Gov. Roy Cooper at Franklinton High School in May.Credit...Dina Litovsky for The New York Times

Feature

Is North Carolina the Future of American Politics?

The state is narrowly split between Democratic and Republican Parties that agree on virtually nothing. Are its scorched-earth politics what the rest of us have to look forward to?

On the last Thursday in March, the air horns returned to the governor’s mansion in Raleigh, N.C. There were about 75 of them, and they belonged to the Air Horn Orchestra, an ad hoc ensemble of liberal activists. In 2016 the orchestra gathered once a week for 30 consecutive weeks, beginning right after North Carolina’s Republican-dominated General Assembly passed — and the Republican governor Pat McCrory signed into law — House Bill 2, which prohibited transgender individuals from using public restrooms that match their gender identity and barred cities from passing anti-discrimination ordinances that protect gay and transgender people.

Reaction to the bill was swift and brutal. The National Basketball Association pulled its All-Star game from Charlotte, and the National Collegiate Athletic Association canceled its championship events in the state, where the church of college basketball rivals the Southern Baptist Convention. PayPal and Deutsche Bank, among other corporations, scuttled multimillion-dollar plans to expand their North Carolina operations. An analysis estimated that the bathroom bill, as H.B. 2 came to be known, would cost North Carolina $3.76 billion in lost business over a dozen years.

Nothing, however, expressed the anger over H.B. 2 quite as viscerally, and loudly, as the Air Horn Orchestra. Its members serenaded McCrory from the shade of a stately magnolia tree opposite the governor’s mansion, wearing “CAN YOU HEAR US NOW, PAT?” T-shirts and holding signs that read “SHAME” and “HELP ME, ROY COOPER, YOU’RE MY ONLY HOPE” — a reference to North Carolina’s Democratic attorney general, who was running for governor against McCrory and had made opposition to H.B. 2 a centerpiece of his campaign. When they weren’t making noise at the governor’s mansion, some of the air hornists phone-banked and door-knocked for Cooper.

The mood at what was supposed to be the Air Horn Orchestra’s final official performance, the Wednesday before November’s election, was joyous, and not just because the group believed it had set a Guinness world record that evening for the most people (347) to simultaneously blow air horns. Cooper was ahead of McCrory in the polls, and when he was later declared the winner by 10,000 votes — providing national Democrats one of their only bright spots in 2016 — some of the Air Horn Orchestra’s members reunited for an impromptu victory march through downtown Raleigh. “We thought our jobs were done,” says Grayson Haver Currin, who founded the group with his wife, Tina. They threw away their instruments or sold them on Craigslist, none of them expecting that they would need them again less than five months later, to antagonize the very man they had just helped install in the governor’s mansion.

Cooper, after all, owed his election to H.B. 2. The law, his campaign’s chief strategist, Morgan Jackson, told me, “crystallized every argument against McCrory that we had.” As soon as Cooper was elected, he made getting rid of H.B. 2 his top priority. But negotiations with the Republican leaders of the General Assembly proved frustrating. “It seems that the goal posts keep moving,” Cooper complained to me in March. Later that month, he finally reached a deal: In exchange for the General Assembly’s repealing the law, which would bring back business and basketball, the governor would sign legislation that prohibited North Carolina cities from passing local ordinances relating to public accommodations or employment practices until 2020. (It was Charlotte’s passage of a nondiscrimination ordinance in early 2016 that prompted the General Assembly to pass H.B. 2 in the first place.) “I had a choice between some progress,” Cooper later told me, “or no progress.”

Unfortunately for Cooper, many of his allies disagreed with his choice. More than a third of the Democrats in the General Assembly voted against his compromise. It passed anyway, and on the day in late March that Cooper signed it into law, the Haver Currins sprang into action. They printed T-shirts that read “CAN YOU HEAR US NOW, ROY?” and a friend hit every Walmart superstore within 30 miles of Raleigh to buy up their air-horn inventories. That evening the Air Horn Orchestra reassembled at the governor’s mansion. “With all the other performances there was a real sense of hope,” recalls Tina Haver Currin, “but this time there was just despair.” Or, as one orchestra member’s sign plaintively put it, “WTF ROY?”

Welcome to North Carolina circa 2017, where all the passions and pathologies of American politics writ large are played out writ small — and with even more intensity. Ever since 2010, when Republicans seized control of the General Assembly for the first time in a century, and especially since 2012, when they took the governor’s mansion, the state’s politics have been haywire. “There’s been a bigger and quicker shift to the right here than in any other state in the country,” says Rob Christensen, a longtime political writer for The News and Observer newspaper in Raleigh.

In just a few years, North Carolina Republicans have not just run quickly through the conservative policy checklist; they’ve tried to permanently skew the balance of power in the state in their favor, passing some of the most restrictive voting laws in the country and drawing some of the most egregiously gerrymandered congressional and state legislative districts in modern American politics (though their moves have repeatedly failed to pass muster with the courts). Cooper’s victory, and the blowback to H.B. 2 that preceded it, seemed to suggest a chastening of the party — until Republicans contested the election results with a series of baseless allegations of voter fraud and legal challenges that left the state in limbo for four weeks before McCrory finally conceded.

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The Rev. William J. Barber II leading a Bible study at Greenleaf Christian Church in Goldsboro, N.C., last month.Credit...Dina Litovsky for The New York Times

Then, before Cooper was even sworn in, the General Assembly — in which Republicans had retained their decisive majority in November — tried to strip him of many of his executive powers. Cooper, in turn, sued the Republican leaders of the Senate and the House of Representatives to gain back those powers. What began as a grudge match now looks more like a free-for-all — and nobody’s partisans, as the Air Horn Orchestra informed Cooper in March, are in the mood for compromise. “It’s more polarized and more acrimonious than I’ve ever seen,” Carter Wrenn, a veteran North Carolina Republican political consultant, told me. “And I’ve seen some pretty acrimonious politics,” he hastened to add. “I worked for Jesse Helms.”

For generations, North Carolina has held itself above its Southern neighbors: a “vale of humility between two mountains of conceit,” as an oft-quoted saying of a 19th-century Charlotte civic leader puts it, the mountains being Virginia and South Carolina. As North Carolinians tell the story, those two states and their kin in the former Confederacy spent the last century fighting to preserve the vestiges of slavery through Jim Crow and then, after the civil rights movement, through low taxes and low wages. But North Carolina looked forward, diversifying its economy, improving its schools and helping its poor. “We never had the very racist leadership that a lot of Southern states had,” says Jim Hunt, the former four-term governor who’s now the grand old man of the North Carolina Democratic Party. Hunt’s may be a highly sanitized view of state history, but there was something to the theory of “North Carolina exceptionalism.” For decades, the state was among the best in the South in almost every measure of social and economic progress, from low infant-mortality to high-school graduation to median income.

In the last seven years, however, North Carolina has fallen four spots in the Social Science Research Council’s Measure of America report ranking states on health, income and education — a decline that coincides with the state’s turn toward Republican hegemony. In one sense, North Carolina’s current politics and policies are of a piece with the rightward lurch of state governments across the United States in the past decade, as Republicans have consolidated power in two-thirds of the country’s statehouses and inculcated a climate of partisan impunity. In Texas, Republican legislators recently approved sweeping new abortion restrictions that seem to resurrect some of the very same laws the United States Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional last year; in Kansas, an experiment in extreme supply-side economics has left the state with a $300 million budget shortfall. In North Carolina, the General Assembly has similarly green-lit the largest tax cuts in state history, blocked Medicaid expansion, slashed state unemployment benefits, relaxed gun laws and created new school-voucher programs.

But then there are the things that send Raleigh political reporters scrambling for the “FUBAR meter,” a rulerlike piece of wood that hangs in the North Carolina legislative building’s press room to quantify the political craziness of the day. For instance, Republicans’ passage in 2013 of a voter-ID law that also eliminated same-day voter registration, severely curtailed early voting and ended out-of-precinct voting — restrictions, a federal court later ruled, that “target African-Americans with almost surgical precision.” Or last year’s H.B. 2, which Republicans passed with such haste in an “emergency” special session that Democratic lawmakers walked out of the Senate in protest. Or the surprise special session Republicans called last December, with only two hours notice, to curb the newly elected Democratic governor’s executive powers. That one rated a 9.46 on the FUBAR meter, which now rarely dips below 7.

What really distinguishes North Carolina is that, unlike deep red Kansas or Texas, it is a quintessentially purple state. Its voters are almost evenly split between Democrats, Republicans and unaffiliateds. (This fall, unaffiliateds are actually expected to surpass Republicans as the state’s second-biggest voting group.) The schisms within its electorate, like the national divisions they broadly resemble, fall between its cities and its rural areas, between a reverence for its past and a plan for its future. “That’s what contributes to the meanness and paralysis of North Carolina politics,” says Mac McCorkle, a former Democratic political consultant who’s now a public-policy professor at Duke. “If it was clear it was an overwhelmingly Republican state, Republicans would be more relaxed. You might even see more progressive policies happen, like they do sometimes in more clear-cut red states like South Carolina or Tennessee. But we’re so closely pitted, everything’s a battle.”

That battle, in recent years, has been a lopsided one. After Democrats’ high-water mark in 2008 — when Barack Obama won the state and his coattails carried Democrats into the governor’s office and a United States Senate seat — Republicans have steadily consolidated power. In 2011, they took advantage of the redistricting process to draw maps that turned their new state-legislative majorities into supermajorities and transformed the state’s United States House delegation from one that had seven Democrats and six Republicans into one that had nine Republicans and four Democrats. In 2012, McCrory captured the governor’s mansion, while Mitt Romney narrowly beat Obama in the state; in 2014, Republicans took back that Senate seat and picked up another seat in the House.

Cooper’s narrow victory last year might have boosted Democratic morale, but it didn’t fundamentally alter the balance of power. Even the governor confesses to feeling beleaguered. “For decades, you could go across the country, and you’d start talking to somebody and say you’re from North Carolina, they’d immediately talk about our universities or our Research Triangle Park,” Cooper told me one morning this spring as we rode in the back seat of an S.U.V. ferrying him between photo ops. “And now today it’s often, ‘What in the world is going on in North Carolina?’ Because they don’t understand why these things are happening in a state that they have known traditionally as a forward-thinking Southern state, a beacon in the South.”

Cooper is a preternaturally cautious politician. When he was first elected to the State Legislature in 1986, as a 29-year-old county-seat lawyer, he was immediately hailed as a comer — a future governor or senator “straight from central casting,” as the North Carolina representative David Price recalls. But his subsequent climb up the political ladder has been painstakingly slow. “The joke about Roy,” says Gary Pearce, a veteran North Carolina Democratic strategist who first promoted Cooper as gubernatorial material some 30 years ago, “is that he’s been a rising star in four different decades.” It is Cooper’s misfortune to have finally arrived at his apparent destiny — his once-youthful face now wizened, his Lego-like helmet of hair streaked with gray — in a political climate that does not have much use for the sort of cautious, consensus-seeking governor he has spent his life preparing to be. Speaking to me in his office in the State Capitol later that day, he lamented this state of affairs. “They got hold of the maps in 2010,” Cooper said, “and it results in a polarized legislature where it’s very difficult to get people elected to these offices who are truly interested in trying to achieve consensus.”

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Gov. Roy Cooper visiting Fort Bragg for the 2017 Airborne Review.Credit...Dina Litovsky for The New York Times

“You’d be hard-pressed to find a more conservative record of any state legislature in the nation than what we’ve had since 2011,” Ralph Hise boasted. It was the middle of May, a few days after the North Carolina Senate passed its budget bill — which, thanks to a generous corporate tax cut, would reduce state revenue by hundreds of millions of dollars — and Hise, a Republican senator from a rural district in the western part of the state, was sitting in his Raleigh office. Hise represents what he proudly describes as “the most socially conservative district in the state,” and his patchy goatee and ill-fitting suits might give the impression that he’s something of a country bumpkin. In fact, Hise, who grew up in his district, attended an elite public boarding school and has a master’s degree in higher-education administration; before entering politics, he worked as a statistician for the United States Census Bureau. Elected to the legislature as part of the Republican wave in 2010, when he was just 34, Hise spent his first few years in Raleigh as a backbencher, but he has grown increasingly assertive. He is now the leading conservative in a very conservative chamber and was a vocal proponent of H.B. 2 who voted against its partial repeal.

Hise and the nearly three dozen other new Republican legislators who were swept into office seven years ago fundamentally changed the character of the General Assembly. For more than a century, Republicans weren’t just in the minority in Raleigh; they were also, by and large, moderate. But the 2010 elections, in addition to giving Republicans control of both chambers, also tipped the G.O.P. caucus’s balance of power away from the genteel old guard and toward a more aggressive, more ideological cadre of politicians. Suddenly, Republicans like Phil Berger — a stridently conservative lawyer from the struggling mill town of Eden, who became Senate president — were in charge. And with their newfound power, these Republicans immediately went to work trying “to recover from 100 years of disaster,” as one G.O.P. legislator put it at the time, and remaking the state in their image.

As Hise sees things, the fight over the bathroom bill, like so many of the state’s political battles, is really a proxy war in a larger, more existential struggle between the two North Carolinas. The state’s metropolitan areas continue to prosper, with an influx of white-collar workers drawn to their thriving finance and technology sectors. But in North Carolina’s rural communities, the tobacco, textile and manufacturing industries have collapsed, with little taking their place. The economic impact from the loss of sporting events and corporate expansions resulting from H.B. 2 wasn’t felt in Hise’s district. For him and his rural Republican colleagues, the bathroom bill was about something else. “Faith is a much stronger component to the people in my district than I see here or in Charlotte or in the other urban areas,” Hise said when we spoke in Raleigh. “And when they see things that are forcing the state to move away from the deeply held religious beliefs that they have, they’re not willing to accept that.”

When Hise moved back to his hometown, Spruce Pine, for family reasons in 2004, after spending several years in Maryland and Georgia working for the census and teaching at a university, he had to take a job packing furniture for two years before he was finally hired as an administrator at the local community college. Today he sees that practically every young person in his district with any education and ambition leaves to work in Charlotte or Raleigh or out of state — and unlike him, they don’t come back. It rankles him when state officials celebrate the arrival of new tech firms or financial-services companies in those metro areas. “It’s fish in a barrel,” he complained. “The likelihood of those coming here is high without a lot of government involvement. But where it’s really going to take work-force development and recruiting and economic incentives is to tag those industries that can come into this state and serve in one of the rural areas.”

The ill will generated by this urban-rural imbalance is intense, and it finds many expressions. During a recent budget debate in the state Senate, for instance, Hise and his Republican colleagues grew so frustrated with Democratic delay tactics that at 3 a.m. they passed an amendment stripping $1 million in education funding from the districts of some of the Democratic senators who stood in their way. “Compared to the overall budget,” Hise assured me, “it’s a very small movement of money.”

One reason Republican legislators can so unapologetically punish their Democratic colleagues is that, with G.O.P. supermajorities, the Democrats are essentially superfluous. But it may also be because Republican legislators don’t have more pressing matters to worry about these days. Six years after taking control of the General Assembly, there simply aren’t many big-ticket items left on their agenda. “You don’t have the pent-up demand of a lot of members of the majority party who worked on legislation for a lot of years and could never get it to move,” Hise told me. “I think most of that legislation is done.”

With Democrats until recently effectively excluded from official power, the business of pushing back against the conservative revolution has mostly fallen to outside activists — none more so than the Rev. William J. Barber II. The pastor of Greenleaf Christian Church in Goldsboro, an eastern North Carolina town most famous for its Air Force base and a couple of standout barbecue restaurants, Barber was until this month the president of the North Carolina chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. When I met Barber on a Friday night this past winter, he was holed up on the 16th floor of a Marriott in downtown Raleigh. The next morning, he would lead over 80,000 people on a march to the State Capitol; now, as the clock neared midnight, he was working with about a dozen advisers on the speech he would give to that crowd.

Barber is a giant man with sleepy eyes and a permanent hunch — a result of a debilitating arthritic spinal condition. He is sufficiently infirm that he’s uncomfortable sitting or standing, so most of the time he can be found propped up on a stool or leaning on a cane. But when Barber speaks in his rolling baritone, not just at the pulpit or on the Capitol steps but even in casual conversation, his back seems to straighten and his eyes come alive. “One of the great gifts of Pentecost was not that they spoke but that they heard,” Barber said to his advisers, asking them to tell him what he should talk about the next day. “I think about that other text in Isaiah that says, ‘Oh Lord, open my ears every morning that I might hear and that I might have the tongue of the learned.’ ”

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Gov. Roy Cooper speaking at a visit to the North Carolina National Guard headquarters in Raleigh.Credit...Credit Dina Litovsky for The New York Times

For many years Barber, who is 53, was a familiar but fringe figure in North Carolina politics, a frequent protester with little following or impact. “He was the resident wackadoodle,” says Jonathan Felts, a North Carolina Republican political operative. “Everyone knew who he was, and no one listened to him.” Then on the last Monday of April in 2013, shortly after Republican lawmakers introduced an avalanche of conservative legislation that Barber deemed unusually “extremist,” he staged one of his protests in Raleigh. “This was the Easter season,” Barber recalls, “and we decided if they were going to crucify the poor, crucify the sick, crucify minorities, crucify public education, then every political crucifixion deserves a witness. So we had a service of self-purification.”

After an hour of prayer and protest inside the General Assembly building, Barber and seven fellow clergy members and nine activists — one of whom was in a wheelchair — were handcuffed and led away by the police. When Barber returned the next Monday to the General Assembly, he was joined by 100 protesters. The Monday after that it was 200. Within a few months, there were thousands. After a year of protests, more than 900 people had been arrested for civil disobedience. “It was almost as if folks were glad to have been shown a way,” Barber says. “It became a gathering place for resistance.” The Moral Monday movement, as it came to be known, was born.

It’s difficult to overstate the impact that the Moral Monday movement has had on North Carolina. In a narrow sense, it revived the state’s Democratic Party. Although Barber emphasized that he was spearheading a moral rather than a partisan movement, the party was such a mess that he became its de facto leader. “Barber really stepped in to fill the void of progressive leadership for Democrats here when they’d been put out completely in the wilderness,” says Tom Jensen, the director of the North Carolina-based Democratic polling firm Public Policy Polling. McCrory won by 12 points in 2012, but thanks in no small part to Barber, he had a negative public-approval rating by the end of the summer of 2013, and his numbers stayed underwater until he lost to Cooper. “You could paint a piece of cardboard beige and watch it dry and that would be more interesting to Democratic-base voters than Roy Cooper,” says the G.O.P. consultant Felts. “Barber and the Moral Monday crowd gave them a reason to be excited, to be active and to vote.”

Barber’s influence transcended electoral politics, reaching business leaders as well. Unlike in other Southern states, North Carolina’s business leaders were generally a moderating influence, until the 2010 Republican takeover. “A lot of people in the North Carolina business community over the last few years have spent a lot of time lobbying the legislature on corporate tax, unemployment and workers’ compensation,” Cooper complained to me, “and we’ve gotten away from the business community truly using political capital to have the legislature invest in education.” Even H.B. 2 was initially greeted with conspicuous silence by North Carolina’s Chamber of Commerce — most likely because, in addition to preventing city and county governments from enacting nondiscrimination ordinances, the legislation also prohibited municipalities from setting minimum-wage standards for private employers and limited how people could sue for discrimination in state court.

But Barber and his movement changed the political norms in North Carolina, to the point that business leaders started to feel sheepish about their rumspringa of deregulation and tax cuts and began distancing themselves from G.O.P. policies. The H.B. 2 debacle, in particular, brought the business community and North Carolina Democrats more into alignment, so much so that Cooper outraised McCrory by almost $8 million during the 2016 campaign. Some Republicans now accuse Cooper of underhandedly fighting to keep the H.B. 2 issue alive during the campaign by privately encouraging Democrats in the General Assembly to thwart any attempts to fix the law. “There were efforts by the then-attorney general and his campaign to sabotage any potential compromises throughout the process,” McCrory told me, “because it was working to their political advantage in both fund-raising and surveys.” (Cooper’s office denies this.)

Democrats in North Carolina comfort themselves with the belief that time is on their side. Although the “demography is destiny” argument lost much of its luster for national Democrats after the 2016 presidential election, in North Carolina, which experienced its political cataclysm a few years ahead of the rest of the country, the idea is once again in vogue. With the state’s rural areas continuing to empty out and its urban and suburban areas booming — in the last eight years, seven of North Carolina’s 100 counties have accounted for nearly 40 percent of the state’s voter-registration growth — Democrats, and even some Republicans, believe it will be hard if not impossible for the G.O.P. to draw the types of lopsided legislative and Congressional maps they produced after the post-2010 redistricting, especially with the courts already looking over their shoulders. “North Carolina is one click behind Virginia, two clicks ahead of Georgia and five clicks ahead of Texas in moving from red to blue,” says Morgan Jackson, Cooper’s chief strategist.

In the meantime, Cooper, hamstrung as he is by the General Assembly, has managed to maneuver his way to a handful of quiet victories. In April, he successfully thwarted a Republican attempt to shrink the state’s Court of Appeals, and thus tip its partisan balance in the G.O.P.’s favor. And the United States Supreme Court decided in May, on a technicality engineered by Cooper, to refuse to hear an appeal of a lower-court ruling that struck down North Carolina’s restrictive voting law. He’s spearheading the Democrats’ efforts to win enough legislative seats in the 2018 election to end the G.O.P.’s supermajorities so that, as he puts it, his vetoes won’t be automatically overridden and he will have “leverage to negotiate.” But Cooper knows that eventually he’s going to need bigger accomplishments to satisfy the grass-roots crusaders who helped put him in office. His H.B. 2 compromise has made that task even more urgent. “Cooper did the right thing as governor,” Paul Shumaker, a veteran North Carolina Republican strategist, says. “He did not do the right thing as a politician.”

The bet that North Carolina Democrats are making — one that national Democrats will undoubtedly be paying attention to before the 2020 presidential race — is that, rather than fight Republican extremism with the Democratic equivalent, the surest way to nudge North Carolina from purple to blue is to make a low-key politician like Cooper, a consensus-seeker even where there’s no consensus to be had, their party’s standard-bearer.

But it’s hard to see how he could persuade his antagonists on either the right or the left to stand down, convinced as they both are that they represent their hotly contested state’s future. “I think North Carolina is a red state,” Hise told me, “and I think we’re on trend to have an even more conservative party.” Barber and the movement he has built, meanwhile, won’t be satisfied if the same old Democratic Party simply takes the G.O.P.’s place. “People say, ‘Well, movements need to learn how to compromise,’ ” he told me. “The problem with compromise, if you look at the three-fifths compromise and a whole lot of compromises down through history, is that compromise has been bad.” Cooper longs to return North Carolina to its status as “a beacon in the South.” But, for now, his — and his state’s — most pressing challenge may be simply finding a way to make it less of a cautionary tale.

Jason Zengerle is a contributing writer for the magazine and the political correspondent for GQ.

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 36 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Purple With Rage. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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