bills attempting to undo that system to move forward.
“It's on-brand for Democrats to do everything they can to hide their radical candidates from voters knowing who they are,” North Carolina Republican Party spokesman Matt Mercer told WRAL.
Democratic lawmakers in North Carolina supported partisan judicial elections throughout the 20th Century, when Democrats made up the biggest voting bloc in the state.
After Republican judges started winning more judicial races in the 1990s and early 2000s, Democrats at the legislature changed the law to make judicial races nonpartisan. Republicans took over control of the legislature in 2011 and, within a few years, had made judicial races partisan again.
Mercer, the state GOP spokesman, said he doesn’t think Democrats would be pushing to change the system if they were the ones winning elections.
“Their party is out of step with the people of our state and this bill is an admission they fear voters knowing their candidates are Democrats,” he said.
Today, the state’s electorate is more evenly split between Democratic, Republican and unaffiliated voters. But moderate or unaffiliated voters often lean toward Republicans in judicial races, even as they lean toward Democrats for governor and other executive branch offices.
In 2020 Democrat Roy Cooper won the governor’s race with just over 51% of the vote. That same year Republicans won all eight statewide judicial elections on the ballot, most of them also with just over 51% of the vote.
‘A terrible idea’
The change back to partisan judicial elections came in 2016, when Mike Morgan unseated incumbent Justice Bob Edmunds for a seat on the state Supreme Court — flipping the court, although it was ostensibly nonpartisan, from Republican to Democratic control.
Republican Donald Trump won the presidential election in North Carolina that year, and state GOP leaders believed they probably would’ve kept control of the Supreme Court if more voters knew that Edmunds was a Republican and Morgan was a Democrat.
Almost immediately after the election, the legislature voted to change Supreme Court and Court of Appeals elections back to partisan contests. A few years later, all judicial elections were made partisan — down to the state’s district court trial judges who handle minor criminal infractions, family law cases and small-dollar civil disputes.
Chaudhuri encouraged people to think about whether they trust judges more now than before.
“I suspect public opinion, or confidence in the judiciary, is at an all time low,” he said. “That to me also suggests a reason we need to return to nonpartisan judicial elections."
Former state Supreme Court Justice Bob Orr — one of the ex-judges with the most experience in modern state history of winning partisan judicial elections — disagrees.
Orr served on the North Carolina Supreme Court and Court of Appeals after winning multiple terms as a Republican, starting in the 1990s. He has since publicly quit the Republican Party as a protest against Trump’s rise to power. But he doesn’t find himself siding with Democrats on this issue.
“Partisan election of judges is a terrible idea,” Orr said. “However, we’ve been doing it since 1868 — except for that one brief period” in the early 2000s.
Orr doesn’t think problems of politics on the bench — whether real or perceived — will be solved by nonpartisan elections. He said there’s a bigger conversation to be had about how judges are selected in the first place.
Many other states use nominating committees made up of legal experts chosen by the governor, legislature, legal professional organizations or some combination of the three. In those systems, judges sometimes also face retention elections instead of more politicized reelection campaigns.
Orr said the qualities that make someone a good judge or a bad judge can be incredibly esoteric and aren’t something the general public should necessarily be expected to form an educated opinion about.
“I have lawyers who will call me and say, ‘What do you think of these two candidates for Court of Appeals?’” Orr said. “And these are lawyers who don’t know anything about the candidates. Why should we expect any different of John Q. Mechanic, or someone who works in retail? They have no reason to know anything about these candidates beyond partisan affiliation, and gender, and maybe a flier they saw once.”
Appointing, rather than electing judges, can come with its own set of travails. While supporters argue it leads to more competent and less political judges, critics argue that it creates a system more susceptible to corruption, nepotism and back-room dealmaking, and less answerable to the general public.
New appointment powers
While nearly all North Carolina judges are elected, the state legislature has begun giving itself the power to hand-pick some judges who will be allowed to hear cases without needing — or having — to campaign for office.
North Carolina Senate leader Phil Berger, a Republican, gets to pick five judges, as does Republican House Speaker Destin Hall. They’re answerable only to legislative leaders and are arguably more powerful than other superior court judges since they can be assigned to hear cases anywhere in the state, not just where they live.
The state Senate recently voted on one of those new appointments to what are called Special Superior Court seats, putting Republican Graham Shirley in office. A former Wake County Superior Court judge, Shirley was ousted by Wake County voters in November. He lost to Democrat Jennifer Bedford, who won with 53% of the vote.
State Sen. Graig Meyer, D-Orange, said Shirley probably only lost because he’s a Republican in heavily liberal Wake County — and that Shirley probably only got put back on the bench, just a few months after voters rejected him, because he has a history of ruling in favor of Republican lawmakers.
Neither system is a good way to select judges, Meyer said.
“We need the courts to remain as an independent judiciary that can really look at things through the lens of the constitution, rather than just party,” Meyer said. “We need to take several steps back away from where we’ve gone with this.”
Shirley didn’t respond to a request for comment on Meyer’s claim that Berger put him back on the bench because he had recently ruled in favor of the legislature, nor did Berger’s office.