Do You Want to be a Majority Party or Not?

I spent nearly the entire previous 10 years working on behalf of Republicans running for the North Carolina House. In that time I never worked with the same legislative map twice thanks to near perpetual lawsuits from the legal activist community on the Left, and I also got to see up close the changes in the shifting electorate during the Trump era.

Robeson County has had a lot of ink spilled (or is it pixels spilled…?) in that time for the massive change in voting habits of its residents, particularly the nearly overnight shift in the Lumbee Tribe’s voting preference. Most recently two Robeson County Commissioners switched parties from Democrat to Republican, shifting the balance of power on the Robeson County Commission from a 5-3 Democratic majority to a 5-3 Republican majority. The Robesonian quoted one of the commissioners who switched parties, Lance Herndon saying, "My ideology hasn’t changed,” Herndon said. “I’m still the same guy I’ve always been and I hope to represent Robeson County as I always have.”

One of the first candidates I helped was Rep. William Brisson, a farmer from Bladen County that had been a Democratic member in the NC House for 5 terms before switching parties to Republican in fall of 2017. Rep. Brisson said when he switched "I've always been a conservative Democrat," Brisson said Wednesday morning. "All of my district is rural, and a lot of my constituents are. I've been getting a lot of pressure from my constituents in the past few years to change. I don't have a lot in common with the Democratic Party right now because they have become so liberal." Rep. Brisson has continued to win elections as a Republican, because his values were and continued to be more in line with his constituents, something that transcends party lines.

I also had the privilege of working with Rep. Tricia Cotham in the 2024 cycle, where she famously switched parties and won a close election because of the hard work and solid messaging directly to voters that she did throughout the election. The message Rep. Cotham delivered was that she wasn’t a party line vote for anyone, and her core values of putting others first had not changed. Meanwhile her opponent often struggled to say what she stood for.

To thrive as a political party you have to see a bigger picture beyond just the upcoming immediate election. To be a majority coalition you have to be willing to let people in to your movement that might not be 100% in agreement with you on policy, but believe in the same underlying goals. In North Carolina, the Republican Party deserves a lot more credit than it has received in recent years for growing their coalition. In the NC House we managed to grow suburban Republican representation between 2020 and 2024 while also strengthening representation in rural areas.

At some point if Democrats are serious about being a majority coalition in North Carolina they’re going to have to stop trying to push out members of their own party actually trying to get results (see: Kirk deViere, Mike Woodard, Michael Wray, and Cecil Brockman).

So long as Republicans in North Carolina stick to keeping the doors open to folks and Democratic activists keep imposing ideological purity tests, one party will continue to be a majority coalition and the other will not.