“Is North Carolina the Future of American Politics?”

Jason Zengerle for NYT magazine:

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.

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.”

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