Voter backlash to Trump, bathroom law has put conservative N.C. legislature in play.
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 years-long Republican grip on a state legislature that has turned an otherwise evenly split state into a bastion for some of the country’s most conservative laws. Among them: a limit on transgender access to bathrooms that was ultimately repealed under pressure from business leaders, congressional district maps that courts have ruled were designed to curtail the voting power of African Americans and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 Republican leadership from tarnishing 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 incumbent two years ago.
The campaign reflects an often-overlooked subplot of the Democratic Party’s broader push to engineer a “blue wave” across the country 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 dominance in state capitals.
“Go! Go! Go knock!” Arun Dhar exclaimed at his door on a recent weekday evening in Apex, shooing away Sam Searcy, distillery owner-turned-Senate-candidate, because Dhar and his wife, Sandosh, are certain Democratic votes. “You have my vote, you can rest assured of that. A lot of knocking is needed!”
The Dhars are from Kashmir, retired pharmaceutical executives who moved to the Raleigh area 13 years ago, bringing with them moderate politics and high expectations for government 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. Let’s hope.”
The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee is pouring $35 million into state legislative races across the country, twice as much as in 2016, with hopes of flipping 15 chambers nationwide, according to a spokeswoman.
The Republican counterpart expects to spend even more — more than $45 million, according to a spokesman. But the financial field within the state is far more level this year than the GOP spending advantage of the recent past. And Republican candidates must contend with President Trump’s unpopularity among Democrats as well as unaffiliated voters, whose numbers have been growing dramatically in recent years.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/voter-backlash-to-trump-bathroom-law-have-put-conservative-nc-legislature-in-play/2018/09/10/346e3190-b1f5-11e8-a20b-5f4f84429666_story.html?utm_term=.05c7765f5003
