North Carolina House Rep. Tricia Cotham made national news last week by switching to the Republican Party, despite voters electing her as a Democrat in November. WFAE’s Tommy Tomlinson, in his "On My Mind" commentary, tries to sort out the truth behind the switch.
Tricia Cotham can change her mind, change her heart, change her story and change her party, and there’s not a whole lot any of us can do about it.
But she also can’t change the truth.
The truth is that just five months ago, she was elected to the North Carolina House as a Democrat. She ran as a Democrat, she had served from 2007 to 2017 as a Democrat, and there was no reason anybody who voted for her would think she was anything else.
The truth is that a couple of weeks ago, when she was still a Democrat — as far as we knew — the House voted to override Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto of a bill that allows N.C. residents to buy handguns without a permit.
If Cotham and one other Democrat had voted to uphold the veto — as most of the other Democrats there did — the override would have failed. But she was one of three Democrats who didn’t show up for the vote.
She said she had a doctor’s appointment. Given what happened a few days later, when she announced she is now a Republican, it was either an incredibly convenient doctor’s appointment or one of the most chickenhearted maneuvers in our state’s political history.
The truth is that our laws should have a provision to deal with this sort of thing. If an elected official switches parties, that should trigger a special election. I know that’s expensive, and a logistical hassle. But there ought to be consequences for politicians who bait-and-switch their constituents.
The truth is that Cotham would be very unlikely to win her district, District 112, as a Republican. Joe Biden got 61% of the vote there. She knows that. Which is why she waited.
She might have also waited for leverage. Her switch gives the Republicans a supermajority in the House, which means Cooper can’t sustain a veto if the votes go along party lines. So if the GOP leaders in the House want to restrict abortion rights, or go after LGBTQ residents, or water down gun laws even more, Cotham has given them clear sailing. It’s a massive power shift that tips our state even further to the right.
It has also given Tricia Cotham a lot of chips to cash.
Watch and see what happens to her district the next time the House leadership tries another round of gerrymandering. I suspect it will end up more Republican-friendly.
As Cotham has explained her switch over the past week, the thing she keeps coming back to is that, basically, other Democrats were mean to her. She didn’t really name names, even though this felt like one of those situations where names ought to be named.
But let’s say her story is legit. It leads to one more truth: Tricia Cotham apparently does not know who she works for.
Maybe Gov. Cooper was hard on her. So what? He ain’t her boss. The other House Democrats don’t pay her salary. She works for the people of North Carolina, and more specifically, for the voters of her district.
Those voters elected her as a Democrat and expected her to behave as a Democrat. Instead, one of two things happened: She either had a genuine change of heart, or she engineered a power play to make herself more important at the expense of the voters and the party she claimed to represent.
The honorable thing to do, for someone in either one of those scenarios, would be to resign. But the truth is, she doesn’t have the guts.
Tommy Tomlinson’s "On My Mind" column runs Mondays on WFAE and WFAE.org. It represents his opinion, not the opinion of WFAE. You can respond to this column in the comments section below. You can also email Tommy at ttomlinson@wfae.org.
