It’s time now for a fact-check of North Carolina politics. This week we’re looking at a claim made by the minority leader of the North Carolina Senate.
In February, on the Politics Podcast produced by WUNC, Democrat Sydney Batch of Wake County said this: “So in North Carolina, and in its history, we always had nonpartisan judicial races, and when the Republicans took over several years ago they changed it.”
Batch was making the case for a bill she filed that would make judicial elections nonpartisan. For more, I’m joined now by Paul Specht of WRAL.
Marshall Terry: So, I remember seeing the party designation for judicial races on the ballot back in November. When did that change in North Carolina? And what was behind the change?
Paul Specht: Well, it's changed within the last 10 years, actually. Republicans gain control of the legislature in 2011. A few years later, they started making judicial branch elections partisan. That means candidates for Court of Appeals or state Supreme Court, or even local courts, will have their party affiliation listed next to their name on the ballot. Republicans, in recent years, have started to win more elections in North Carolina. So the thinking is that putting the party affiliation next to these judicial candidates would help the Republican Party.
Terry: So it seems like the key word in state Sen. Batch's comments is "always." Were judicial races always nonpartisan in North Carolina before the switch by Republicans?
Specht: No. In fact, judicial races have been partisan longer than they've been nonpartisan. We have to go all the way back to Reconstruction for the beginning of judicial elections. Even then, they were partisan. They were partisan after the Civil War, throughout the 20th century and they didn't change until the late '90s.
Democrats controlled the state legislature for a century. They dominated North Carolina state politics. But in the late 1990s, Republicans started to win a few more races. And the thinking was, that if Democrats made judicial elections nonpartisan, that would help them preserve some of these offices in the judicial branch.
Terry: What's the latest with this bill that Batch filed to make judicial races nonpartisan? Again, Republicans are in control in the legislature, so does it have any chance?
Specht: No, it does not. To be blunt, she filed it back in mid-February. It has not even made it to a committee in the Senate, and I doubt it will. The sponsors are Democrats. In recent years, having these labels on the ballot has helped the Republican Party. They now have a majority on the state Supreme Court and they have a large majority on the Court of Appeals. So this is not something that they would be interested in changing.
Terry: Now let's go back to that claim by state Senate Minority Leader Sidney Batch. How did you rate it?
Specht: We rated it mostly false. She's right about Republican legislators changing judicial races to make them partisan. That's accurate. But her use of the word "always" saying North Carolina always had nonpartisan, judicial, races — that leaves out a large chunk of history.
And she also accused Republicans of having political motivations. Well, historians say that when Democrats changed the races from partisan to nonpartisan, that was also motivated by some politicking. So we rated this mostly false.
WUNC did issue a correction about the senator’s claim on the next episode of its Politics Podcast.
