- Republican congressmen call on Governor Stein to deploy the National Guard to Charlotte.

And Jeff Jackson, the Attorney General, sues FEMA to speed up Helene recovery funds.

This is State Lines.

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(dramatic music) ♪ - Hello again, welcome to State Lines.

I'm Kelly McCullen.

Joining me today, good friends, better analysts, WUNC Radio's Colin Campbell to my right.

Hello, sir.

- Hey.

- Maggie Barlow of Maven Strategies.

Congratulations in part of local elections.

We'll talk about a little bit later on, but that's your sphere and a good job, I presume.

- Yeah, it was a good night for Democrats.

- Oh, there you go.

Brooke Medina is joining us, as is Andrew Dunn of Longleaf Politics, and you're the rookie this week.

Welcome to the show.

Thanks for making the trip from Charlotte, and I hope it's a joyous occasion to spend a half hour with this crew.

- Oh, absolutely.

Thanks for having me on.

- Well, since you're out of that Charlotte area, we'd normally never start with the rookie on the stage, but Charlotte and you right from there, we wanna talk about what the members of North Carolina's Republican delegation want.

They want the National Guard deployed to Charlotte to fight crime.

U.S.

Representatives Mark Harris, Chuck Edwards, and Pat Harrigan are asking for now Governor Josh Stein for a deployment order to enter the Charlotte city limits and do what they need to do to lower crime rates.

Charlotte police, Andrew, from what I directly read in a report, drop in violent crime since October 2024, small increases in commercial burglaries and car break-ins.

Police there have conceded repeat offenders are driving up local crime rates.

That's a very high-level view.

Why would Republicans want National Guardsmen in Charlotte?

- Well, I think some of it is political posturing rather than a serious policy proposal, but I don't think the idea should be completely dismissed out of hand, and here's why.

So the Charlotte police chief, the outgoing Charlotte police chief, he says a city the size of Charlotte should have about 2,400 officers.

If you go by U.S.

Department of Justice data, based on Charlotte's population, we should have about 3,000 officers.

Now, in the city of Charlotte's budget, we have allocations for about 1,900 officers, but there's been a consistent 300 vacancy gap for the past two, three years.

So we're talking about we've got 1,600 cops on the street in Charlotte when we should have closer to 3,000.

So that's where a National Guard could potentially help.

National Guard is really good at stationary security, and that frees up the police officers to do their thing on the beat.

- Brooke, it's troops.

I mean, they're normal citizens.

They live among us National Guardsmen and women, but a couple of hundred years ago, it wasn't real cool to watch British troops march through our colonies, and it was a little bit different, a different time and era.

If you're a conservative, and you're calling for this and supporting it, how do you handle the philosophical side of this?

- Yeah, well, it's important to remember National Guard are essentially the militia of a state, and so it's not the federal government swooping in, and it is a request to Stein to do this.

However, even so, your point is well taken there, which is that this is not a state of municipal or city health when you would have to send in the National Guard to be able to bring back law and order, but crime is surging.

Charlotte experienced last year a 20-year high in violent crime.

I have a child that lives in Charlotte.

I don't want that.

I want better for Charlotte, but the long-term solution is more law enforcement on the ground that actually live there that are police officers.

National Guard could be a temporary solution for now, but it's not by any means the ideal.

- Maggie, I mean, you've worked on Democratic campaigns, progressive issues.

How do we bring this issue of policing, community safety, proper staffing levels of police stations, how do we bring this to the table in a way that Republicans and Democrats and Libertarians don't automatically side off into three different camps and just start attacking each other over their intentions?

- Well, this is definitely not the way to do that, because this is very politics-based, not evidence-based.

We've seen that the civilian policing is working.

Crime rates are down, actually, and I just think that we need to see more support for those police officers not having the federal government come in and camouflage.

- Colin, what's the deal with writing letters to the president, writing letters to Stein?

I mean, we're texting, we're calling.

It's symbolic, I know, but it does seem like a lot of letters are getting written.

- Yeah, and it's letters that are immediately released to the public and to the media.

It's designed to create a news story in ways that, you know, it's less of a story if you just put out a press release that says, "I'm mad about this."

If an elected official is telling another elected official, "Hey, we need you to step in, "and I'm putting this request in writing," then it becomes more of a story, and I think that's sort of the goal here.

You know, the timing of this was interesting.

It was a day or so after the municipal elections.

Charlotte, despite a lot of focus on the crime issues in Charlotte and some claims by Republicans that the Democratic leadership of the city is being too soft on crime, Democrats did really well in the elections there.

I think the only Republican that won was unopposed.

So the voters there, if this is an issue for them, it wasn't an issue that caused them to wanna go in a totally different direction in terms of city leadership, but certainly for Republicans, the crime issue continues to be a potent one, and the situation in Charlotte is giving them sort of ammunition to pursue this issue further.

- Andrew, but Charlotte did vote.

Local voters elected a city council.

There's a 300 employee gap.

Just what, four or five years ago, lessening the power of the police in local, especially larger cities, was a dominant issue that helped people get elected.

Did Charlotte not vote for this?

- Honestly, I can't tell that crime made any waves at all in the local election.

In Charlotte, we hold our municipal elections in the off years, and so historically, it's been a great opportunity for candidates to kinda get their own message out there and not get drowned out by what's happening nationally.

This is the first time where there was just no opportunity for Republican candidates to get any sort of message out on their own, and people just voted purely based on national partisanship.

- How askew can city, I'll throw this out here, and I don't know who will jump in, but how askew can local politics be if local politicians act like many Congress members, many US senators, many presidents, federalizing the idea of a local race?

- It gets really tricky, 'cause the stuff they're actually dealing with is often not political at all.

That's part of why we do have nonpartisan races in a lot of the local elections.

- They are nonpartisan.

- But the parties are endorsing, and you see that effect, but at the same time, on the ballot, at least in theory, and it's because a lot of times, the factions on a city council are about growth.

Do you want more housing?

Do you wanna slow the growth?

But at the end of the day, enough voters are going out there and simply saying, "I wanna support Democrats," or "I wanna support Republicans," that it's hard for there to sort of be the consequences for whatever the actions that were taken by the town board, or city council on a specific actual local issue.

- Brooke, I wanna ask you about North Carolina Attorney General Jeff Jackson.

He's now filed, joined another lawsuit against FEMA on allegations FEMA withheld funding for hurricane recovery efforts in western North Carolina, as well as some homeland security operations.

Attorney General Jackson seeks the release of $17.5 million in stalled funding.

It does appear FEMA has withheld funding, and North Carolina approves its new population totals, to I guess adjust the census to remove those who have been deported.

The feds also changed a rule requiring the state to spend relief funding in one year, not over a three-year span.

Jackson says it's impossible to comply because even a business-focused, conservative government in D.C., they can't move fast enough to handle spending money in one year, they need three.

Where does he have a point, where does he not?

- Yeah, I think we're maybe needing to look at this at a little higher level here, which is why do we need the federal government so heavily involved, what reforms could actually be made so that the state of North Carolina, or the state of Hawaii, is better prepared to respond to those disasters without having to be so reliant on the federal government for this.

I believe the federal government has a role, to be sure, in disaster relief.

However, when you think about this, the over-dependence on the federal government, the Center for Practical Federalism at SPM, where I'm at, they just released a report where it shows that North Carolina is reliant on 36% of its revenue to come from the federal government.

We're in the longest government shutdown in history right now, and so the fact that we are so reliant on D.C.

for essential services and aid like this is a larger problem that I think we really need to get at.

And so I hope they sort out the FEMA thing, especially during hurricane season, but I think there's the larger question here of what's the actual role of the federal government versus the state on this?

- And why does FEMA have such a big role in parceling out the money?

Once Congress has said North Carolina needs this money, why are the feds not trusting North Carolina state agencies to handle it responsibly and get it out quickly as opposed to going all of these layers of red tape every single time we have a hurricane?

- Maggie, all this issue, we've covered it on this show for over a year now, it's always been, well, the bureaucracy is slow, no matter who takes control of the levers of federal government.

How much of this, in your opinion, might be politics installing that money versus just government being what federal government does, which is it's slow, but it has a lot of money?

- Well, I think that this is a case where politics really isn't playing a role.

It's more so about making sure that there's predictability so that those funds that have been allocated can be used.

A decision was made overnight to change it from three years to one year, and that creates real problems, and it creates problems for the people that we're relying on to be there for us during a natural disaster.

They need predictability, and this is not doing that for them.

- I'll respectfully disagree a little bit.

I think that this is entirely political.

To be honest, it's been hard for me to keep track of all the different lawsuits that Attorney General Jeff Jackson has filed against the Trump administration.

It's kind of been his brand in the first year that he's been in office, is he's the anti-Trump crusader.

I think it plays well on the Democratic donor circles, but I'm not sure it really moves the needle for public safety in North Carolina.

- Will it move the needle to get $17 1/2 million released more quickly to North Carolina?

- Probably not.

I mean, maybe, but.

- So where does this go?

How long does Helene, as an issue, is it able to stay, Brooke, at the forefront of North Carolinians' thoughts?

That it even gets an article on page two of the proverbial newspaper.

- Yeah, well, I think, especially when you're just looking at the political calendar and the hurricane calendar here in North Carolina and across the Southeast, that's certainly going to be a factor.

But I would say, if we consider even hurricanes Matthew and Florence, those continue to make their political rounds in North Carolina.

So I think as long as North Carolinians are feeling the effects in certain districts and hurting from these recovery stalls, or incompetencies from government agencies, it should at least still continue to take a front seat in a lot of ways.

- Colin, how do we, we're gonna be voting for a US Senator here soon, and one's gonna be blamed for not helping Western North Carolina fast enough, and the other one, the Democrat Cooper's gonna say he forgot Eastern North Carolina during what, 2017, 2019?

- Yeah, both of these guys, there's legitimate criticism to be leveled against both these guys on how well they've handled this kind of thing.

And at the same time as that, you've got, with this new gerrymandered political maps, the most competitive congressional district, it's still not super competitive, is Western North Carolina, where Representative Chuck Edwards, Republican, is seeking re-election.

So you could see that become a big issue for that race if that ends up being the only potential, you know, flipped seat for Democrats coming in the congressional side.

- Well, we can file lawsuits, Andrew, we can write letters to Donald Trump in DC and all that, or you can do what the Lumbee did this week.

They somehow, someway, by boat, plane, car, they went to DC and appeared before the US Senate.

The Senate's Committee on Indian Affairs is considering extending full federal recognition with all benefits to the Lumbee tribe.

Congress recognized that tribe, the Lumbee, in the 1950s, for some reason withheld those full benefits.

If you've ever wondered what those benefits might be, how about the right to self-govern as a nation and to receive federal funds for a variety of projects which other tribes qualify as nations, but they do not, Colin.

How important was it for the Lumbee to be seen in person before that committee?

- I think this is a big step for them to have such a big contingent showing in Congress at the same time, you know, their rivals are the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians on the other side of the state who are adamantly opposed to them getting this recognition status.

They make claims about their heritage not being the same authenticity, I guess, maybe is the best word to describe the critiques there.

- So you had the leader of the Cherokee there and the leadership of the Lumbee tribe sort of duking it out in front of a very powerful, you know, congressional committee over who legitimately is American Indian and should be recognized federally as such and have all those benefits.

And certainly that's been this big touch point.

It'll be really interesting to see how Congress shakes out and if the opposition to the Lumbee that sort of stymied this for so many years is starting to erode a little bit.

- Maggie, I must say, who in the U.S.

Senate have the authority, the positioning to look at two different tribes and say, well, one is more authentic or less authentic than the other?

I couldn't imagine the deliberation.

- Yes, that definitely would be a challenge, but you know, it's interesting in that the last, you know, Donald Trump in the last election, he was in support of it.

Joe Biden did the same thing.

So there has been a lot of support across the board.

It's just, it's never made its way all the way through.

So it'll be interesting to see how that all shakes out.

- Brooke, I am interested in this issue as an outsider looking in, because the congressional delegation of Democrats, Republicans in the West, you know, the Cherokee are out there.

They represent them.

So it's a little bit of a different vibe than asking Congress, congressional representatives of Eastern North Carolina about Lumbee recognition.

Is this performative like so many other issues or do you think the Lumbee may have made a difference by appearing in front of the Indian Affairs Committee?

- Yeah, well, I just think about the changes that we have seen in the Lumbee voting block in North Carolina since 2016.

The Robeson County area and its surrounding areas went for Trump in 2016, '20 and '24 with 63% of them voting for Trump in 2024.

So this political shift paired with the movement you're actually seeing on Congress is there is something different about it this time.

- It's also notable that the Trump administration has tapped former Representative Lowry to a high level post in the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

So that might be a better indication that something might actually move.

- What can Jared Lowry do there?

Former state representative from Robeson County, brother took his seat here in Raleigh.

So the Lowry family well represented in the halls of power, but can he make a difference as an appointee versus leaning on Tillis or Ted Budd or other Congress members?

- No, I think it's more symbolic than actually having somebody in a position of power to make the change himself.

I think it's a symbolic representation that this administration is taking it seriously.

- What could happen to the economy of Southeastern North Carolina if the Lumbee can self-govern as a nation as opposed to a tribe?

- I mean, it's huge.

I mean, you drive out to Cherokee in North Carolina and they've got a massive sort of casino resort complex.

They've recently got into the marijuana business and are making a lot of money for that.

They have really great healthcare for their people.

This is something that the Lumbee would like to have a piece of and certainly Robeson County where the Lumbee are headquartered is one of the poorest areas of the state.

- Worth the fight, you would say.

- I would think so for them.

- Maggie, politically in the Democratic and Republican retail politics, is it best that the parties just sort of stay out of this and see what happens?

How do you handle it?

- Well, they haven't stayed out of it.

They've gotten involved, but it's a difficult issue and I think it's just gonna have to let it see how it plays out.

- Could something happen during this, whatever a session means anymore?

Is this a near-term thing or was this a long-term play for them to appear before Congress?

I'm not sure how recognition works in terms of legislation.

- They've been working on this since 19, well 1910 actually, maybe even 1880.

There's been, there's a long arc of the Lumbee Indians trying to get this recognition.

And so there's the political side of this, there is the economic side of this between the Cherokee Indians and the Lumbee.

And so there are so many different layers to this, it's hard to, I think, unpack in just a short time.

- Yeah, it's extremely complicated.

There's basically two ways you can go about getting federal recognition.

One is through an application process and the Lumbee are saying, well that takes 20 to 30 years to work your way through the bureaucracy.

But then the other way is through an act of Congress.

So I think they're hoping that'll go quicker.

- Be an interesting issue and something we'll be tracking here at State Lines and through my colleague David Hurst, maybe take a look at it.

He's the reporter and does a great job.

So we'll check on that, that's a good issue.

How about local elections?

That was a big issue.

Most of us ignored it, didn't go out and vote.

I hope you did.

It happened earlier this week.

At the high level Charlotte voters, you approved the 1% transit tax.

The News and Observer reports that Democrats dominated non-partisan races across Wake County towns.

Wake Forest, North Carolina's mayor lost re-election and went public saying political parties, Maggie, are now getting involved in local races.

So to your point, you have at least one person down in Fayetteville.

You said, to be perfectly transparent, you've been active in municipal races before.

Why are parties getting involved in quote, "non-partisan races"?

That seems to violate the rules.

- Well, the reality is Democratic parties have been involved in these municipal elections for quite some time now.

And it was a really good night for Democrats.

In addition to picking up, taking seats from red to blue in places like Fuquay-Varina, Burlington, Warsaw, we also were able to hold on to seats that were currently held, like in small towns like Oxford and Matthews.

So it was a good night.

And I think a couple things happened.

We actually did see larger turnout than we have seen in like 2023.

So that was a good thing.

And then I also think that you had a lot of Democratic enthusiasm that created a lot of that.

And then in addition, a lot of the unaffiliated or swing voters came out because they were upset about what's going on federally with what the Trump administration has done.

You know, they're still seeing things that are, things are costing more money.

The affordability issue has not been addressed.

And I think as a result, this is gonna give us an opportunity to play in seats where we may not have been able to play in before because we're seeing in election results that swing voters are listening to us.

- First and third district, you think for US House, do you think Democrats have a shot at stealing either or both of those in a year or so?

- You have, who knows?

We will see.

- That's not the answer.

I was looking for a hard core prediction.

Collin, you wrote about this this week.

I couldn't tell, some areas stayed Republican.

Some areas predictably went Democrat.

Wake County is gonna get bluer and bluer and bluer.

I couldn't tell from what I read across media.

Are some reporters just excited areas are already naturally becoming bluer?

Or was it really a wave?

Or in some ways, did voters turn out Democrats or turn in Democrats into office turning out Republicans?

I couldn't tell.

- I think there was a little of that.

The challenge for analyzing municipal relations, we didn't have any statewide stuff, is that every local issue, every local government has different issues.

The suburban town where I live, the candidates were all talking about approval for eight townhouses.

A lot of people are mad about it.

They don't want the townhouses.

So that motivated some of those voters and then they may have turned out for Republicans or Democrats as a result of that.

And then you had the parties mobilizing their people with ballots that said, or sample ballots that basically said, here are the Republicans or here are the Democrats, even if they're not labeled as such on the ballot.

But in terms of drawing big conclusions, I think it's pretty difficult for municipals in this state.

You almost can get better conclusions looking at just north of us in Virginia where there was a election for governor that gives you a better sense for sort of how things are shaking out on national issues.

- Senator Thom Tillis, they always catch him in the hall for an interview.

And he says, you know, the hockey puck will be 12 months down.

Today's today, we're worried about, skate to where the puck will be, as Wayne Gretzky said.

Is that true?

Can a lot happen in 12 months, put Republicans back in the driver's seat in terms of vibe and direction of electorate?

- Of course, I mean, lots can happen over 12 months.

But I think what we're seeing from the municipal elections in North Carolina, from the statewide elections in Virginia and New Jersey, is that there is, we appear to be headed towards a blue wave election in 2026.

It would be hard to argue against that.

I think for Republicans, what Republicans really need to do is get back to talking about the economy.

I mean, I haven't heard many Republicans talking about affordability over the past year.

You know, there's a lot of people having to defend tariffs when that's pretty clear that that ends up raising prices.

The message has kind of drifted.

- Brooke in Charlotte with that transit tax, it did vote Republicans and Democrats all the way pretty much.

But when it came to that transit tax, that was a lot closer to a lot of people, observers down there.

So people voted progressive, but they almost beat that transit tax, which had a lot of money and some very powerful people behind it.

- Yeah, well, you know, you have to think about these particular types of voters that show up for these elections.

They are definitely a higher type of engaged voter.

But I do think like whether it's the transit tax or the overall Democratic sweep that happened in Charlotte and even the Republican that is in office there in Charlotte oftentimes sides with Mayor Lyles.

So I think that overall, it just signals a deeper blue shift in Charlotte.

- Yeah, I mean, that transit tax is not a clean Republican and Democrat issue.

I mean, if you look at kind of the coalitions on either side, it's more of an establishment versus a populist type dynamic so the very progressive voters are against the tax saying that it doesn't do enough to help marginalized communities.

Then of course you have the farther right conservatives are also against any sort of tax increase.

So it's really those two groups together against your more pro-business moderate type voter.

And they were narrowly able to squeak out a win.

- Got a couple minutes left, Maggie.

I'll let you have this final topic.

Democrats in North Carolina's US House delegation, they're proposing mandatory transparency in any future state redistricting efforts through legislation.

Democratic Representative Deborah Ross is leading that effort through her house bill with others Don Davis is involved.

She says state Republican legislators in Raleigh quickly redrew the first and third US House districts with very little output or feedback.

The bill in the house, US House, would require public hearings, online streaming, 10 days of review before any new congressional district could be approved.

This Republican House, we know where this bill is heading, but the statement has been made.

What do you make of what Deborah Ross did laying down the marker now?

- Sure.

Well, this is actually the second time that bill has been introduced.

And it was in response to things like we saw in the redistricting where Republican strategist, Thomas Hoffler was, it was found that he was drawing districts with using racial data.

And all of that stuff was kind of done behind closed doors.

And then obviously this most recent October session where we saw that debate was limited, there was no public in, there was very little public input.

And it just creates an issue of when people don't know what's going on, a lot of bad things happen.

I do a lot of work with campaign finance.

And that is one of the things, like when we have that transparency and things that are going, it allows people, reporters like yourselves, to go and dig into things.

And that's exactly what we need in the redistricting process.

So I think it's a great idea and I would like to see it happen.

- Brooke, what state are we in if you're a Republican or Democratic voter?

Republicans clearly are politically rewriting districts.

And in California, they just, let's face it, they threw out independent redistricting because it didn't work.

- It's not how it works here in the United States.

It is so partisan.

And I think what we were talking about, the non-partisan elections, like just let's cut through the noise.

The reality is it's Democrat and Republicans in so many ways.

And so there really is, it's high time for redistricting reform here in North Carolina.

My former colleague, Andy Jackson at Locke, he's written about this numerous times.

There needs to be more transparency in this.

And the temperature needs to lower because the political winds always blow a different direction.

- They are blowing, Andrea.

What do you make of this issue?

Independent districting walks away from California at least until 2030.

I guess we'll reassess that.

But in North Carolina as well, it was a fast process to redistrict the first and third US House.

- It was.

And I don't think it was worth doing politically.

You asked earlier whether the first and third could go blue.

I think they absolutely could.

I mean, they're both R plus five districts now.

And in a blue wave election, those could both be at play and candidates will definitely matter.

I've argued in the past is that what we need in the North Carolina constitution is more guardrails on how lines can be drawn.

I don't really trust so-called independent redistricting committees, but we do need some more guardrails.

- 10 seconds and we'll wrap this show up, Colin.

- I mean, I'm all for more transparency, but at the same time, Republicans said exactly what they were gonna do.

They wanted to get another Republican seat and that's what they tried to do in this case.

So transparency may not change the actual actions and the redistricting actions.

- And thank you folks.

We're almost out of time.

Email statelines@pbsnc.org your thoughts.

I'm Kelly McCullen, see you next time.

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