Joe Biden's Hubris Could Doom My State

North Carolina Democrats could be wiped out if Biden drags the ticket down.

Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

Bolstered by his base’s rage at the media, fueled by a disorganized opposition, and fortified by a coalition that includes the Congressional Black Caucus and Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar, President Joe Biden is vowing to stay in the presidential race.

The fact that Biden has rallied fellow partisan Democrats to the righteous cause of “Joe Biden being the president” has not changed the reality of the 2024 election. Polling still shows Trump tied or ahead in every single swing state and Biden running several or more points behind Senate candidates like Bob Casey in Pennsylvania, Jacky Rosen in Nevada, and Ruben Gallego in Arizona. The Biden campaign pointed to one poll in the debate’s immediate aftermath as evidence no replacement could do better against Trump than Biden could; the same polling shows two-thirds of voters think he’s too old to be president. 

But if the Democrats don’t turn their fortunes around at the top of the ticket — be that with Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, or anyone else as the nominee—all of those seats are at risk. In fact, Democrats could be facing an electoral catastrophe at every level. There are reports, for instance, that House Democrats, rather than recapturing the chamber, have been warned that they might lose around 20 seats instead. (The Democratic Party has denied this.) 

It's impossible to know at this stage exactly what will happen in November. But given where we are, it's worth considering some worst-case scenarios. And perhaps nowhere will the effects of a Democratic wipeout be felt more than in the state where I live, North Carolina.

The vast majority of gubernatorial elections in the U.S. are in midterm years. But 11 states hold them concurrently with presidential elections. North Carolina is one of those states. This year, the popular incumbent moderate Gov. Roy Cooper, who has never lost a race in more than 30 years in political office, is term-limited. 

The options to replace Cooper are Josh Stein, a moderate Democrat running as a Cooper-like check on the Republican legislature, and Mark Robinson, an absolute monster who recently greenlit the murder of his political opponents. And if the Democratic presidential nominee cannot win North Carolina, or at least lose it by a respectable margin, Robinson will become governor. 

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The first thing you need to know is that North Carolina’s political system is fundamentally undemocratic. Despite the state being a perpetual swing target for presidential and Senate campaigns, Republicans have reshaped it over the past 15 years thanks to gerrymandering.

Though no Democratic presidential nominee has won North Carolina since Barack Obama in 2008, Donald Trump won by fewer than three points in 2016 and roughly 1.5 points in 2020. On the flip side, if you were born in 1993, a Democrat has been governor of North Carolina for all but four years of your life.

The Democratic Party ran North Carolina for more than a century, even after the state began voting reliably Republican in the presidential election thanks to white backlash to civil rights. The Tea Party wave of 2010 ushered in a new era of Republican government then led by Thom Tillis — now simultaneously one of the D.C. press’s favorite GOP senators and the subject of ire for Republican activists at home — and Phil Berger, who remains the state Senate leader to this day. 

With their newfound power, the Republicans drew some of the most racially and politically biased maps in the country, which were then litigated in federal court for a full decade. Thanks to their addiction to gerrymandering, I’ve never voted in the same district twice in the nearly ten years I've lived here, a trend that will continue again this year. A former Republican chair of the House redistricting committee, who later resigned in disgrace for doing campaign fraud, said at one point that the only reason he drew a map where 10 House seats favored Republicans was that he couldn’t draw a map with 11. He was later given space to write about in The Atlantic. 

The same principle has been applied to the legislative seats these lawmakers draw for themselves, which makes it functionally impossible to win a Democratic majority in either the state House or Senate. This is now official judicial precedent, thanks to far-right supreme courts both in North Carolina and in D.C. And our ballot measure process runs through the legislature, which has only used it to put conservative policies and power grabs before voters.

Even in the wave election of 2018, where Democratic candidates in the state House won a clear majority of votes cast statewide, Republicans still won a comfortable majority in both chambers of the legislature. 

And while Democratic overperformance in the 2022 midterms did block a supermajority in the state House, that was short-lived when a former Democratic state representative re-entering the legislature from a liberal Charlotte district, Tricia Cotham, was re-elected and almost immediately switched parties. Cotham then helped the GOP pass an enormous school voucher program that will starve the state’s public schools so the rich parents of kids in private schools can get reimbursed for MacBooks, and a 12-week abortion ban that destroyed a vital point of abortion access for the whole Southeast, after she pledged during the campaign to codify Roe v. Wade into state law. 

The only electoral vehicle anyone opposing the Republicans is to elect enough non-conservatives to the governor’s mansion, other executive offices, and the appellate courts that there’s a check on the rigged conservative dominance in the halls of power. This is not a very sustainable way to maintain progress. 

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It wasn’t so long ago that both Democratic gubernatorial candidates and Republican presidential nominees were winning North Carolina by double-digits. In 2000 and 2004, Gov. Mike Easley — whose own corruption scandal helped accelerate Democratic decline — outran the national Democratic tickets by eight and 12 points, respectively, on his way to landslide wins. In 2008, however, Lt. Gov. Bev Perdue only outperformed Obama by less than half a point to narrowly defeat Charlotte mayor Pat McCrory, an early sign of the impact of national polarization on down-ballot races. In 2012, Perdue retired and McCrory, who ran as a pro-business moderate, outperformed Mitt Romney by more than six points and defeated Lt. Gov. Walter Dalton by double-digits. 

In 2016, Democrats nominated Cooper to run against McCrory. Cooper, then a four-term attorney general, had never lost an election; in 2012, even though McCrory and Romney won the state, the Republicans didn’t even bother to put up a challenger against Cooper. McCrory was brutally unpopular, thanks to signing the transgender discrimination law HB 2 as well as some more obscure local issues that cratered support in his base of Charlotte, and Cooper led in most polls taken throughout the fall.

Cooper did win, by a razor-thin margin. He only ran about three points ahead of Hillary Clinton, and, presaging what Trump would do four years later, McCrory and Republican activists baselessly alleged voter fraud in the majority-Black city of Durham and in its targeting of specific voters across the state. Cooper only won after a mandatory recount. That same year, Stein similarly hung on to beat an HB 2 champion named Buck Newton (not a joke).

Four years later, Cooper ran against Lt. Gov. Dan Forest, a nepotism case who was much more comfortable speaking the language of the new right than McCrory had been. Cooper was widely expected to sail to re-election, with many polls in the run-up finding him with a double-digit lead over Forest. But even though Biden outperformed Clinton, Cooper ran ahead of him by just three points and beat Forest by fewer than five, a surprising underperformance. 

Stein, meanwhile, won re-election as attorney general by fewer than 14,000 votes. That same year, Mark Robinson won a higher share of the vote than both Cooper and Stein and was elected as the state’s first Black lieutenant governor. 

In the past four years, Robinson has become one of the most high-profile far-right state politicians in the country. His recent outburst at a church in the tiny town of White Lake, directed at everyone from criminals to socialists and communists to “people who have evil intent” — “​​Some folks need killing! It’s time for somebody to say it. It’s not a matter of vengeance. It’s not a matter of being mean or spiteful. It’s a matter of necessity!” — is just the latest in a long line of statements that together form a vision for a Christian nationalist North Carolina enforced through violent means. Robinson wants an abortion ban without exceptions, jail for transgender women who commit the crime of using a public restroom, and to reshape North Carolina’s “wicked” public schools by removing science and history education up through fifth grade. This is just what he’s saying publicly. 

The only way to block Robinson is for Democrats to have a respectable showing in November. That's already difficult: unlike in 2016 or 2020, no one is talking about North Carolina as a potential “tipping point” state for the Democratic nominee. But the Biden crisis could make it impossible. He is not even polling ahead in any of the states he did win in 2020, as his support craters with young people and Latino voters. 

Trump is currently up in North Carolina by six and a half points, according to FiveThirtyEight’s averages. This is territory that would force Stein, who is currently running neck-and-neck with Robinson, to outrun his party’s nominee more than any Democratic gubernatorial candidate in 20 years, and to do so as the last ancestral Democrats leave the voter rolls. Is that possible against the most extreme gubernatorial nominee in the country? Sure. Is it likely? No. 

A complete collapse at the top of the ticket, on the other hand, would almost assuredly sweep Robinson and every Republican running statewide into office — including the candidate for state public schools chief who called for a televised execution of Ilhan Omar, the HB 2 author-turned-Freedom Caucus congressman aiming to replace Stein as attorney general, a state Supreme Court candidate who thinks acknowledging racial bias is judicial activism and more.

George Stephanopoulos asked Biden last week how he’d feel if he stayed in the race and lost. “I’ll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the good as job [sic] as I know I can do, that’s what this is about,” Biden said. 

That is not what this is about. Biden’s outsized ego will be damaged if he loses his last run for elected office, but he will be fine. If Trump wins in a landslide, the Democratic Party may be swept out of power and into temporary irrelevancy in Congress and across the states, but ballot access laws mean they’ll never really go away. If history is any indication, the Democrats will come back in two years by raising an enormous sum of money and channeling liberal outrage off the coattails of a second Trump term that no one will have wanted.

That will be little comfort to people in North Carolina—or, really, to people anywhere in the world paying the price for the Democrats' selfishness.

Jen O’Malley Dillon, Biden’s campaign manager, said before the debate that she was “bullish on North Carolina, and I don’t fuck around on saying that.”  The last time Biden had a lead in any North Carolina poll, according to FiveThirtyEight, was in February. That was a hypothetical race against Nikki Haley.

She could be right. Maybe all of the polls are underestimating Biden, or maybe there’s enough time to turn it around. Maybe there will be a level of national ticket-splitting unprecedented in the modern era or a more local down-ballot wave that lifts Democrats like Stein and state Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs over their Republican opponents. 

Or maybe it will turn out like we all think it's going to. In North Carolina, as everywhere else, it’s always been a needless risk: for Biden to run for re-election in the first place, to stack the deck for his renomination without a real primary, and now to desperately cling to power — when all the fundamentals of the election point to him being potentially the worst person in the entire Democratic Party, other than Bob Menendez, to run against Donald Trump for president.

No matter what Biden ultimately decides to do, it will be a disaster for vulnerable North Carolinians if whoever’s leading the top of the ticket can’t manage to put up a better showing than John Kerry in North Carolina. The bigger the loss at the top of the ticket, the more strict the abortion ban, the more massive the cut from the safety net and public schools, and the more extreme the crackdown on the rights of minorities, workers, and people expressing free speech will be. 

If that future should come to pass, there will be plenty of blame to go around. Joe Biden will be at the top of that list.