Making Sense of North Carolina’s Political Patterns and Players With Chris Cooper

Chris Cooper: Anatomy of a Purple State | UNC Press; October 2024

Chris Cooper rarely struggles to answer an interview question. From the state’s first constitution to last week’s voter registration numbers, North Carolina’s resident political pundit is always prepared to discuss anything. But he felt like his answers to one question—what book would he recommend for a rundown on North Carolina politics?—were a bit outdated. So he wrote that book.

Cooper, the Madison Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Public Affairs and Director of the Haire Institute for Public Policy at Western Carolina University researches and teaches American politics with an emphasis on North Carolina and has been quoted about state politics in just about every major and minor news outlet in the country (including this one). 

In Anatomy of a Purple State, Cooper tries to make sense of the patterns and players of Tar Heel state politics. His credentials as not only an expert but a teacher shine through as he mixes the accessibility of sports analogies (with a strong eye to the state’s love of college basketball) with witty turns like “accidental anathema of architecture” (to describe Raleigh’s unfortunate legislative building).

Cooper also knows his limits: he doesn’t pretend that this book contains all the answers and concludes it with a list of other books, journal articles, data sources, and even podcasts to look at for more information. His hope, he says, is that Anatomy of a Purple State can draw in anyone curious about how the Old North State works and, in part, help address “our increasing obsession with national politics at the expense of state politics.”

Since we’re starting the school year, is there anything that you’re teaching your students now that you wouldn’t have taught, say, before 2016 or 2020? How has teaching politics in North Carolina changed?

There are probably things I’m teaching my students now that I wouldn’t have taught a month ago. 

I would not have talked about unaffiliated voters as a key part of our state, but yet, that’s what most of our students are. Obviously, for good, bad, or indifferent, Donald Trump has changed the national environment, and that includes North Carolina. So the way I talk about ticket-splitting has changed—it’s a bit of a head-scratcher to think, ‘here’s a state that voted for Donald Trump and Roy Cooper on the same ballot, it wasn’t two different, you know, cycles or different tides, it was the same ballot.’ 

I talk about party switching. Tricia Cotham’s party switch really reinforced how much party switching matters, so I want to orient students to that. I talk about the council of state more than I used to as well, not so much because the environment’s changed but because I’m increasingly realizing that people don’t have a clue of the difference between the auditor and the treasurer, for example. 

On Twitter recently, I saw you were talking about the “Harris effect” on voter registration. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

We’re trying to figure out how or if the big switch from Biden to Harris is going to have an effect on the electorate. There are a few clues we have now. One is polling, and I think the polling is pretty clear that Harris is in a much better situation than Biden was. Another would be fundraising, and I think it’s pretty clear that Harris has seen a real increase in fundraising since the announcement. 

And the third would be new voter registration. We’re used to, every week, Republican new registrations beating out Democratic new registrations. It’s a trend we’ve seen for a while in North Carolina politics. Since the Biden to Harris switch, the trends have reversed. Now we’re seeing more Democratic new registrants than Republican new registrants. 

It’s almost certain that that is because of Harris, that she is inspiring new voters and new Democratic voters in the team.

And at the risk of making an interview about your book about state politics all about national politics, if you got a call right now from the Harris campaign and then from the Trump campaign, asking “Mr. Cooper, we need your help. How do we win North Carolina?” What advice would you give to each of those campaigns?

For the Trump campaign—I’ll start there, since they did barely win last time so it’s in some ways an easier answer—keep doing what you’ve been doing. Make sure that you pay attention to the rural vote, they’re in no danger of losing it by any stretch but if the Harris folks can cut into the margins in the rural parts of the state, it can make a difference. 

For Harris—I think my advice would be, first, some of the things that they’ve already done. So they are contesting more state legislative seats. They’re not going to win most of these, but it’s going to make things more competitive, give people a reason to show [up]. 

I would concentrate on the African American vote, which seemed to be down in 2022 and in 2020, and not take it for granted. So just because there’s a woman of color at the top of the ticket doesn’t necessarily mean that the African American vote is going to come along. Cheri Beasley lost in 2022 at the top of the ticket with very poor Black turnout. And then the flip of the Trump advice—just cut in a little bit to the rural margins. Again, nobody expects the Democrats to win Swain County, but if they can lose by slightly smaller margins, things will be better for them. And I think that’s been the Roy Cooper magic trick, is that he has been able to lose by slightly smaller margins in the rural parts of our state.

Following up on that, what makes someone like Roy Cooper able to make those little cuts into rural areas where someone like Joe Biden couldn’t?

Part of it is who Roy Cooper is in his background. He’s from Nash County. This is not somebody from Orange County, Durham County, Guilford County. He seems authentically rural because he is. There is an appeal there that he has just based on who he is, that does slightly better in the rural parts of the state.

One of my biggest takeaways from the book is the idea of the urban-rural divide and what that means for strategy. You had a really strong argument for why North Carolina is very different from Georgia, where Joe Biden was able to win in 2020 by turning out voters in the Atlanta area. Could you explain that comparison?

Atlanta dominates Georgia like no city dominates North Carolina. So if you are the Democratic Party in Georgia, and you run up the margins in Atlanta, that may be enough. You don’t need to have an expensive statewide strategy because of just the massive population in Atlanta. 

North Carolina’s not like that. You can win Charlotte, and if you don’t win the rest of the state, you lose and you lose big. Our cities just aren’t quite as big. And it’s a more diffuse electorate in North Carolina than it is in Georgia. We have the second most rural voters of any state in the country. Any [single] one of these rural counties is not that important. But if you add them together, collectively they are.

In 2017 the number of unaffiliated voters in North Carolina surpassed the number of Republican voters, and then in 2022 surpassed the number of Democratic voters. What does that mean for North Carolina politics?

It means a couple of different things. Most unaffiliated voters are not swing voters, but almost all swing voters are unaffiliated voters. A lot of them are shadow partisans—especially young people—they’re registered unaffiliated, but always vote Democrat or always vote Republican. 

But if you’re going to find these swing voters, these people who split their tickets, they’re going to be in that unaffiliated category. I, along with some coauthors, tend to think of them as “unmoored” voters. If you think of a boat that is moored to a dock, it’s not going anywhere, right? So if you are registered D or registered R, you ain’t going anywhere. [But] if you are an unmoored and unaffiliated voter, that may mean that a big political tide has a better chance of moving you. And so in the short run, that’s what is important. 

In the long run, I think we’re going to have a real problem in this state to get people to run for office. So, to talk about one of the chapters, unaffiliated candidates almost never win when they do run. And so if young people are overwhelmingly unaffiliated, and if you have to be a member of one of the two major parties to win, then I have real concerns about our democracy 20 years, 30 years from now when the pool of people to pull from is smaller than it’s ever been.

What could the parties do to make a stronger case to win over young people who are registering?

First, I think they have to think it’s a problem. If you talk to party folks and party officials and campaign people, sometimes they’ll dismiss this and I get why. Their paycheck and their goal is centered around the next election. And as you just said, you’re gonna probably go one way or the other regardless. In the short run, they just don’t pay attention to it. 

And so I think the first thing they have to do is to tell people why it matters. 

If they’re registered unaffiliated they’re gonna have a harder time breaking in. They’re gonna have a harder time running for office one day themselves. I think just reminding people that [a political party] is an organization that has effects and that if you want to have the most influence, you’re going to do it from one of the two major parties, Democratic or Republican.

But for the people who are out there pounding on the walls saying “Neither of these represent me, why can’t we have more than two parties in North Carolina?” Could you walk us through that?

More people are not affiliated with the two major parties. Isn’t there hope for somebody else? It seems like the next leap, right? And the answer is no, there’s really not [hope] in our current system. 

One, it’s just hard to get on the ballot. If you are one of the two major parties, if you want to run for, for example, the General Assembly, most of these primaries aren’t even competitive. If you want to get on the ballot as an unaffiliated person, you have to get signatures. And while you’re getting those signatures, the members of the two major parties are already fundraising. They’re already moving forward. So it’s like you’re catching up. You get to the starting line of the race, you’re on the ballot, and then members of two major parties are already 50 yards ahead of you. 

Another part is the way we elect people. We don’t have proportional representation in the United States, which is, you know, a wonky way to say that the person who gets the most votes [in the district] wins, period. And that is going to tend to push to two parties. We know that when we compare American politics to other countries’ politics. 

And then there’s just a socialization piece. Even for the unaffiliated voters, they know what a D stands for, they know what an R stands for. So if they don’t pay attention to the auditor’s race, let’s say, they still know the D is more likely to favor certain kinds of policies, the R is more likely to favor other kinds of policies. You can cast a pretty informed-seeming vote without knowing a lot. Whereas if you’re going to vote for an unaffiliated candidate, you have to learn about them. It’s a bigger barrier in terms of information. 

All of these things are pushing against third-party and unaffiliated [candidates]. They may not even get on the debate stage in the first place.

One of the trends you discuss is nationalization, and how every election now is about the people at the top of the ticket more so than the people down ballot. But could you make the case for why people should care about state politics and what it actually can impact in their lives?

State politics can impact your life so much more than national politics. So do you care about abortion? For good or bad, the states are the ones making those decisions. The states are clearly where the rubber meets the road. If you care about higher education funding, again, good or bad, maybe you think there should be less, maybe you think there should be more. It’s the states, not the national government, that matters. If you care about K-12 education, it’s the states. The U.S. Department of Education doesn’t really do that much that affects the average student. If you care about your insurance rates, it’s the states that make those decisions. For almost every policy that we care about, except foreign policy, the states are where the action is. 

And your influence is greater [in state politics]. If you try to get 30 minutes with your member of Congress, it’s going to be tough. You have 750,000 people competing for that person’s time. If you want to get a few minutes with your local member of the North Carolina House, your odds are a lot higher. We have 14 members of Congress but 120 members in the state house. You can get to the decision makers a lot easier. 

Every way in which we can measure influence, states are where it’s at. So if you want to influence politics, it’s about state politics. If you want to know about the place where the real issues are decided, it’s state politics.

Something else I appreciated about your book is the idea that nothing is accidental. We look around and wonder, “Why is the legislature like this? Why do they have that power?” And you go back to the state constitutions and tell us “Oh, this is exactly why these things are the way they are.” You have a whole section on the legislature. Could you give a rundown on the uniqueness of the North Carolina legislature?

It is the most powerful branch of government in North Carolina and there’s really no question about that. We pay attention to the governor, we know the governor’s name. We often don’t know the names of our state legislators, but they’re the ones who are where the rubber really truly meets the road. State government matters for a lot of issues more than national government and the General Assembly is the most powerful branch of government in our state. 

And then you add to that that it’s also poorly resourced. These folks make $13,951 a year. We give them most of the power, but we don’t give them the resources to use that power. It’s a hard thing to get people to run for any office, particularly an office like that. 

I’m not going to run for office—people can rest well—but let’s just pretend for a second I wanted to, and I came home and said to my wife that I’d like to run for office. She’d say “How much money?” I’d say, “$13,951 a year.” She’d say “How often will you be in Raleigh?” I would say, “Well, I don’t really know and every now and again they might call me back unannounced to be there,” and that’s over five hours from my house so the remuneration wouldn’t be great. The schedule doesn’t really work with my [current] job, so it would be a non-starter, right? 

And I think that for a lot of North Carolinians, and one sort of sad thing we know, is that these barriers are greater for women who might want to run for office than they are for men, on average.

That leads me to your closing chapters. I don’t want to give away the whole farm but could you address your recommendations for the future of North Carolina?

There are more than five reforms that I would suggest in a perfect world. I’m under no illusion that this is the perfect list; Moses did not hand these five down. Certainly, smart people could disagree, and I want them to. We just need to realize that we don’t have to accept the institutions we have as they are. 

1. We have a literacy test in our state constitution, which is abhorrent, for lack of a better word. This is something that was put in to disenfranchise people of color in the early 1900s and at this point, it is unenforceable thanks to some federal legislation and court cases but it’s still in our state constitution. Democrats and Republicans agree. We’ve had major members of our general assembly go on record and say this needs to go. So I think this is doable, but I think it is incredibly important. 

2. I talked about independent redistricting commissions, and the main goal I have there is just to let folks know that this is possible, that they’re not perfect, that independent redistricting commissions do not all of a sudden make a political process not political, but they move the needle in some important ways. 

3. I did professionalize the state legislature as well as another one, just calling people’s attention to the abysmally low pay, the irregular hours. And maybe we could think about the types of people then who run for office.

And I’ll grab the one that I didn’t take on, which is term limits, which is an incredibly popular [idea]. People love the idea of term limits. 

The problem is, the research on term limits says they don’t solve the problems that they’re meant to solve. If you want to take influence, for example, away from lobbyists and special interests, the worst way to do that would be to put in term limits, because when you term limit legislators out, they become lobbyists, and then the legislators who were in don’t know where the copier is, much less how to make policy.

Once Roy Cooper’s term ends, do you think people will stop asking if you are related? Or do you think it’ll persist for a while?

I think if he runs for senate, then I’m gonna have to deal with it a little while longer. My guess is that question tends to come to me a lot and probably not a lot to the governor.

Reach Reporter Chase Pellegrini de Paur at [email protected]. Comment on this story at [email protected].