Cups of exuberance overflowed as Americans in their recent elections powerfully charted a new course toward those sacred, elusive goals of peace and justice.
The repudiation of President Trump’s malign MAGA movement reached deeply into states and communities where Trump and his enablers were accustomed to the driver’s seat. In North Carolina, the outcome amounted to nothing less than an electoral earthquake, with Democratic candidates scoring victories unimaginable just months ago.
Yes, there was euphoria as North Carolina Democrats – running in districts gerrymandered to give Republicans every advantage – erased the GOP’s 10-4 majority in the state’s congressional delegation. They could end up with 11 or more seats of their own once all the votes are counted, boosting their party’s new U.S. House majority.
North Carolina’s state House, ruled by anti-tax, anti-regulation Republicans since 2011, will see Democrats take charge with the new year. And the state Senate’s Republican margin – which has been large enough for a united caucus to override Democratic Gov. Josh Stein’s vetoes – will shrink to no more than a couple of seats.
Icing on the cake for the N.C. Council of Churches and its social justice-minded allies: State Supreme Court Justice Anita Earls won re-election to a second eight-year term. She will continue as a voice for fair elections and well-funded public schools on a court that has snubbed those priorities. And the trio of winning Court of Appeals candidates will help bring a more balanced perspective in that Republican-dominated panel.
So what’s not to like? From a national standpoint, there’s the risk that when the election pendulum swings so far, so fast, there’s going to be a rebound, a resettling towards the mean.
Democratic leaders will need to be disciplined and relentless in addressing the problems – crystallized by some as chaos, incompetence and corruption – that drove inflation- and war-weary voters to hand them the keys. The cruelties of Trump’s anti-immigrant deportation campaign must be halted, even as deporter-in-chief Stephen Miller takes over as White House chief of staff. Voters across the spectrum will applaud.
In North Carolina, where cities strain under the demands of rapid growth while rural areas cope with economic decline, the Democrats’ to-do list is long and gnarly. Exuberance among their supporters, including independents and even Republicans disgusted with MAGA misdeeds, could turn to frustration without progress toward better schools, better health care, cheaper costs of living and affordable housing. Law-abiding, tax-paying immigrants, however they crossed the border in their flight from poverty and violence, must be given pathways toward legal residence.
Troubled taxpayers
If the results of Nov. 3 flashed other caution lights for the newly ascendant Dems, those lights might have lurked in the under-the-radar referendums on three amendments to the state constitution.
This wasn’t the first time legislative Republicans had ginned up proposed amendments meant to lock dubious priorities into place while acting as catnip for conservative voters. And even if those voters wound up being swamped in the so-called blue tsunami, all three amendments were approved by comfortable margins in the range of 60 percent in favor to 40 percent against. That showed a disappointing, if perhaps understandable, level of support across the board.
One amendment simply digs the state’s unfortunate voter photo ID law a little deeper into its cynical “election integrity” (read voter suppression) hole. In keeping with the Trump administration’s crackdown on mail-in voting, the law now requires all ballots submitted by mail to include a copy of the voter’s qualifying photo ID.
It’s a needless hassle designed to discourage citizens who might otherwise prefer the convenience of mail-in voting. The amendment means a future legislature can’t lift the requirement without repealing it via another referendum, a long shot given that voter ID with suitable exceptions is generally popular.
The other two amendments, likely more consequential, both aim to disrupt one of elected officials’ most difficult balancing acts – how to set taxes at levels sufficient to finance public services without placing an unreasonable burden on taxpayers.
One of them puts a constitutional cap on North Carolina’s personal income tax rate at 3.5 percent, cementing tax cuts that in recent years have hollowed out the state’s revenue base. The rate under current law already would decline to 3.49 percent next year.
The other amendment seeks to curb local governments’ property tax increases. That caters to concerns that soaring property taxes are weighing on homeowners, even as it hampers counties and municipalities responsible for a range of services. Where and how the property tax constraints would be applied isn’t spelled out, but the mandate for future legislatures now has been established.
Schools in a crunch
A new report presented to the State Board of Education highlights just one of the areas where constraints on tax revenues will make it harder to address a critical need. According to The News & Observer of Raleigh, the report puts the cost of needed school facilities improvements at $18 billion over the next five years. That’s up from $13.1 billion for the five-year period now ending. Most of the increase is tied to renovations in aging school buildings; 49 percent of those buildings across the state are reported to be more than 40 years old.
School construction costs are supposed to be met by local governments. But especially in less-affluent rural counties, a meager property tax base makes that a heavy lift. New limits on property taxes will put even more pressure on the state to supplement local funding, even while the income tax is being capped.
Yes, during a booming economy income tax revenues still can grow even at lower rates. But amid fierce competition for funds, Board of Education officials aren’t optimistic about being able to handle the projected facilities needs. That means too many schools wouldn’t provide the kind of environment that helps maximize learning.
North Carolina already suffers from sub-par school investment, both in buildings and in operational costs, mainly salaries. This is while the legislature is funneling huge sums into vouchers for students to attend poorly regulated private schools – essentially subsidizing those schools with money handed out to families no matter their own income. The newly elected legislature could make real headway toward the needs of traditional public schools by cutting the voucher program down to size.
What voters deserve
Public school advocates recognized the threat posed by the new amendments and pushed for their rejection. That opposition fell flat. To gauge the degree to which anti-tax sentiment carried the day, consider that the most successful Democratic candidate, newly elected U.S. Sen. Roy Cooper, polled 2.45 million votes (58.7 percent) and carried 43 counties, according to the State Board of Elections.
Meanwhile, the income tax cap amendment was supported by 61.9 percent of 2.56 million voters. It gained a majority in only four counties: Durham, Orange, Chatham (with spillover from Chapel Hill) and Buncombe (Asheville).
The property tax limit measure fared similarly, with Democratic-leaning Wake County conspicuously missing from both lists. The well-publicized Cary spending scandal, which brewed under the noses of the town council and led to the firing of the town manager, surely didn’t make voters in that area eager for more property tax hikes.
It’s clear that scads of pro-Cooper folks – remember, Cooper himself opposed the amendments – wound up venting their frustrations over a tangle of economic stresses by supporting measures that could boomerang, hindering government efforts to make their lives better.
Yet for all the anti-tax amendments’ popularity, the General Assembly’s newly invigorated Democrats can’t let themselves be spooked. They have a mandate to counter more than a decade’s worth of policies that have left North Carolina struggling to face today’s and tomorrow’s challenges – families crushed by rising costs, rural counties languishing, the environment increasingly in jeopardy, schools forced to operate on the cheap.
Their leaders, both in Raleigh and Washington, must be smart and principled enough to justify the voters’ leap of faith in the prospect of a great civic healing rooted in justice and concern for the well-being of ordinary citizens. If they do, there will continue to be plenty of exuberance to go around.
