By Alexander H. Jones

After 14 years of total control, North Carolina’s conservative legislators seem to believe they have built a permanent majority. Revolutions tend to be unstable, but the “Conservative Revolution” effected by Thom Tillis and Phil Berger has proven to be the wellspring of a durable majority in the General Assembly. They have buttressed this longevity with gerrymandered districts, and at this point many progressives believe that the ceiling of their aspirations should be to contain the damage that right-wing supermajorities can inflict upon the state.

It’s a plausible narrative, but what if it’s wrong? Previous majorities — notably, the Democratic machine that dominated state politics until 2010 — have believed themselves unbeatable. And whether they were led by State Senator Marc Basnight or national Republican uber-consultant Karl Rove, aspiring permanent-majority-meisters have always been thwarted by the power of our country’s polarization. North Carolina, of course, is a prime example of a state with a narrowly divided electorate, and one might expect that parity to eventually yield a new majority for the progressive side.

In fact, Democratic candidates won elections for state-level offices like governor, attorney general, and secretary of state by an average of 1.5 percent from 2010-2020. So far, so promising. The problem is that the progressive movement’s challenges in legislative races are far more vexing than in statewide races where they are able to field well-known personalities like Roy Cooper and Elaine Marshall whose personal brands transcend the Democratic Party’s putrid reputation in rural areas. As a result, Republicans have, like it or not, won the popular vote in seven out of the last eight elections for North Carolina General Assembly.

In considering the daunting obstacles that face progressives, the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee’s 2024 strategy is instructive. The Democratic group has announced a slate of targeted seats that they intend to contest in an effort to defeat the Republican supermajority. On their list are nine state-House seats and five seats in the state Senate. If Democrats have a decent-enough year to allow their down ballot candidates to run viably in tough districts, they can break the supermajority. But even a perfect winning record in the DLCC’s targets would leave them well short of a majority in either house of the legislature. That’s because Republicans hold enough solid-red seats to withstand a Democratic wave year.

Thus, building a progressive legislative majority would require Democrats to defeat a large number of Republicans who currently appear invulnerable. Imagining hypotheticals that could create a hopeful scenario is often a fool’s game, but progressives have reached a point of desperation dire enough to justify some creative thinking about how to overcome their disadvantage in legislative races. What I think is the most likely way progressives could gain — or, more precisely, conservatives could lose — a legislative majority would be a damning, Watergate-level scandal that so discredited conservative legislators that their brand collapsed even in areas that are fervently committed to the right. Given the ethical controversies that have brewed in the legislature for years now, that does not seem like an impossible outcome.

But even that would create a Democratic majority, not a progressive majority. For the greatest obstacle to truly progressive governance in this state is not gerrymandering or rural polarization, but simple history. North Carolina has never had an authentically progressive legislature. The Fusion years of Republican civil rights and Populist economics were marred by a coup in Wilmington, and the brief renaissance of agrarian progressivism in the late 1940s rested on a foundation of racial segregation. Building a progressive majority in this state would take creating something new. That will take patience and persistence — the central ingredients of progress in the American South.

Alexander H. Jones is a policy analyst with Carolina Forward. He lives in Carrboro. Have feedback? Reach him at alex@carolinaforward.org.