As Cooper starts second term, here are the campaign promises we'll track

As we did with former Gov. Pat McCrory, and throughout Gov. Roy Cooper's first term, we'll be keeping tabs on how far Cooper gets on core campaign priorities.

Posted 11:00 a.m. Jan 10, 2021 — Updated 3:50 p.m. Jan 10, 2021

Travis Fain

, WRAL statehouse reporter

RALEIGH, N.C. — Judging political promises can be tricky.

Rarely does a politician promise success as opposed to effort, and seldom can a governor establish lasting public policy on his or her own.

That’s particularly true with North Carolina’s divided government, where Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper sparred for his full first term with a Republican legislative majority that remains intact for his second.

Still, if a governor runs on Medicaid expansion, and Medicaid expansion is not achieved, that cannot be called success. When it comes to legacies, governors must compromise. They must persuade the legislature to see things their way or convince voters to elect one that will.

This is one of the basic tenets as WRAL News rolls out a new addition of our gubernatorial Promise Tracker. As we did with former Gov. Pat McCrory, and throughout Cooper’s first term, we’ll be keeping tabs on how far Cooper gets on core campaign priorities.

Gov. Roy Cooper campaign promise tracker (second term)

This time out, the process is complicated by a pandemic that complicates almost everything else in our lives. The governor held few, if any, public campaign events during last year’s election season, meaning fewer chances for reporters to nail him down on commitments.

There was only one gubernatorial debate, and the governor’s campaign materials focused largely on his pandemic response and how his opponent, Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Forest, would handle the crisis. Cooper’s campaign website didn’t even have an issues section.

Even so, WRAL News has assembled a list of nine priorities. We’ll track the governor’s progress by assigning grades, at least once a year, that leave room for him to achieve the goal, fail due to legislative opposition, win mixed results or simply break his promise outright.

We whittled this down from a first-term Promise Tracker that looked at 31 different priorities, and we added some new issues specific to his second term. For his first term, the governor achieved at least mixed results in roughly half those 31 areas. For most of the rest, he worked toward the goal, in WRAL’s judgment, but was blocked by the General Assembly, or by circumstance.

This term’s metrics may seem more subjective than in the past. You will see phrases like “significant increase” as we lay out standards for each promise.

Who, you may ask, decides what's significant? Ultimately, the answer is the @NCCapitol team here at WRAL.

Arguably, the most important thing on Cooper’s plate is continued management of the state’s pandemic response.

“My priority is protecting lives,” Cooper has said many times, including in a campaign commercial last summer. “We’ll make sure our schools are safe, and we have to support our small businesses.”

Important, to be sure. But how does one measure it?

The pandemic isn't included among the nine issues being tracked. Instead, Cooper will be held accountable for his administration’s pandemic response day by day as WRAL News and other media cover the ongoing crisis and its fallout.

Likewise, continued hurricane recovery is a priority, and the Cooper administration has struggled in the past to cut through the red tape surrounding federal programs quickly enough to get rebuilding money where it needs to go in a timely fashion.

That pace seems to have quickened, and Cooper’s mantra has been: “We are rebuilding stronger and smarter.”

This is another promise difficult to measure, even with the flexibility we’ve allowed in other metrics. Ultimately, we set the issue aside from this imperfect exercise.

Finally, social and criminal justice reforms will likely be debated in Cooper’s second term, and the governor established a task force last year to take a deep dive. That task force came back in December with 125 recommendations.

Grading him on those recommendations would likely prove unwieldy. So that issue, too, was set aside.

People will take issue with the way this tracker is arranged and with the subjectivity sometimes required. In fact, the governor’s staff complained repeatedly about the Promise Tracker from his last term.

But it is an honest attempt to measure Cooper’s progress, not necessarily on what he ought to do, but on the bigger proposals he has promised to push.

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