How North Carolina Turned Partisanship Up to 11

摘要

Republicans in Wisconsin and Michigan lately working to undermine the authority of their newly elected Democratic governors are taking a page from the party's 2016 playbook in North Carolina. They might want to take another look at how that worked out.North Carolina Republicans' attempts to cement power-first by redrawing the electoral map in 2011, then by making it harder for Democratic constituencies to vote, and finally by stripping power from the governor's office-made the state a model of what can be accomplished by conservative lawmakers willing to go to extremes. Those same actions have bred an atmosphere of extreme partisanship in the state, where a voter backlash contributed to electoral losses for the GOP in 2016 and 2018, and allegations of absentee voter fraud unfolding in the 9th Congressional District seem poised to invalidate a Republican victory.