OPINION: This is the most important election in North Carolina in 2024, by far

The governor’s race is crucial. The presidential election is enormous. But in North Carolina, no race has bigger stakes for the democratic process than one low-visibility race for NC Supreme Court. 

There’s a guy running for governor of North Carolina who’s reportedly referred to himself as a “Black Nazi.” A guy who wants to be president, again, despite inciting a violent attack on the capitol the last time he was in charge. A guy who wants to be NC’s attorney general, essentially its top lawyer, but he tried to overthrow the presidential election in 2020 when his party lost. 

And yet, perhaps no race in North Carolina is as important to the future of the state than the one for NC Supreme Court—even if this race gets a fraction of the money or the attention. 

Let me explain.

In November, it’s possible, likely even, that more people in NC will vote for Democratic candidates than Republican candidates. 

But it’s a virtual certainty that Republicans will retain control of both chambers of the state legislature — and possibly hold onto their supermajorities (they currently hold 72 of 120 seats in the state House and 30 of 50 seats in the state Senate). They’re also likely to lock up 10 and possibly 11 of NC’s 14 seats in Congress. 

These sorts of numbers aren’t possible in a state as purple as North Carolina without corruption. That’s because North Carolina is probably the most gerrymandered state in the nation. 

Republicans on the court argued that the NC Constitution guarantees us elections, but it doesn’t promise us fair elections.  

Gerrymandering is a partisan practice where politicians redraw voting districts to their political party’s favor, either by packing their opponents’ likely voters into fewer districts or by spreading them out over multiple districts. 

And a 5-2 Republican majority on the NC Supreme Court gave conservative leadership in the state legislature clearance to do so in an infamous 2023 decision.

Republicans on the court argued that the NC Constitution guarantees us elections, but it doesn’t promise us fair elections.  

Soak that up.

We spend a lot of time telling people that voting matters. But the Republicans who lead the state party and sit on the state Supreme Court are working as hard as possible to make sure it doesn’t. 

If positions were reversed today, and it was the Democrats gerrymandering—as they did for decades before Republicans took over the legislature in 2010—I feel confident in writing that this court would have delivered a decision saying the polar opposite. 

I’m not the only one. 

“Today’s result was preordained on 8 November 2022, when two new members of this Court were elected to establish this Court’s conservative majority,” Justice Anita Earls, one of two dissenting justices (the other being Justice Allison Riggs), wrote of the court’s gerrymandering decision.  

We spend a lot of time telling people that voting matters. But the Republicans who lead the state party and sit on the state Supreme Court are working as hard as possible to make sure it doesn’t. 

Republicans on the court are so in the bag for the GOP that, this month, they ordered the state elections office to postpone mailing absentee ballots in order to grant Republicans’ request to remove Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from the presidential ballot, even though Kennedy’s request to do so came after the state deadline and election officials were hours away from mailing out absentee ballots. 

They did so because they believe Kennedy’s presence would drain more votes from the Republican, Donald Trump, than the Democrat, Kamala Harris.

This decision cost North Carolina voters weeks of time in which they could have completed vote-by-mail ballots. The justices violated the state’s law on when those ballots had to go out. And they cost the state an estimated $1 million to make new ballots. 

Because it’s party over everything else. 

Regardless of where you land on the political spectrum, a democracy without meaningful elections isn’t a democracy. Courts without impartiality aren’t courts. And politicians who don’t fear elections or an independent judiciary tend to become tyrants.

How NC’s Supreme Court works

Fortunately for voters in North Carolina, seats on the state Supreme Court aren’t lifetime appointments. 

They are held for eight years, and they are elected in partisan elections—meaning the candidates’ partisan affiliation will be marked on the ballot. 

Most voters don’t want these races to be partisan, but Republicans made it that way in 2016 and the courts have been increasingly more beholden to the political parties since then.

There are seven seats on the court. Five are held by Republican justices. One is up for re-election this year. It is held by incumbent Justice Allison Riggs, who is a Democrat. She’s running against Republican Jefferson Griffin. Click those links to read Cardinal & Pine’s past coverage of Riggs and Griffin.

In 2026, the other seat held by Democrats, the one held by Earls, will be up for re-election. And in 2028, there will be three seats up for re-election that are currently held by Republicans.

Regardless of where you land on the political spectrum, a democracy without meaningful elections isn’t a democracy. Courts without impartiality aren’t courts. And politicians who don’t fear elections or an independent judiciary tend to become tyrants.

If North Carolinians want to have any hope of changing the partisan leanings of the court in 2028, if they want to end gerrymandering, they’ll have to start this year by supporting Riggs, a former voting rights attorney who’s argued against gerrymandering for years.

The stakes are as high as they come, but you won’t see this race on television much, so you’ll have to drum up interest the old-fashioned way— by caring a whole lot and talking about it.

There’s no weird pornography scandal, no Trump, no massive advertising campaign—just the future of a democracy that’s hanging on by a thread.