Source: Editorial Board
Earlier this month, voters in North Carolina and across the country chose to return Donald Trump to the presidency. However, voters here also rejected MAGA extremism at the state level, giving Democrats wins in multiple Council of State positions and breaking the Republican supermajority in the legislature.
The election is still too recent to try and make sense of what happened on Election Day, but it shouldn’t go unnoticed that voters handed victories to several sane, qualified, and seemingly good people like Josh Stein, Jeff Jackson, Mo Green, Rachel Hunt, Elaine Marshall, as well as others in legislative races.
These wins should be celebrated. While not the presidency, these are still big victories for decency, democracy and for the people of North Carolina. Women will live longer lives because North Carolina will have leaders in place who believe in reproductive rights and that no person should die bleeding on a hospital floor because they can’t legally get the reproductive care they need to survive. These wins will protect our public schools from harmful right-wing policies meant to decimate our public education system. These wins will protect marginalized communities from hateful far-right policies created specifically to target them for no purpose other than to discourage them from being who they are.
Because voters broke the GOP supermajority in the North Carolina House, Gov.-elect Josh Stein will take office in January with the ability to sustain vetoes. This is something that Gov. Roy Cooper has been unable to do over the last several years and Republicans have taken full advantage of that by passing harmful laws and then overriding the governor’s vetoes. Without a Republican supermajority, Cooper’s vetoes of the abortion ban, the anti-LGBTQ+ “Don’t Say Gay” law, voter ID, private school vouchers and more would have been sustained and would not currently be state law, so this is a giant win for North Carolinians and for the future of our state.
Having Stein in office, along with new Attorney General Jeff Jackson and the non-supermajority legislature, North Carolina is likely to become a haven for those seeking relief from far-right laws and abortion bans in other southern states.
By nominating Mark Robinson for governor, Hal Weatherman for lieutenant governor, Dan Bishop for attorney general and Michele Morrow for public schools superintendent, North Carolina Republicans nominated their most extreme slate of candidates in history. Though Trump supported them and they all supported Trump, North Carolina voters rejected them.
This most recent election continues to show that while Trump has found success on the national level running on an extremist platform grounded in vengeance and hate, North Carolinians have very little interest in electing MAGA candidates close to home. Robinson, Morrow, Bishop and Weatherman hold the same beliefs and use the same rhetoric as Trump, yet all four of them were handily defeated.
While this realization won’t make the next four years less difficult, it’s a positive sign that voters here are at least rejecting that message in down-ballot races, an especially important point to mention since Trump cannot run for president again and won’t be on the ballot in 2028. Should another Republican try to take over the MAGA mantle from him, they too may find themselves having a hard time earning the votes of North Carolinians.
