Election Night 2022: What Happened in the NC House
The below was originally published here.
A week removed from Election Day 2022, and nationally it was an unusual midterm, but a little more conventional here in North Carolina.
Republicans dominated statewide elections and grew their majorities in both chambers of the NCGA by a net of two seats each. As it currently stands three days away from county boards conducting their canvasses of late arriving absentees and provisionals, here in the NC House we finished one seat away from a supermajority.
As of this writing, nationally Republicans only won 177 Biden seats in state legislatures, with 10 of them being won by NC House GOP candidates, or just over 5%.
Winning 10 Biden seats makes NC House GOP one of the top performing Republican House Caucuses across the country, with only the Florida House GOP winning more Biden seats than NC House GOP.
Without final precinct level data being posted by the State Board of Elections there is a lot we don’t know about how individual elections shook out down at the State House level, but there is enough data we can draw some big picture conclusions.
Most Politics Are National, But Down Ballot Margins are Local
For the most part the national mood is going to determine a down ballot candidate’s floor and their ceiling. In 2020 NC House Republican candidates could expect to at best outperform Trump by 1% if they were able to cut through the noise, and on rare occasions could outperform or underperform by as much as 2%.
This election it appears the biggest over-performances in target seats were more than the standard 1%, with some candidates running 2.5% or more ahead of Ted Budd.
The success NC House Republicans had in 2020 of netting four seats was driven by the ability of our candidates to retain votes despite the usual drop off as voters moved down a ballot. It would appear many NC House Republican candidates in target seats retained votes or were able to have crossover votes from Cheri Beasley. Ken Fontenot was the top vote getter across all contested elections in Wilson County and Bill Ward was the top vote getter across all contested elections in Camden County. Steve Ross appears to have outperformed Ted Budd by roughly 2.5%, in the process beating Rep. Ricky Hurtado by 2.42%.
Your Brand Matters and The Top of the Ticket’s Brand Matters Too
There was wide fluctuation across the country largely driven by the perception of the top of the ticket’s brand. Where the brand of the Republican party was strong, Republicans performed well. Florida GOP’s brand is Ron DeSantis, New York was driven by Lee Zeldin’s strength. Meanwhile in Pennsylvania the perceived brand of Mehmet Oz and Doug Mastriano drove Pennsylvania GOP’s performance into the ground.
Here in North Carolina Ted Budd ran what some would call a “boring” campaign, but of the Trump endorsed candidates he may have had the best overall night. JD Vance won by a wider margin but did so in a state that is more Republican than North Carolina.
To Budd’s credit, boring is good. A better way to describe Ted Budd is normal, and in a year where there were a LOT of candidates who are anything but normal, Budd never made national news for any embarrassing gaffes. That is a pretty significant reason explaining Budd’s win, and it meant that down ballot Republicans in North Carolina had far less national pressure placed on them.
The Issue Sets Mattered and Most, Including Me, Got it Wrong
Abortion was not as much of an issue as the daily coverage of media outlets would have you believe. It certainly mattered in statewide races in terms of ginning up marginally more turnout for Democrats in heavily Democratic areas, but in State House races it wasn’t the dominant issue.
The economy and inflation were the driving issues for voters nationally, but only when the Republicans were “boring” or “normal.” Brian Kemp won by 7.5% in Georgia while being a staunchly pro-life candidate, while Herschel Walker finished 0.9% behind Raphael Warnock.
Where many of us got the issue set wrong, myself included, was just how important the (very bad) national brand of both parties are, as well as the perception of the dominant figure of the GOP, Donald Trump. We knew it was important, but just how important it was wasn’t immediately apparent. Here in North Carolina conservatively it lowered the ceiling of what Republicans could realistically achieve by at least 1%.
In suburban areas such as south Mecklenburg there is a history of voters ticket splitting to an extensive amount. In HD 104 in 2020 Joe Biden won by over 17% while Dale Folwell won by 2.5%. When roughly 20% of the electorate will ticket split, in a year where the economy is the biggest issue and it’s a midterm reaction to Joe Biden, Republicans could realistically expect a healthy share of voters who are fiscally conservative but socially moderate to vote Republican down ballot. That certainly happened to a degree, but not as much as would be expected in a scenario where the brand of the GOP nationally is in the tank.
Voters Decided Much Later Than They Have Recently
We conduct weekly electorate tracking once absentee ballots begin to be returned in significant numbers and continue through the final week of Early Voting. In 2020 it was apparent Republicans would hold on to majorities in both the NC House and NC Senate because voters were consistently saying down the stretch they were more likely to vote Republican than what the projected model said they would.
This cycle something different happened, where neither party exceeded the model at any point during any of the final six weeks.
Below you’ll see a chart tracking the generic ballot, where the bar charts are what the projected performance should be versus the dots which showed how the parties actually performed on generic ballot.
Simply put voters were lukewarm on both parties because the brand of both parties are terrible.
At the very end Democrats performed right at the model and it indicated more late deciders were moving towards Democrats than would normally be expected in a midterm where there is a Democrat in the White House.
The NC House Republican Caucus Was Over the Target
The goal this entire cycle was to grow the majority and win a supermajority. That obviously didn’t pan out, as we fell one seat shy of winning a supermajority.
Following the court ordered redistricting and a final map drawn by House Democratic Leader Rep. Robert Reives, NC House Republicans had to in reality flip 8 seats, not 3, while winning a total of 11 seats that Joe Biden won in 2020.
Early on we determined the pathway began in eastern North Carolina, where there were five seats within reach:
HD 47: Charles Graham’s seat that was now open
HD 5: Howard Hunter’s seat in Northeastern NC that had added Camden County
HD 24: Linda Cooper-Suggs’ seat in Wilson County that had added one Republican precinct in Nash
HD 25: James Gailliard’s seat which was all of Nash County save the single precinct added to Cooper-Suggs’ seat.
HD 9: Brian Farkas’ seat in the southern half of Pitt County.
As it stands at the time of this writing, all five of those seats were flipped. The race in HD 9 is currently outside the margin for Rep. Farkas to request a recount and following the Pitt County Board of Elections canvass on Friday the final margin will be known.
After that the pathway became how many suburban seats of the following four could be flipped:
HD 35: Terence Everitt versus Fred von Canon
HD 63: Ricky Hurtado versus Steve Ross
HD 103: Laura Budd verus Bill Brawley
HD 73: Diamond Staton-Williams versus Brian Echevarria in a reconstituted version of Larry Pittman’s seat. This seat was notable in that Rep. Reives drew this seat on the floor during redistricting, and drew in just about every Democratic precinct in Cabarrus possible.
If three of those seats could be won, then NC House GOP would have a supermajority provided we held on to every incumbent with the exception of Larry Yarborough, who was drawn into Durham.
The late development that changed the math was Terry Garrison’s background report. A criminal filing from December 1994 surfaced during the research conducted on Rep. Garrison, but it seemed apparent a civil filing likely existed. After months of requests in early October a record of a civil filing was finally obtained. You can read about it here, but Rep. Garrison acknowledged it happened and every voter in the district soon found out. What was a seat that Biden won by 10% in 2020 was won by the Republican Frank Sossamon by 2.8%.
Ultimately one suburban seat was flipped, and the other three were won by Democrats, leaving NC House GOP shy of a supermajority by a single seat.
We suspected there were a couple other seats in play beyond those four suburban seats and Garrison’s seat, but it wasn’t clear which would emerge as the closest.
The Caucus was able to invest over $700,000.00 in four of the six seats either side of the supermajority line and over $600,000.00 in another seat. This isn’t always captured in campaign finance reports because spending that is not authorized by the candidate, such as negative mail, is not reported as an in-kind contribution.
These numbers will likely end up being higher once final invoices are accounted for and do not include money the candidates raised themselves, but our investments in the seats determining the supermajority:
70th seat: NC House GOP invested $804,062.18 in HD 63 Ross v. Hurtado
71st: NC House GOP invested $729,059.87 in HD 9 Reeder v. Farkas
72nd: NC House GOP invested $722,071.60 in HD 73 Echevarria v. Staton-Williams
73rd: This seat is the outlier, one of the seats we thought would be competitive but didn’t know just how much. NC House GOP invested $156,202.24 in HD 48 Swarbrick v. Pierce
74th: NC House GOP invested $811,608.67 in HD 103 Brawley v. Budd
75th: NC House GOP invested $602,686.73 in HD 35 Von Canon v. Everitt
In the end NC House GOP had one of the best nights for Republicans in the entire country, flipping 7 seats and winning 10 of the 11 Biden seats needed to secure a supermajority.