Among the things that make North Carolina such an interesting place to live are its sometimes-baffling – and sometimes not baffling at all – contradictions.
So for someone who has covered N.C. politics since before the Dawn of Time (our state’s General Fund budget had just exceeded $2 billion when I arrived in 1977; it hit $20 billion four years ago), the demographic changes and contrary trends are fascinating.
I grew up in a state that was still regarded as a poor one. But the changes of the last third of the 20th century brought dramatic growth in the population, significant differences in political choices and great prosperity for some and confounding underemployment for others.
So when the John Davis Political Report arrived in my inbox the other day, I waded in. You may not know of Davis, a Mississippian who came to this state decades ago and who has been cataloging its political changes ever since. I first got to know John in the 1990s when he began writing about the political effects of the huge in-migration of Northern and Midwestern Republicans who were not nearly so conservative as many Southern Republicans or old line Democrats.
The 2011 Census numbers show strong growth in urban areas of the Piedmont and continued growth in all but seven counties – all but one of them in the East. In a state long dominated by rural interests and entrenched politicians from Eastern N.C., these demographic changes will concentrate more voters, and more power, in the state’s largest cities.
We have had an 82 percent growth rate in the number of registered voters over the past two decades. In 1990, Democrats outnumbered Republicans by a 2-1 margin. In recent decades the Democrats’ share of registered voters has declined to less than half of all registered voters, about 45 percent. While Republicans have added about a million voters, their share is roughly the same as it was in 1990 – 32 percent.
The difference? The number of those who call themselves unaffiliated, as Davis does, has risen from just 6 percent to 24 percent. These independent voters decide general elections, notes Davis. That presents problems for Republicans who now control the legislature.
“The greatest political challenge ahead for the new GOP legislative majority is how to initiate conservative solutions to state government problems without alienating the majority of voters who prefer results over party or ideology,” he writes.
We talked more about this on Friday. “The biggest mistake Republicans can make is to believe that voters chose them because of their ideology,” he said. “They chose Republicans because they had lost confidence in the Democrats’ ability to solve the problems of the day. … This has not become a Republican state.”
That’s why a state that is trending more liberal among its growing population is the same state that throws Democrats out of legislative offices and puts Republicans in charge. Voters, including many Democrats, were tired of the establishment and wanted a change of leadership.
But if Republican actions in the legislature cause voters to lose confidence in their ability to boost the economy, create more jobs and control government growth and spending, Davis said, voters will make the only other choice open to them: another leadership change.
Davis is a pro-business political moderate. Some Democrats suspect him of Republican leanings and some Republicans suspect him of Democratic leanings.
He also thinks the new Republican majority must be careful to avoid the mistake that President Barack Obama made – believing that his agenda was more important than the voters’ agenda. Instead of pressing first on health care, Obama should have kept working on the jobs problem until it showed positive, demonstrative results.
Similarly, Republicans in the General Assembly should focus on three key things they ran on – and won on – last year: jobs, fiscal integrity and efficient delivery of government services.
The natural temptation of any new political majority is to engage in some payback to settle old scores and to change everything as fast as it can.
Davis is impressed with the discipline of the new majority. Still, “If Republicans come to Raleigh thinking they can make up for more than a hundred years of Democratic hegemony in one year, they will be making a mistake,” Davis adds. They must “do something about jobs, the budget, the size of government and spending. Anything to do with the social side of the agenda such as same sex marriage would also be a mistake.”
The reason: Too much attention to social issues may drive off independent voters who helped put them in office. “Every statewide election in North Carolina today is decided by unaffiliated independent voters,” he said. “Republicans cannot drift too far to the right because we have become a state of independents.”
