Inside the North Carolina GOP’s decade-long push to seize power from state’s Democratic governors
GOP lawmakers have passed law after law stripping powers from Democratic governors
In November 2024, Democrat Josh Stein scored an emphatic victory in the race to become North Carolina’s governor, drubbing his Republican opponent by almost 15 percentage points.
His honeymoon didn’t last long, however.
Two weeks after his win, the North Carolina legislature’s Republican supermajority fast-tracked a bill that would transform the balance of power in the state.
Its authors portrayed the 131-page proposal, released publicly only an hour before debate began, as a disaster relief measure for victims of Hurricane Helene. But much of it stripped powers from the state’s governor, taking away authority over everything from the highway patrol to the utilities commission. Most importantly, the bill eliminated the governor’s control over appointments to the state elections board, which sets voting rules and settles disputes in the swing state’s often close elections.
Ignoring protesters who labeled the bill a “legislative coup,” Republicans in the General Assembly easily outvoted Democrats, then overrode the outgoing Democratic governor’s veto.
The maneuver culminated a nearly decade-long effort by Republican legislators, who have pushed through law after law shrinking the powers of North Carolina’s chief executive — always a Democrat during that time frame — as well as the portfolios of other executive branch officials who are Democrats.
Over that period, lawmakers have attempted to transfer control or partial control of at least 29 boards, entities or important executive powers. In most cases, they succeeded.
As a result, Republicans now hold increased sway not only over North Carolina’s election board, but also over its schools, building codes, environmental regulations, coastal development, wildlife management, utilities, cabinet appointments and more. All had previously been under control of the governor.
“This is not what people voted for,” said Derek Clinger, a senior counsel at the State Democracy Research Initiative, an institute at the University of Wisconsin Law School, who has studied the events in North Carolina.
Stein, as well as all of North Carolina’s living former governors — Republicans and Democrats alike — have blasted the legislature’s erosion of gubernatorial authority as a violation of the state’s constitutionally enshrined separation of powers.
“You should not be able to make the laws and then control who enforces them — just ask any fourth grader about the three branches of government,” Stein said in a statement to ProPublica. Lawmakers’ actions “throw the will of the voters into the trash can,” he added.
Initially, governors had some success using separation-of-powers arguments in lawsuits filed to challenge efforts to strip their powers. Even majority-Republican courts ruled in their favor, declaring laws that shifted authority directly from the governor to the legislature were unconstitutional.
More recently, though, legislators have found a loophole, writing laws that move traditional gubernatorial powers to elected executive branch officials who are Republicans. Since 2023, when the GOP won majorities on the state’s appellate courts, judges have increasingly rejected lawsuits aimed at blocking such legislation.
The North Carolina GOP’s effort to rein in executive power at the state level stands in sharp contrast to the Trump administration’s efforts to expand such power federally. Before the Supreme Court, for example, the administration has argued for a “unitary executive” theory that would allow the president near-total control over personnel.
North Carolina Republican legislative leaders didn’t respond to interview requests or detailed emailed questions from ProPublica about the power shifts. In the past, Republicans have defended whittling down Democratic governors’ authority by pointing to similarly partisan moves by Democrats decades ago, though these were on a much smaller scale.
Current and former lawmakers also say the power shifts reflect the vision of North Carolina’s founders, who deliberately made the state’s governor weak and its legislature strong to prevent abuses suffered under British rule.
“It’s never been co-equal, never will be, never intended to be,” said Paul Stam, who was the lame-duck Republican speaker pro tempore of the House when the General Assembly began its push to weaken the governor in 2016.
Republicans also dispute the notion that voters oppose reducing governors’ authorities.
“The people voted for a strong Republican majority in the legislature,” Sam Hayes, the former general counsel for North Carolina’s speaker of the House, said in an interview. “That role can involve reassigning the powers of the executive branch.”
After lawmakers took away the governor’s power to appoint the election board’s members, Hayes became its director. The board’s new Republican majority has handed control over North Carolina’s county election boards to conservatives, some of whom have moved to eliminate early voting sites favored by Democrats.
In recent years, states including Wisconsin, Michigan and Kentucky have waged similar battles over separation of powers. In almost all cases, Republican-dominated legislatures have stripped powers from Democrats elected to statewide offices.
Still, North Carolina’s example has been particularly notable, critics say. According to a scholarly review by Clinger, the General Assembly’s power grabs in 2016 and 2024 are the most expansive in recent American history.
Collectively, lawmakers have brought the powers of the state’s chief executive to a low ebb, said Christopher Cooper, a political scientist at Western Carolina University. In 2010, the textbook “Politics in the American States” ranked the institutional powers of North Carolina’s governor the third-weakest in the nation. By 2024, they ranked dead last.
“Soon,” Cooper said of the legislature, “they’re not going to have anything left to take.”
When the battles over the election board began in 2016, the joke among Republican lawmakers was that to get things done on elections policy, “you either need the Northern Hammer or the Sweet Southern Stammer.”
The Northern Hammer was Bob Rucho, a famously blunt senator originally from Massachusetts. The Sweet Southern Stammer was David Lewis, a genial Republican House member from rural North Carolina with a speech impediment and an uncommon mastery of election law.
The self-deprecating Lewis, a farmer and tractor salesman by trade, had helped design the gerrymandering strategies that, starting in 2010, handed Republicans long-term control of the legislature even in election cycles when Democrats won a majority of statewide offices.
The importance of controlling the election board — and the potential disastrousness of not controlling it — was clear in the 2016 gubernatorial race, a close contest between Republican Gov. Pat McCrory and his Democratic challenger, Roy Cooper.
The board makes decisions that can affect election outcomes in myriad ways, such as deciding where and for how long early voting takes place. It picks the state’s election director and members of county election boards, which maintain voter registration lists and operate voting sites. It arbitrates postelection challenges from losing candidates.
As governors historically had, McCrory had appointed the five board members who oversaw the 2016 race, choosing three from his party and two from the opposing party as state law directed.
But the panel and its professional staff still operated with considerable independence. After McCrory challenged his 10,000-vote loss to Cooper, alleging widespread voter fraud, the board — led by McCrory’s picks — voted against his protests, effectively ending the race.
When Republican legislators launched their first effort to seize control of the board soon after, senior staffers figured it was payback for not helping McCrory.
“I viewed it as retaliation for the board not having played a partisan enough role,” said Katelyn Love, who was then an attorney for the board and went on to become its general counsel.
Lewis, who left the legislature in 2020, said he and other lawmakers were convinced that once appointment power passed to Cooper, he’d “stack the board” against Republicans. “In certain parts of the state,” he said, “elections really do come down to two or three votes, or a small percentage of votes, and we had no confidence” that Cooper’s appointees “would just treat us fairly.”
Republican legislative leaders called a special session, proposing multiple bills that redirected powers from the governor, often to the legislature itself.
“We said, ‘You know what: We’re the legislature and we decide who appoints who,’” Lewis recalled. “Instead of letting Roy do it, why don’t we put folks in place that kind of support the way we see things?”
Lawmakers targeted not only the elections board, but also Cooper’s ability to hire and fire more than 1,000 political appointees in state government and to choose members of the state’s Industrial Commission, which handles matters such as worker safety claims. They took aim at some positions in part because they came with big paychecks, Lewis acknowledged; a seat on the Industrial Commission pays more than $160,000, for example.
“The truth is, a lot of the importance of some of these positions is who gets to appoint whose friends to the board,” Lewis said. “It’s kind of considered a plum job.”
The election board measure was framed as making oversight more bipartisan. Indeed, it increased the number of board members to eight and required even numbers of Republican and Democratic appointees.
But the governor controlled only four of those seats. The legislature appointed the other four. Also, in even-numbered years — those when federal elections are held — the law required the board’s chair to be “a member of the political party with the second-highest number of registered affiliates.” At the time, that meant a Republican. Since the chair shaped what matters were taken up and had other bureaucratic influence, this gave the party an edge.
Lewis insisted the restructured board was designed to even the scales — between the parties and between the governor and the legislature. “If one side can block the other, then bad things don’t happen,” he said. “And if both sides can work together, you can get a more positive resolution.”
Less than two weeks after McCrory conceded, the legislature quickly forced through the changes, despite protests so intense they led to numerous arrests.
Cooper quickly filed a court challenge, arguing that the law violated the state’s constitution and stymied his ability to enact his policies. The separation of powers is explicitly enshrined in North Carolina’s constitution, which declares, “The legislative, executive, and supreme judicial powers of the State government shall be forever separate and distinct from each other.”
Democrats also made the case that the new, evenly split election board was intended to produce gridlock that effectively favored Republicans, keeping in place the election director chosen by McCrory’s board and blocking steps that required majority approval, such as establishing early voting sites.
In March 2017, a trial court struck down most of the legislative changes, including those affecting the elections board, ruling they illegally robbed the governor of executive authority.
Lewis and other Republican leaders went back to the drawing board. Small groups of election specialists and legislative aides met early in the morning or late at night, surviving on food from Bojangles, the much-loved fried-chicken-and-biscuits chain. They sketched out priorities and drafted legislative language on whiteboards, then waited for the opportune moment to introduce a bill.
According to Lewis and other Republicans, they were determined to find a winning formula, no matter how many shots it took. “We felt like we had every right to do that because the constitution invested the legislature with defining the responsibilities” of the governor, Lewis said.
A month after the trial court rejected lawmakers’ first stab at breaking the governor’s grip on the elections board, the legislature tried again. It passed another law that altered the board in much the same ways as the first, expanding it to eight members, for example. But this time, instead of giving the legislature half the appointments, the law directed the governor to make all of them — from lists provided by the chairs of the state’s Democratic and Republican parties.
Cooper, calling the measure the “the same unconstitutional legislation in another package,” swiftly filed another legal challenge. For almost a year, as the case wound through the courts, he refused to make appointments under the proposed rules. The board’s professional staff kept up with administrative tasks but struggled to find workarounds for responsibilities handled by board members. They went to court on multiple occasions to get judges to rule on election protests and challenges in the board’s absence.
“It was very disruptive and chaotic, and a drain on the agency’s limited resources,” Love said.
In January 2018, the state Supreme Court struck down the legislature’s second attempt at taking over the elections board.
The third came two months later, when lawmakers passed a bill that resurrected many elements of the previous one, but with a few new tweaks. In this version, the governor chose the board’s eight members — four Republicans and four Democrats — from lists submitted by each party, plus an additional tie-breaking member, unaffiliated with either party, from nominees provided by the new board.
Despite these differences, the outcome was much the same: another lawsuit from Cooper and, eventually, another loss in court.
Republican legislators realized they were likely to lose the case, so they also decided to try a strategy that took the issue out of the hands of the court system, Lewis said. They put a constitutional amendment on the November 2018 ballot that proposed removing the governor’s power to choose election board members and giving that authority to the legislature.
“You put your idea out for the people,” Lewis said. If “they vote for it, then it’s no longer unconstitutional.”
Of the six constitutional changes on the ballot that year, the election board proposal and one other — an amendment altering who picked judges to fill empty or added court seats — targeted traditional gubernatorial powers.
The measures were hotly contested, attracting about $18 million in spending by groups for and against them. Lewis said that Republican internal polling showed clear support for the amendments, but the final tallies showed a notable divide: Voters passed four of the measures but rejected the two that stripped powers from the governor by roughly 2 to 1.
At the end of 2018, Republicans temporarily waved the white flag, passing a law that returned the governor’s control over the election board. In 2020, Lewis relinquished his longtime role as the House’s election policy point man after pleading guilty to charges related to using campaign funds for personal expenses, including rent. He then resigned.
Today, Lewis sells cars in a small town on North Carolina’s swampy southeastern coast and does occasional political consulting. Looking back, he still believes he did the right thing. “I was following the will of the voters that gave us the majority in the legislature to do these things.”
Over the next few years, the elections board made one critical decision after another in close or disputed elections, underscoring its importance. In one instance, it called a new election in a congressional race tainted by an illegal scheme to fraudulently collect and fill out mail-in ballots.
Republican legislative leaders bided their time, waiting for another opportunity to launch a takeover. Karen Brinson Bell, chosen as the state’s election director in May 2019 by Cooper’s appointees, said lawmakers never let her forget the tenuousness of her position.
“I knew from the day I started that my days were numbered,” she said. “I was never naive to the fact that there would likely be other attempts to change the makeup of the board.”
Bell said that at a December 2022 meeting held by the National Conference of State Legislatures in West Virginia, Warren Daniel, a Senate Republican who worked on election matters, told her that he and his colleagues planned to take over the board and to reduce early voting. (Daniel didn’t respond to ProPublica’s questions about the incident.)
In October 2023, the moment Bell had long expected finally arrived. The legislature’s Republican supermajority introduced a new bill to remake the election board. It shifted control over appointments to the General Assembly’s majority and minority leaders and put some of the board’s administrative functions under the secretary of state.
On decisions where the board’s four Republicans and four Democrats deadlocked, the law gave Republicans a decided advantage. If members couldn’t agree on an executive director, for example, the legislature’s majority leaders would choose one. If the board couldn’t agree on a plan for expanded early voting (championed by Democrats), then each county would have just one early voting site, the minimum required by law.
The measure was similar to its predecessors, but the courts that would decide its legality were vastly different.
Since the demise of the previous election board law, Republicans had won 14 appellate court races in a row and held majorities on the state’s higher courts. The Supreme Court’s chief justice, Paul Newby, had made it clear he saw no legal impediment to whittling down the governor’s portfolio, writing a sharp dissent to a ruling that struck down an earlier attempt to limit gubernatorial power.
In February 2024, a trial court issued a decision that reframed the debate over the constitutionality of gubernatorial power transfers. This time, the case didn’t involve the election board. It dealt instead with a law that used a variety of mechanisms to strip away Gov. Roy Cooper’s control over seven other entities that managed everything from coastal resources to building codes.
A three-judge panel found three of the seven transfer schemes legal because power passed from the governor to another elected executive branch member. “While the Governor is the chief executive, other elected officers who are members of the Council of State are also vested with executive power,” the judges wrote.
Michael Gerhardt, a constitutional law professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who studies issues related to separation of powers, was aghast, saying the decision reflected partisanship rather than sound legal analysis. The court was “ignoring the fact that the governor was actually elected” and “allowing the state legislature to transfer some of his authority to Republican officials,” he said.
Mitch Kokai, a senior political analyst at the conservative John Locke Foundation, argued the panel’s finding was consistent with North Carolina’s history of splitting executive power among multiple executive branch officials. He dismissed Gerhardt’s comments as partisan “sour grapes.”
“The Democrats are losing, and they don’t like the fact that the Republicans are winning, so they’re casting doubt on what the conservative courts are saying,” he said.
The ruling didn’t affect the October 2023 election board measure, which hadn’t been implemented, blocked by a separate trial court decision. But after Stein’s double-digit win in the 2024 governor’s race, Republican lawmakers again used a legislative session ostensibly about hurricane relief to introduce a new, superseding measure that would finally put the election board under their party’s control.
It used a power transfer strategy similar to the ones that had won court approval the previous February, placing election board appointments in the hands of Dave Boliek, a Republican newly elected to the executive branch office of state auditor. Boliek could choose three of the board’s five members from his own party, giving Republicans their long-sought majority.
No other state auditor in America manages elections and Boliek had no experience doing so, but he expressed enthusiasm about taking on the job.
“Governor Josh Stein doesn’t have any experience supervising elections either,” Boliek told ProPublica in an email exchange. “Leading a public office requires a willingness to learn and serve — and I’m a quick study.”
In the same law, legislators also redirected Stein’s authority to make appointments to an array of other boards and entities and stripped powers from other newly elected Democrats, including the lieutenant governor, attorney general and superintendent of public instruction.
Stein sued to prevent the changes from taking effect, but in May, the Newby-led Supreme Court declined to block Boliek’s takeover of the election board. Although litigation continues, he has started transforming election oversight, both statewide and locally, in ways that would be hard to undo.
Some of Boliek’s board members have long histories in Republican politics and efforts to tilt state elections in the party’s favor. The new chair, Francis De Luca, had led a conservative institute that sued to contest McCrory’s loss in the 2016 race for governor. (De Luca didn’t respond to ProPublica’s request for comment.)
Another new Republican member was Rucho, the so-called Northern Hammer who’d worked on election policy with Lewis. The new board will be fair, he promised. “My goal is to level the playing field so that everyone is playing by the same rules,” he said.
Bell’s replacement as election director, Hayes, has overhauled the board’s 60-member staff, though historically it’s been nonpartisan and largely remained when new leadership took over. Since Hayes took charge, at least nine staffers have left or been placed on leave, according to interviews and published reports. At the same time, the board has added seven new political appointees, many of whom have close ties to Republican politicians.
“It’s a nonpartisan shop shifting to a partisan shop,” said one staff member who asked not to be identified, fearing retaliation.
Hayes insisted the board remains nonpartisan and described the changes in staff as “nothing out of the ordinary.” He described his goals as “repairing relationships with the General Assembly” and working to “honor the letter and spirit of the law.”
“If we do that,” he said, “I believe that we will rebuild trust in elections here.”
Under Hayes’ leadership, the board also moved swiftly to settle a lawsuit filed against it earlier this year by the U.S. Justice Department, agreeing to require tens of thousands of voters to provide missing registration information or risk not having their ballots count in state races, voter advocacy groups say. Bell had opposed taking such steps.
Hayes said he settled the suit with the “intent of honoring federal law” and to clean up the state’s voter rolls, which Republicans argue have been badly mismanaged.
The new leadership has also taken steps that could limit early voting locations in the state, especially those in Democratic strongholds.
Boliek hired longtime Republican operative Dallas Woodhouse, who has advocated for restricting early voting, to fill a newly created role partly focused on early voting. In October, Woodhouse emailed Republican board chairs directing them to consider moving polling sites out of urban areas, where there are more Democrats, to “areas that are outside of urban cores,” where Republicans tend to hold the majority.
So far, conservative majorities in at least eight counties have moved to limit early voting sites or weekend hours sought by Democrats. At least two have rejected sites near universities, including a site near a historically Black college.
In an interview, Boliek told ProPublica there was no plan to reduce early voting sites in areas that lean Democratic. He later explained in an email that Woodhouse “simply answered inquiries from board chairs.”
Hayes communicates with Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who tried to help Trump overturn the 2020 election, and Woodhouse regularly attends video calls held by the North Carolina chapter of Mitchell’s national organization, the Election Integrity Network.
Boliek said Woodhouse talks to a variety of organizations from across the political spectrum, adding,“I don’t think people should be concerned.” He said the board was dedicated to making “it easy to vote and hard to cheat in North Carolina.”
Hayes said Mitchell and other network leaders aren’t “receiving special access to me or treatment from this office” and that he talks to people on both sides of the aisle.
All told, Republican legislators have successfully transferred power over 17 of the 29 boards, entities and important executive prerogatives they’ve targeted since 2016, a ProPublica review showed. In addition to the election board, the governor has lost control or partial control over a dozen entities, including the state’s Environmental Management Commission and its Utilities Commission.
Stein told ProPublica that state residents have suffered, in the form of weakened environmental protections and rising energy costs.
Rucho, the Northern Hammer, argues the power transfers have actually improved life in the state.
“You have to change the way the system works, if the system is not working,” he said. “This was a real good remedy to make these boards work on behalf of the people.”
Longtime observers say they have deepening concerns about the erosion of the separation of powers in North Carolina.
Bob Orr, a former Republican state Supreme Court justice, said that if power grabs by Republican legislators continue to be upheld by the state’s Republican-majority courts, it will threaten democracy in the state.
“Really, what can people do?” said Orr, who left the Republican Party because of how it changed under Trump. “A legislature that is literally unchecked with gerrymandered districts and a presumption of constitutionality for everything they do in the courts — that is a danger to democracy because they can change the system regardless of the will of the people.”
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