Stephen Cobb

Welcome to another episode of State AG Pulse. My name is Stephen Cobb, former Deputy Attorney General of Virginia and partner here at Cozen O’Connor. Very excited for today’s episode. For those who are old enough to remember in 2020 Tim Russert, in talking about the elections wrote Florida, Florida, Florida. Well, if Tim Russert was alive today, he might say this year is about North Carolina, North Carolina, North Carolina. So I couldn’t be happier today with our two guests my colleague, the former Chief Deputy Attorney General of the great state of North Carolina, Swain Wood and the multiple award-winning reporter from the Greater Raleigh, formerly of the Raleigh News and Observer, formerly of the Sanford Herald, and currently correspondent for WRAL in North Carolina. We have a scion of AG royalty, Will Doran Gentlemen, welcome to the podcast.

Will Doran

Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here and talk about our race for attorney general this year. It’s going to be a big one,

Stephen Cobb

And Swain, it’s always a pleasure to collaborate with you and looking forward to your insights today.

Swain Wood

Thank you Stephen. Really glad to be here and talk about North Carolina.

Stephen Cobb
So as I was saying, North Carolina on every possible level is going to be of vital import this year. Presidential, gubernatorial, state attorney general, so let’s dive right in. Will, Swain, set the landscape for our listeners a little bit. Tell us, high level, talk about the races and how things are setting up this year in North Carolina. Swain, let’s start with you.

Swain Wood
Okay, well in North Carolina, the governor, two term governor Roy Cooper, who was attorney general of North Carolina, Democratic attorney general, Democratic governor, he was AG for 16 years before becoming governor is term-limited and so is not able to run. And so the current attorney general Josh Stein, also a Democrat, is the Democratic nominee for governor. His opponent is Mark Robinson, the current lieutenant governor. The attorney general candidates are two sitting congressmen in North Carolina. One is Congressman Jeff Jackson, of social media fame to many. The other is House Freedom Caucus member Dan Bishop. And these races are expected to be very pitched battles and very close all the way through.

Stephen Cobb

So we’re not far past the primaries that saw these statewide candidates come through to claim their party nominations. What were some of the issues and underlying political trends that you saw going through primary season in North Carolina?

Will Doran

Well, I think the main takeaway, Stephen, is there were really no surprises. Joe Biden didn’t even have an opponent on the ballot here, so he cruised. Donald Trump won very handily against Nikki Haley even though she had actually been here in Raleigh on Saturday right before Super Tuesday trying to rally support. And she got a decent amount of votes in the primary, but nothing massive. And I think the main thing was, we saw there was much lower turnout in this primary than there was in 2020 and obviously the 2020 elections for North Carolina, and I think a lot of other states around the country, set new records for turnout, especially in the general election. And I think there’s probably a little fatigue with some voters heading into November. We’ve seen polling, people don’t really love the idea of a rematch of Donald Trump and Joe Biden and that all, I think, depressed turnout for not only presidential race but probably races down the ballot. Candidates for governor, for attorney general, for any other race are going to have to really work to convince people to come out and vote for them.

Stephen Cobb

In 2016 and 2020, there’s a significant number of North Carolina voters that voted for the Republican candidate for president and then Democratic candidates for governor and attorney general. I think more and more nationally we see that kind of ticket splitting less and less. So Swain, Will, what do you think are some of those issues that lend itself to that ticket splitting in North Carolina? Who are these voters and what are the issues that they care about?

Swain Wood

Well, North Carolina has a fairly long history going back 50 years or so of splitting its tickets between state government offices and national offices. Republicans have done better in the state and national offices over the last 50 years. They have made some inroads in statewide races in North Carolina, particularly sort of down-ballot statewide races like Commissioner of Insurance and Labor Commissioner and things like that. But voters in North Carolina seem to feel more comfortable with Democrats in the mold of Josh Stein or Roy Cooper running things. And whereas they have tended to vote Republican in most of the presidential elections over the last 50 years, a couple exceptions to that, including very notably in 2008, Barack Obama very narrowly won North Carolina. He was not able to repeat that in 2012, although it was close. But for the most part, people in North Carolina have tended to just feel more comfortable with Republicans at the national level in the presidency and Democrats running the government in the state. And what that ends up with is it’s usually these days those races end up being separated, having tens and tens of millions of dollars spent on them for a margin of one to two points.

Stephen Cobb

So your ceiling’s 51 and your basement is 49.

Swain Wood

That is often said yes

Stephen Cobb

Will, I’m going to say something and I want you to agree or disagree with me, but that is that the role of attorney general will be one of the defining characteristics of the races in North Carolina for two reasons. One, you have Josh Stein running on his eight years as attorney general, and then you have two very well-funded candidates running to be attorney general. And so the way I see it is that really the role of that office is going to have an outsized role on the issues that people are campaigning on across North Carolina.

Will Doran

I’d absolutely agree with that. Yeah, I think that, like you just said, I think it’s fair to say that the office of attorney general is going to have a lot more salience to voters than really probably any time in recent history because you’ve got the current attorney general running for governor and that race about governor is going to be in large part about actions that he took as attorney general, whether he is using it to promote himself or maybe his opponent is picking on some things to criticize him. And so you’re going to have voters paying attention to what that office does more. And then on the other side, you’ve got, in the past when we’ve seen these races for attorney general, a lot of times it’s been from sort of unknown candidates, maybe people who’ve been state lawmakers in the past but don’t have a ton of name recognition. That is not the case with Jeff Jackson and Dan Bishop. Both of these men have huge name recognition, not only around the state, but they even have national followings. I mean, they’ve both already raised millions of dollars for this race, far outpacing anyone that we’ve seen in a past race for attorney general. So this is going to be, I think a lot more front and center for voters on the airwaves and just in their everyday kitchen table conversations with their family.

Stephen Cobb

Well, let’s dig into that a little bit, Will, Swain, what are some of those issues in particular that you think Josh is running on or that he will be criticized over that emanated from the role of attorney general?

Swain Wood

Well, and it’s interesting because I think the role of attorney general in North Carolina lends itself to the kind of sort of more middle of the road bipartisan-oriented approach to campaigning and governing that has been successful for Attorney General and then Governor Cooper, Attorney General and then Governor Easley before him in the nineties, and now Attorney General and Democratic nominee for Governor, Stein. One of the big issues that Attorney General Stein is running on this year is the national leadership role that he played in negotiating the national opioid settlements, which brought I think over $50 billion now nationally to help fund treatment programs and things of that nature around the country. And I forget the latest figure, but North Carolina has certainly gotten its fair share of that. Maybe it’s in the neighborhood of a billion and a half, maybe more. Don’t quote me on that exact number, but well over a billion dollars that will be coming in a consistent stream over years. And that was a heavily bipartisan effort by state attorneys general around the country. It was an extremely bipartisan effort across North Carolina because in addition to the state leading the settlement, virtually all of the local jurisdictions, counties, cities and towns in the state, joined onto that settlement as well. And obviously many of those are represented by Republicans and there was just an extraordinary amount of bipartisan comity on that and it turned into something that is an important part of Attorney General Stein’s campaign, but then also like the consumer protection issues that the AG’s office typically focuses on, combatting robocalls, enforcing the Do Not Call list, things like that, those things actually matter a lot to voters. When they see those things happening, I think they see their attorney general standing up for them against these big companies who are trying to take advantage of them. They tend to see government working for them and that is something that has helped Democratic candidates for governor and attorney general in North Carolina.

Will Doran

Yeah, I mean just a few of the issues that we have kind of on the horizon here in North Carolina are huge. I mean, most of my job is spent covering the state legislature here and within the last few months we have legalized sports betting and also expanded Medicaid. And those are I think two huge issues that the attorney general’s office could find itself dealing with in the future on Medicaid. I think a lot of people say, okay, great, we’re going to give healthcare to more people, but that also opens up more possibilities for fraud that the attorney general’s office may be needing to keep an eye on. With sports betting, of course, there’s all sorts of issues there with the companies involved in, and it seems that also casinos are on the verge of being legalized here in North Carolina, probably not in the next year, but in the next few years I would not be surprised if we voted to legalize casinos in the state. So you’ve got gambling issues, you’ve got those healthcare issues, there’s a lot of bipartisan momentum on medical marijuana and all of the issues that come with that. Obviously AG Stein has been pretty active in cracking down on vaping companies for marketing to kids. If we legalize medical marijuana here, there would obviously be concerns about that as well and the opioid money that still needs to be spent as well. So I mean there are a lot of really big issues that have either just recently happened here in North Carolina or that are probably about to happen within the next few years that I think is going to really make this race really important.

Stephen Cobb

That’s fascinating. Will, sticking with you for a minute, if I may. One of the roles that AGs that’s kind of fallen on partisan lines in the AG community are issues on women’s reproductive rights, and particularly there was a lot of issues as it rolled up to Dobbs, but then since then we’ve seen this issue come up not just as a normal campaign issue but as a ballot initiative in many states. Obviously there’s real difference of opinion between the statewide candidates in North Carolina on the issue of women’s reproductive rights. How, if at all, do you see that issue playing in this election cycle in North Carolina?

Will Doran

Yeah, I mean it’s going to be big here, like it has been in every state. I think it could be big in the governor’s race because Josh Stein as attorney general actually refused to defend the state’s new abortion law in court when it was sued over. And not only did he do that, he actually kind of sided with Planned Parenthood, the folks who were suing, and said that he agreed that it was unconstitutional. And he has taken some flack from Republicans over that. They say, you’re not doing your job, your job is to defend the state when it gets sued, you’re not doing that. He says, well, I’m not going to defend an unconstitutional law. And so there’s that debate going back and forth, but I think that will be just kind of an issue. And we’ve seen Dan Bishop saying that if he is elected attorney general, he will defend the state whenever it’s sued and isn’t going to be picking and choosing over things like this. So he’s trying to make that an issue in his campaign for attorney general as well and try to kind of press Jeff Jackson on, okay, are there issues like this where you would decline to defend the state should it find itself in a lawsuit? So I think there are the more political arguments like that that could affect both the race for governor and the race for attorney general. And then there’s also just the matter of inspiring voters. Like I mentioned earlier, the turnout seems like it’s a little bit lower, more depressed this year. People aren’t really as excited to get out and vote for president. So then you have to kind of look to these other candidates down the ballot on both sides of the aisle to turn out their voters beyond just the party base who’s going to come and vote no matter what. The people who are kind of in the middle undecided, maybe they don’t vote every single year. Candidates for governor, for AG, might have to reach out to some of those people and say, hey, we know that you don’t love either of the options for president, but my race is really important and I really need your vote. I think abortion on the Democratic side is going to be a huge driver for turnout. I don’t know if it’s necessarily the kind of issue that is going to sway swing voters. WRAL, my news station, did some polling earlier this month and found that Democrats list abortion as a huge priority for them, but people who identify as moderate, people who are unaffiliated voters, didn’t seem as urgent for them. But yeah, I think it’s absolutely true. That’s going to be a huge striver for Democrats to try to rally their base round and say, hey, this is still a very serious issue in North Carolina and we need you all to come vote on it.

Swain Wood

Yeah, I agree with that. The issue of women’s reproductive freedom is an extremely salient issue in North Carolina, from everything we’ve seen there. And that cuts in different directions with different groups of the electorate, but it certainly turns out a lot of people to vote. And in North Carolina this year, based on the records of the candidates for governor and attorney general, there’s an extremely sharp dividing line, between Stein and Robinson on the one hand, and between Jeff Jackson and Dan Bishop in the attorney general’s race, Stein and Jackson are very much supportive of abortion rights and what they regard as women’s reproductive freedom. Robinson has long advocated for banning abortion completely. Bishop is very much in the same mold. It will be interesting to see how he kind of positions himself in that race and whether Robinson attempts to kind of step back from some of the more expansive statements that he’s made in the past. But yeah, it is an absolutely pitched battle on that issue in North Carolina.

Stephen Cobb

Obviously when you talk about partisan politics, there are policy differences between parties and candidates, but what have you all observed as some crossover – either issues or the way that those issues are packaged to voters – that has provided successful blueprints for electoral success for candidates, regardless of political party, in North Carolina?

Will Doran

Well, I think, yeah, I think there’s broad bipartisan support for continuing to tackle the opioid epidemic here. Swain could sit here and talk for hours about the work that North Carolina has done on opioids, But it is still a serious issue and I think that’s going continue to be something that resonates with people on both sides of the aisle.

Stephen Cobb

Swain, one of the, I mean, the underlying theme I’m taking from Will’s comment there is the old Tip O’Neill “All politics is local”. And so that’s framing many of these issues and things that are local to that community, whether or not they are things that fall under the office of an attorney general’s office or a governor. What are some of those kind of either predominant AG issues or national issues? How do they translate to the local level in North Carolina?

Swain Wood

Well, I think the way I might amend Tip O’Neill’s comment is to say “All politics is personal”. I mean, it’s local, but it’s really personal too. And I think the office of attorney general underscores that. Most people in the state don’t have the resources to hire high-priced lawyers. Almost all lawyers are now would qualify as being high priced, I think, all private practice lawyers. So they often feel like in a lot of these issues that go into litigation where there’s huge companies and other interests who are kind of taking advantage of them and they don’t have anybody to stand up for them and fight back and represent them, whether it’s representing them in court or in the policy arena. And the office of attorney general really lends itself to that because you are first and foremost the people’s lawyer and your loyalty is to the constitution. How you conduct yourself in office in a way that recognizes that and makes people understand and believe and feel good about the fact that you are their lawyer on these issues has been a very successful strategy. I mean, Stein, we talked about his national role in the opioid settlements. Cooper, when he was attorney general, played a leading role in the national mortgage settlement, which obviously just had a huge impact on… it was a crisis and then some mitigation resulting from that, that had huge impact on people’s day-to-day lives, you’re talking about their mortgage. With that issue, with opioids, you’re talking about people who have family members, friends and themselves, who are just struggling with a horrible addiction that really some corporate malfeasance played a major role in creating that epidemic. Robocalls, things like that. So it’s issues that matter to people personally. And so in that sense, it’s local and it gets away from the kind of ideological, you just do not see first and foremost the kind of ideological and highly partisan and sometimes tribalized sorts of issues that you so frequently see in DC and in some other states. Focusing on those kinds of things are good strategies for AG candidates in North Carolina history shows, I think.

Stephen Cobb

Will, juxtaposing that point that Swain’s making, there is always a bit of a push and pull I see, particularly in states like North Carolina, Virginia, as to whether or not national issues dominate the electoral messaging. How much do you think that this election cycle, being that it is a presidential, that will be dominated by what are national trends as opposed to what is North Carolina-specific?

Will Doran

Yeah, I mean we’ve seen this in politics just increasing over the last decade is things are getting more and more national. But I think there is still a role for some of these state level candidates to run on local issues, not national issues and make their case there. But I don’t think it’s a secret that the Democratic party plans to make a huge part of their pitch up and down the ballot, a focus on perceived extremism on the right, and a lot of it tying back to January 6th and attempts to overturn the election. You see some effects down-ballot on that as well. And here in North Carolina in the primaries, Republican voters here nominated a very kind of MAGA-friendly slate of candidates up and down the ballot in most of our contested primaries, whoever the Republican candidate was that was more associated with Donald Trump won the primary.
And so I think Democrats are really going to jump on that, and that’s going to be true in the governor’s race. That’s going to be true in the race for attorney general. That’s going to be true in plenty of other statewide races that we’ve got here. And so I’m a little unsure of how that might translate. So do you have some voters who are Republicans and they don’t really want to vote for Donald Trump, so they vote for Joe Biden for president, but then they say, well, I’m still a Republican, so I’m going to vote Republican all the way down the ballot. And maybe that helps Dan Bishop out in the race for attorney general. Or maybe on the other hand, you have some voters who are Republicans but are so fed up with Donald Trump that they decide that they’re not going to support any of the more MAGA wing of candidates of which Dan Bishop’s absolutely a member. So I think it absolutely will have an effect. It’s a little unclear so far how that’s going to play out. I will say in polling that we’ve seen about 35, 40% of the unaffiliated voters here in North Carolina, which actually the biggest group of voters – there’s more unaffiliated voters than there are Republicans or Democrats – about just under 40% of them say that January 6th makes them less likely to support Trump. And so that’s a big margin of voters. And we’re talking about a race here that, no matter who wins this race, it’s probably going to be decided by maybe two percentage points at most. I mean, when Josh Stein won the race for AG in 2016 and 2020, I think it was less than 1% of the vote each time. It was really, really, really tight margins. And so I think issues like that could have a huge effect on this race, just because the margins here are so small.

Stephen Cobb

Swain, what do you think? Which party has the most to gain by conceptualizing these races, based on national trends?

Swain Wood

Well, the formula that has worked for statewide Democrats in North Carolina has been to emphasize state issues. So from that perspective, I think you can expect to see Democrats try to do that again in these races. For example, in 2016 when Trump won the state by a significantly more number of votes than he won in 2020 in North Carolina, now Governor Cooper was elected for the first time as governor that year, and he really ran on House Bill two, the transgender bathroom bill. Yeah, and it’s interesting. Having grown up in North Carolina when I was a kid, you would’ve never imagined that a Democratic governor would run on that and be successful, and that would be a number one issue. But people became very concerned that it was going to hit economic development in North Carolina, and there was a lot of evidence to suggest that that was true. So he really focused on that. He also focused on some environmental issues that were really important to voters that there had been some huge coal ash spills and things like that. So he really focused on statewide issues, and he continued to do that throughout his governorship. And so I think you’ll see the Democratic slate of candidates, including Stein and Jackson, focus on a lot of important state issues. On the other hand, the strategy that narrowly worked for Trump in North Carolina in 2020 was to basically run the national MAGA playbook and keep coming to North Carolina, go out into rural areas. I mean, he was in North Carolina so much in the last few weeks of the election and just energized a huge number of voters, including a lot of people who typically didn’t vote a lot before that. [He] wasn’t really running on local North Carolina kinds of issues, but was running on the typical sort of MAGA set of issues, immigration, things like that. So I think maybe you could argue the Republican strategy will be more of a national strategy this year, and the Democratic strategy will be more of a state-based strategy, and we’ll see what happens.

Stephen Cobb

So we’re running short on time, but before we close out, I want to give everybody an opportunity to look into your crystal ball and if you were talking to our viewers about how to look at the next six months or so in North Carolina and look for one or two harbingers of potential electoral success, what are you pointing at or what are you telling folks to look at as indicative of who’s leading in North Carolina, particularly in a race that everybody expects to be within two points of each other? So I mean, for me, and this isn’t necessarily North Carolina-specific, the economy is always going to be a very important issue. So when you talk about the numbers on unemployment and we look at the stock market, these are going to be kind of indicative if these trends continue to hold through the next six months, I think that bodes well for incumbents both nationally and in state offices in North Carolina, but what issues, if you’re looking at and telling folks “I want you to look at this one or two things in North Carolina as kind of a precursor for how things are going to play out”, what are you looking at? Will, I’ll start with you.

Will Doran

Yeah, I mean, absolutely. The economy’s the number one issue, and that will have a trickle down effect, pun intended, on all of the other candidates down the ballot. I mean, if things start getting worse in terms of inflation, that’s obviously going to hurt Biden and that’s going to hurt all the other Democrats because it hurts Biden. The opposite is also true. If people start feeling a little bit more comfortable about their personal finances, if they start feeling happier about all the jobs numbers and everything that we’ve been seeing, the stock market, then that’s going to help Biden and the rising tide lifts all ships. So I think that is absolutely the main issue. Immigration is also a huge thing for North Carolina voters. It is basically the economy, healthcare, immigration, are kind of the top issues for people here. Depending on what you see from the national news, from scenes at the border and how well the two candidates for AG are able to address that issue when it is relevant to their race, I think that could help them in picking off the undecided voters. And then of course, like I was mentioning as well, just the Democratic focus on extremism within the GOP and how well that actually resonates with voters. Do we see it start hitting those undecided voters and moving them to the left, or does it not really work on people? I think we’ll be watching the polling numbers pretty closely on that.

Stephen Cobb

Swain, what about you?

Swain Wood

Well, I think in the end it’s going to boil down to Ronald Reagan’s question about “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” And if you think you are, I think that’s going to help the incumbents in both the statewide races and the national races. Right now, if things don’t change significantly in terms of the economy or some other issues that it’s going to be… If there’s another pandemic or something, heaven forbid, right now it’s kind of difficult to imagine people going into the voting booth and saying, yeah, I want to go back to what things were like in the fall of 2020 because that was such a great time in North Carolina and in the country. I think there’s a sense that things have stabilized, the economy done better than people predicted and has bounced back pretty strongly. Still some issues about inflation and if that turns around that could be a problem, but I think that’s what’s going to boil down to.

Stephen Cobb

Well, there you have it, North Carolina, North Carolina, North Carolina. Time will tell whether or not it is indeed the political linchpin of the 2024 cycle. But the one thing that is for certain is that it will be very, very close amongst all of the statewide and presidential races. Will, Swain, thank you both so much for taking your time to be on the podcast and sharing your insights. We really appreciate it.

Will Doran

It’s been a pleasure.

Swain Wood

Thank you, Stephen.

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