Not just president, governor: NC's 2024 elections to bring high stakes, broad political turnover
The next 11 months promise to be a whirlwind in North Carolina politics, with much at stake nationally and locally.
The Nov. 5 presidential election is fast approaching, and North Carolina figures to once more feature as one of the most important swing states in the country.
Also looming: A new legislative session, a host of high-profile political lawsuits and the guarantee of new leaders in many of the state’s most powerful positions — including governor, attorney general and speaker of the House.
Here are the storylines we’re watching in 2024.
North Carolina a GOP must-win: Michael Whatley, executive director of the North Carolina Republican Party, said that while 2020 proved Democratic President Joe Biden has other paths to reelection this year even if he loses North Carolina, the same is not true for the Republican nominee. A win for Biden in the Tar Heel state would likely spell doom for Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley or any other potential GOP presidential candidate, he said.
“A Republican will have to win North Carolina to win the White House,” Whatley said. “There’s just no path to 270 electoral votes without North Carolina.”
In three of the last four presidential elections, the margins have been incredibly tight as no candidate has won a majority of voters statewide. In 2020 Trump won North Carolina with 49.9% of the vote, while Biden received 48.6%.
“North Carolina was the closest battleground state that the Democrats did not win in 2020,” Whatley said. “When you go back to [Barack] Obama, [Mitt] Romney, Trump both times, it was just incredibly close in every election.”
Governor’s race: Republicans passed stricter new abortion laws in 2023, lowering the state’s cutoff for most abortions to 12 weeks. Many in the GOP would like to go further, but losing even one more moderate Republican lawmaker would’ve meant being unable to override a veto by Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper.
Cooper is term-limited in 2024 and can’t run again. If Republicans win the race to replace him, they’ll be empowered to be more aggressive on issues such as abortion or guns, where the right wing of the party wants new policies — like eliminating concealed carry permit rules, or enacting stricter abortion bans — that not all in the GOP agree with.
Morgan Jackson, a Democratic operative with experience on numerous campaigns, including Cooper’s successful runs for governor, said that even if the governor’s office here isn’t as powerful as in most other states, it’s still important as a spokesperson for the state — and its ability to serve as a check on the Republican-led legislature.
“When Roy Cooper came into office HB2 was still the law of the land, and corporations were running from North Carolina,” he said, referring to backlash to a GOP-backed law that regulated which restrooms transgender people could use in public buildings.
“Jobs were getting canceled,” he said. “People were moving. But Cooper’s megaphone was able to turn the tide, and get people coming back to North Carolina.”
Jackson is now working on the gubernatorial campaign of Attorney General Josh Stein, the front-runner in the Democratic primary that features several candidates including former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Morgan.
On the Republican side Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson is seen as the favorite to win the nomination. But he’ll first have to fend off challenges from Treasurer Dale Folwell and Salisbury attorney Bill Graham, fellow Republicans who are seeking to paint Robinson as too extreme and inexperienced.
The general election is likely to be decided by only a small margin, so both parties will need to sway undecided voters or convince more from their own party to turn out and cast a ballot.
Whatley said that up and down the ballot, Republicans plan to hammer Democrats on immigration and inflation. Jackson said Democrats will focus heavily on abortion and the GOP’s embrace of conspiracy theories and extremism.
GOP control of the legislature: The March 5 primary elections will decide most seats in the state legislature. Nearly all of the 50 Senate districts and 120 House districts were recently redrawn to be either deep-red or deep-blue, with only a handful of truly competitive seats scattered across the state.
Nevertheless, the stakes are high for state legislative races. Even if Democrats keep control of the governor’s mansion next year, they won’t have much say over big policy debates unless they can also break the GOP supermajorities in one or both chambers of the General Assembly.
That reality will put significant pressure on both parties to win the few competitive districts still remaining in the state — including several in the Wake County suburbs — which will decide whether or not Republicans keep their supermajority heading into 2025.
The national Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee plans to spend heavily on trying to flip or defend a handful of key seats later in the year, likely focusing on the future of LGBTQ and abortion rights in North Carolina.
Election lawsuits
There’s a chance that the elections might not happen exactly as planned. A series of redistricting lawsuits seeks to overturn the new GOP-backed election maps, claiming they’re the result of unconstitutional racial gerrymandering targeting Black voters, who vote overwhelmingly Democratic. But at this point it appears unlikely — though not impossible — that those lawsuits will succeed in replacing the maps in time for this year’s elections.
The three racial gerrymandering lawsuits are far from the only ongoing litigation that could still throw a wrench into the 2024 elections. Republican state lawmakers have passed multiple other new laws regarding election rules, inviting lawsuits from Democrats, voting rights activists and others.
One of the new laws, giving Republican state legislators more control over the State Board of Elections, has already been blocked as presumptively unconstitutional.
The outcome of the various cases are expected to increase focus on the North Carolina Supreme Court — and the race for another seat on the court. The court shifted from a Democratic majority to Republican majority in the 2022 elections. In 2024, Democrats will be trying to keep a seat that’s up for grabs. If Republicans flip that seat, they’ll grow their majority from 5-2 to 6-1 — and force Democrats to wait even longer before having a chance to gain back control of the high court.
“The state Supreme Court race is as important as the governors' race to the future of this state, if not more,” said Gino Nuzolillo, an organizer with Common Cause North Carolina, a group that advocates for anti-gerrymandering and ethics reforms. “It should get way more attention.”
Other political lawsuits WRAL has been following, and which could affect voting in 2024, include challenges to the rules for:
- Voter ID
- Mail-in voting rules
- Same-day registration changes
- Partisan poll observer changes
- Felon voting rights
- Residency rules for voter eligibility
Short legislative session
In between the campaigns and lawsuits, the state’s politicians also have to do the jobs they were elected to do.
For the state legislature that means the “short session,” scheduled for April, which earned its title because the legislature typically spends odd-numbered years doing the vast majority of its work, while the sessions in even-numbered years are briefer so they can hit the campaign trail. Tweaks to the state budget are the top priority for that session, but more substantial policy efforts could also be on the way.
Republicans aren’t guaranteed to still have a veto-proof supermajority next year, but they will in April. They could take up new topics, or finish the push on big issues that gained steam in 2023 — such as medical marijuana, casino legalization, housing reforms and immigration crackdowns.
Gambling: Casinos were the most contentious issue of the 2023 session, with Senate leader Phil Berger trying to tie their legalization to the state budget. But he lost the casino fight after the right wing of the party rebelled and refused to support the plan, particularly in the state House. Democrats also declined to go along, sinking the casino plans. Berger and other casino supporters have indicated the issue could come up again. But whether 2024 is too soon for a second push on casinos remains to be seen.
Medical marijuana: Medical marijuana is a top priority of Sen. Bill Rabon, R-Brunswick, one of the most powerful state senators and a cancer survivor who has used his own personal story to convince skeptical conservatives to get on board. It passed the Senate with broad bipartisan support in 2022 and again in 2023 but each time died in the House of Representatives.
House Republicans have offered little in the way of public explanation for why, but House Speaker Tim Moore was strongly considering a run for Congress in 2022 and is running for Congress now in 2024. With the session happening after the primary, the political dynamics for medical marijuana could change — if one of the reasons it has been held up was to avoid causing problems for Moore or other Republican politicians in their primary elections. Christian conservatives, who have been the bill’s only major opposition at the legislature, wield significant influence in GOP primaries.
HOAs: Another bipartisan issue that gained support among rank-and-file lawmakers in 2023, but failed to pass into law, was a push to create stricter laws for homeowners associations — namely to make it harder for HOAs to seize people’s homes over small unpaid fines, like for uncut grass. A bill last year to do that faltered after heavy lobbying in opposition from HOA industry groups. Last week a group of Republican and Democratic lawmakers held a public hearing to bring attention to the cause again. They’re expected to write a report proposing reforms, in time for the April session.
Gun rights: Gun rights activists won a major victory when the legislature eliminated North Carolina’s pistol permit requirements last year. But they’ve been frustrated that lawmakers didn’t go a step further and also eliminate concealed carry permits, so that anyone over 18 could carry a concealed weapon in public without needing to pass a test on marksmanship or gun laws, as is currently the law. The lead backer of the concealed carry repeal, conservative Rep. Keith Kidwell, has been floated as a potential new House Speaker to replace Moore; other Republicans are backing Rep. Destin Hall, a top Moore ally.
Immigration: A conservative push to force sheriffs to cooperate with federal immigration officials passed the House mostly along party lines, with all but two Democrats opposed. But that effort failed to come up for a vote in the Senate. Republicans are hoping to make immigration a key theme of the 2024 elections, so that bill or another like it could resurface in 2024 if party leaders think it could convince swing voters to vote Republican.
