Hey, John,
I know it’s been a hot second since I reached out to you. It was nice to get a little rest and some perspective on our run and the impact of the results this past month. But yesterday showed that my work as a legislator isn’t quite done, and our work as a state and party is nowhere near done.
I probably don’t have to tell you that the House overrode Governor Cooper’s veto on SB382 yesterday, enshrining into law one of the worst partisan power grabs I’ve seen in the last decade. They ripped control away from the Governor, the Superintendent of Public Instruction, the Attorney General, and more, all because Democrats won those races in November.
And they called it an aid bill for Hurricane Helene victims while basically giving Western NC almost no additional support.
I wish I could say I was surprised, but this is who the North Carolina Republican Party is. They will stop at nothing to consolidate their own power, and at the end of the day, there’s not much we can do in the short term, because our state constitution makes our legislature supreme.
If we want to stop this, we have to win—and that means we have to win the legislature.
Frederick Douglass said it best in 1857: “This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand.”
Right now, we don’t have a seat at the table. Right now, we have no ability to make demands.
But there’s good news: part of the reason they’re rushing this bill through now is because we picked up seats in November. After January 1st, the Republicans in the House will no longer have the votes to regularly override the Governor’s veto. We will have a seat at the table, however small—but we can’t be satisfied with crumbs.
And for the first time in years, in 2026 we will be running under the exact same maps we ran under in 2024. This means there is certainly. We don’t have to wait months to start recruiting great candidates, and we don’t have to keep them a secret so our best candidates don’t get drawn out of winnable districts. That’s an opportunity for us to build on the work we’ve done and start to claw our way back toward a majority.
And in a way, this bill gives me a glimmer of hope as well—the GOP could easily have slipped an actual billion dollar aid package into this bill and gotten probably every Democrat to vote for it. But they didn’t, because Republican leaders have mismanaged our state badly over the last decade, and they know how precarious our financial situation actually is.
We ain’t got the money. There is not now nor has there ever been a “surplus”. The car is wheels up off the edge of the fiscal cliff and we’re soaring right for the ground. Our tax revenues were less this year than last year, and in October alone revenue was down 7% (!!) compared to last October. That’s a really scary place to be in, because we have serious needs not being addressed in education, healthcare, and most importantly, rebuilding Western North Carolina.
But…it is an opportunity for us: because there will be terrible impacts right on people’s doorsteps, and we’ll have the opportunity to make sure people understand just who is responsible for them. I’m as upset as you are about this power grab, but if we learned one thing in this last election, it’s that voters aren’t motivated by good or bad governance. They’re motivated by real or perceived impacts on their lives, and if we’re going to win, we have to show folks how Republican policy is having real, negative consequences for their kitchen tables.
SB382 sucks. It’s going to make our state a worse place and I won’t sugar coat that. It’s too late to stop it—in fact, it was too late to stop it on November 9th, 2022. But politics is a long game, and we have to start the work today. The Republican Party gets that: they’ve been working at this for decades. Now it’s time for us to dig in and do the same.
Now is the time to start building a true geographic coalition that can get our party out of the big, urban metro areas and start reclaiming seats in rural North Carolina.
Now is the time to start recruiting, training, and funding great legislative candidates who can flip seats to ensure we have enough reliable Democratic votes come 2027.
Now is the time to understand that, yes, this will be a long road, but it’s a necessary one, and we have to think beyond just tomorrow. Right now, the US Congress is in Republican hands because we lost seats in the legislature, lost seats on our court, and got newly gerrymandered maps as a result. What we do here in North Carolina has implications for our entire republic, and because of that, we have a moral duty to fight for a better world for all Americans.
I’m making a donation today to the North Carolina Democratic Party’s NC House campaign fund to make sure our party has the resources to support those efforts. I hope you’ll join me in doing so.
