- [Kelly] Attorney General Jeff Jackson joins the lawsuit to delay a food benefit shutoff, and legislative Republicans' new congressional districts are also headed to court.

This is State Lines.

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♪ - All right, welcome back to State Lines, everyone.

I'm Kelly McCullen.

Got a raucous crowd in here in the studio.

I want you to pull up a chair and join me.

We're going to hear the wisdom of the News and Observer's Dawn Vaughan is to my right today.

Hello, Dawn.

- Hello.

- Paul Shumaker of Capitol Communications and his counterpart, if you will, the loyal opposition, Morgan Jackson of Nexus Strategies.

Morgan, hello to you.

- Good to see you.

- Mitch Kokai, champion of free markets, and we'll see what else.

He's with the John Locke Foundation.

Good to have you back, my friend.

- Thank you, sir.

- Well, not a lot of action in Raleigh, but yet still tons of action based out of Raleigh and in D.C.

Let's start with our Attorney General Jeff Jackson.

He is joining that lawsuit of the federal government to stop a planned halt to food benefits payments.

The pause in SNAP benefits is linked to the ongoing federal government shutdown.

Attorney General Jackson has joined with other Democratic attorneys general in asking courts to require that the feds use their reserve funds to maintain SNAP benefits.

About a million and a half North Carolinians receive SNAP payments to buy their groceries.

Mitch, pick this up from here.

This is a federal issue.

You've seen it on Fox and MSNBC, but this one comes directly home.

- Well, in this case, what you have is something that you're seeing that has become increasingly commonplace is that when there is a Republican administration, the Democratic attorneys general band together and sue over various things that are done, just as when there's a Democratic administration, Republican attorneys general band together and sue over policies they don't like.

It'll be interesting to see where this goes because it's done to some extent because they actually believe that they have a strong legal case.

It's also done to some extent as political theater.

One of the abbreviations of AG is attorney general, another one is almost governor, and almost all of these attorneys general are thinking about when they're gonna run for governor, and I suspect that that is true with our current attorney general as well.

- Morgan, you work with Attorney General Jeff Jackson.

Helped him out a time or two, I do believe, on the campaign trail.

Nothing cynical about that, right?

He's putting his face out there as the front of the SNAP benefits debate in DC.

Is Mitch right?

- Listen, Attorney General Jackson has been very clear that when federal government policies are gonna hurt North Carolinians, he's gonna take action, and when you've got almost 1.5 million North Carolinians who receive food assistance every month, some sort of benefit every month, and you have to stand up, you have to fight for it, and listen, it's a bipartisan issue.

Look at what's happening in Congress right now.

You've got somebody who's the one of the most conservative Republicans in Senator Josh Hawley, who's trying to put amendments on the floor to pay SNAP benefits now, even with a shutdown.

So I think what people recognize is people will go hungry because of this, and it's one thing for a program not to be funded because there's a fight in DC, but it's another thing to starve people, and I think the other thing that most people realize is that SNAP benefits, the large majority of them outside of the elderly and children, these people are working people who don't make enough money to ultimately afford groceries for their family, and we shouldn't let people starve, and that's what AG is saying, is the federal government has the money in reserve, keep SNAP benefits flowing, keep food in these families' mouths.

- Paul?

- Smart politics on part of the Attorney General.

In fact, I mean, one of the things that in the political world you look for are good kitchen table issues.

This is a kitchen table issue because it impacts what goes on the kitchen table, and at the same time, when we're going into the holiday season and we're getting ready to go, the money's been appropriated, the money is there, and the shutdown is holding it up, and so this is now starting to hit home, and it's smart politics on the part of the Attorney General.

- Who wins the debate ultimately?

This is clearly now defined as winners and losers.

Compromise is a loss anymore.

To get this government up and running, and SNAP is a symptom, it's not the disease.

- Ultimately, I think Republicans pay a bigger price than Democrats, and for the very simple reason you have a Republican president, you got Republican control of the House, you got Republican control of the U.S.

Senate, and the average voter sees Republicans in charge, and right now, government's not functioning, so it doesn't really matter who you want to blame or who you want to point the finger at.

The reality is people know they're not getting their benefits, people know they're not getting what they're depending on.

As Morgan said, you know, for their own livelihood, for their own nutrition at home, not to go and discount when you have a lot of single moms who are out there trying to buy a baby formula.

And so ultimately, Republicans are going to pay the price for the shutdown, and I think we've seen that start to carry out today with overnight, the president coming out calling for do away with the filibuster.

Yeah, we need to get it.

You know, you're going to see Republicans pay that price.

- Dawn, Attorney General Jackson does seem to get more headlines when he goes head into a battle with the Trump administration versus he keeps his, seemingly keeps his powder a bit more dry when dealing with these state legislators.

I've noticed that.

Is that an accurate observation?

- Probably.

He put a video out, too.

He's, you know, good for that, known for that, too, as far as explaining things plainly, and I think this really, you know, as everyone has said, kind of, you know, just set the table for what Attorney General Jeff Jackson can do.

I thought it was funny that Mitch said AG for almost governor in North Carolina lately.

That would probably be the state auditor, I guess, maybe not as much AG with the way things are going.

But yeah, and I think Paul's right that the, you know, Republicans control the federal government.

This is their problem to solve.

The details, the, you know, average person doesn't care.

They just want you to fix the problem, and SNAP is something that - it's huge.

I mean, food, people being hungry, like there's, you know, really no way of trying to paint that as anything than what it is.

People need food.

- Morgan, with this idea of Donald Trump calling for an end to the filibuster, if your team just sits back, will Trump just embrace a lot of these Democratic ideas for certain economic and political policies and process changes that were such, quote, "bad ideas" when Joe Biden was president, now great ones?

- I think that anybody who pretends that they can predict what Donald Trump is going to say or do on any day is lying.

He's a guy who is 180 degrees one day today and 180 degrees a different way tomorrow, so who knows?

But listen, it's clear.

This is ultimately Trump's shutdown, is he controls D.C.

The House and Senate do what he wants them to do.

They don't push back on funding mechanisms.

When they fund things and he stops paying it, they just allow it to happen.

This is Trump's shutdown.

He's trying to find a way out of it.

- Well, the stoppage of the food stamp payments has really escalated the pressure.

As Paul said, we're asking, will the Democrats or Republicans pay the price for this?

Well, Thom Tillis was asked about that on Capitol Hill.

Here's what he had to say earlier this week.

- The Democrats have made a mistake by shutting down the government, and I'm still encouraging my colleagues, my retiring colleagues, my colleagues that are not up until 2030, come in, the water's fine.

Voting to fund the government's not nearly as politically devastating as it seems to be.

I'm somebody who likes to get out of the gridlock, but this is one where I think the Democrats own it and Republicans should stay firm.

- Mitch, I will say this.

I'm supposed to be objective.

That man looks relaxed, as relaxed as a U.S.

Senator can be right now.

- And he probably is, because he knows he doesn't have to run for re-election again.

He can say what he wants, say what he thinks.

And in this case, this feeds into something that we've been talking about, that this is the Republicans' situation to own, and one of the reasons is because if you have to tell people that, well, in the Senate we can't pass this unless we get some Democrats on board and we need enough of them because of the filibuster, once you start explaining that, you've lost it.

People are not going beyond the fact that Trump is the guy in charge, and the House and the Senate, the Republicans in charge there, seem to be doing his bidding.

If Trump's in charge, Congress is doing his bidding, and they can't get this done, it's their problem.

Thom Tillis is actually making a very clear, cogent argument about the Democrats in the Senate who will not go along to help break a filibuster, but that's an inside baseball argument that's not going to convince the people who are really feeling pain right now.

- Morgan, on this debate, you're running the Cooper campaign, but as an issue, are SNAP benefits important?

What would cause voters to wake up?

SNAP benefits versus military pay in North Carolina.

- A lot of the stuff, and Mitch is right, a lot of this is process, it's inside baseball.

What matters to people is what actually affects them.

Paul talked about kitchen table issues, he's dead on right about that.

It is when your paycheck doesn't show up, when your food assistance money doesn't show up, that alters the way that you act as a family and the things that you have access to, it's a problem.

Listen, we're already living in a world where the price of everything is too much and continues to go up.

What the government should be focused on right now if you ask individual voters is lowering prices, shutting down the government, and whether it's stopping SNAP benefits or stopping different kind of pay that's going to go out, or ultimately killing the subsidies in the Affordable Care Act is causing health insurance premiums to triple and quadruple for people.

My point of that is the government shutdown is continuing to make prices worse, which politically makes it worse for Republicans because they could, again, as everybody said, have to own the shutdown in people's eyes because you can't explain your way out of it.

The government needs to be making things easier for people.

What the government's currently doing is making things harder, and that's a problem.

- We're at the first of November of this year.

By next year, what do voters think about this shutdown?

Of course, there'll be a deal done before that.

- Well, it's not going to be in the forefront next year, year from now.

I think what you got to look at right now is there's a price to be paid by both sides here.

First of all, the shutdown highlights the dysfunctionality of government.

It highlights the dysfunctionality of both sides.

I think the real impact that you're going to see here is going to be what happens in primaries.

For instance, on the Democrat side, the Democrats have drawn a line of sand.

They're saying, "We're not going to come back."

Senator Tillis is right.

The shutdown is because Democrats want to extend temporary subsidies that were COVID-era subsidies that they enacted as temporary.

They want to extend those.

They're drawing this line in the sand.

What's going to happen is that if they compromise with Republicans, they're going to open the door for more of the radical left, like what we're seeing taking place in New York, to start to dominate in the primaries.

Same thing on the Republican side is that Republican primaries are going to be coming up.

The question is going to be how does this impact those primaries, and who are the quality candidates moving forth?

The end result is what's taking place right now is the shutdown is highlighting the dysfunctionality, which leads to the disgust that the middle swing voters in a pivotal state like North Carolina, what they have with the process.

That's why we continue to see both parties' market share stabilize or decrease, while unaffiliateds who have no party chair, who have no elected leadership, continue to increase.

- Let's look at that third, and was it the first and third congressional district.

One's a little more Republican, one's less Republican, but like he says, with swing voters, do you see any issue affecting decisions of who may run in those two races and re-establish those two congressional districts?

- There is something to be said.

You're talking about the primaries, and when elections come, and the timing of what the big issue is, and if everybody is mad at Congress, they might be especially mad at the people that are in Congress now, right?

And if they're running and they want some sort of change, someone with other ideas, I think people have a limited amount of patience for the excuses and the complaining about the other side, and at some point you need to, if you're not actually able to solve the problem, that you have enough ideas that could solve the problem, and if that messaging gets through to people that, you know, if this person goes to Washington or stays in Washington, that they're actually going to work for me, that they're going to solve my problems.

- All right, Paul, we'll come back to you.

Let's talk about insurance.

North Carolinians, if you're buying insurance through the Affordable Care Act marketplace, you are seeing monthly premium hikes depending on the company you choose to use.

The insurance commissioner, Mike Causey's office, he signs off on the increases.

The office says it does not establish pricing.

It does ensure that rules are followed when companies make hike requests.

Extra federal subsidies that supported Americans through the COVID pandemic are expiring.

As we have discussed already, Paul, it's a key reason we're facing this federal government shutdown.

Take it to the state level.

State health plan, another Republican, Brad Briner, he came in and said, "We got to fix this.

Premiums are going up on state employees, deductibles and everything else also going up."

So, no one is immune.

And even you said backstage, health care costs going up every year on everyone.

- Absolutely.

Absolutely.

And in fact, I mean, it's not just going to be health care costs.

This is just another factor that's going to play heavy into the 2026 elections, and that is the economy.

It's not just the health care costs, the impact that it has.

It means people have less money to spend at home.

They have less disposable income as their premiums are going up.

Even employer subsidies are being decreased as other employees are being asked to pay more.

And so, the economic, what's going to determine outcomes going into 2026 is going to be not the numbers.

It's not going to be the arguments made about where the inflationary index is, whether the economy is doing well or not doing well.

It's going to be how people feel about their disposable income at home and what they have and able to spend.

Health care is a big bite.

As I told you backstage, I mean, my health care premiums are greater than any mortgage I've ever had on a house, okay?

And I'm privately employed, self-employed.

And so, it is a real, real, you know, it's a real life-impacting event, and it's only going to continue to become so.

- And to Paul's point, it's going to be important not to emphasize the numbers saying we've created this many jobs or the inflation rate is this.

It's going to be what people really feel.

Do they feel like their economic conditions are better than they were when they elected the crowd that's in office, or are they worse?

And if they feel that the conditions are worse, that's going to bode poorly for the people who are in power.

- I want to just show you the impact this has, and particularly the impact on health care premiums are going to impact dramatically in red states, by the way.

When you have Marjorie Taylor Greene coming out and wanting to say we have to do something about fixing this, we have to address this, we have to extend this, I mean, it shows you the extent and how deep that's going to run.

It's going to become a major problem.

Not just now, it's going to become into the future.

One of the things that's lacking on the Republican side, and I can take part of the responsibility to blame because I ran a lot of ads saying let's replace Obamacare.

We never had a plan.

Today, Republicans don't have a plan.

The fact of the matter is we're leading into a health care crisis, and neither side really has a sound physically responsible plan to address that.

- Dawn, take us to the Medicare debate, still short-funded in Raleigh.

So across the board, whether you can afford your own insurance or not, it seems the machine of health care is starting to misfire a bit.

- I think, I mean, you could have a lot of shows about, you know, all the problems with health care.

I think something especially important, I think we're all in open enrollment now, you know, like if you're looking at, you know, what you want for your coverage and generally do you want to buy the most expensive plan for the best coverage, and you've got to weigh what your decisions are about how much money is coming out of your paycheck for those on that kind of insurance.

But when everything else costs more, and now your take-home pay is even less because of whatever you're paying for health care or if you don't have it through your job, then it's all worse.

And then you see the federal government is shut down, and people can't even get the food that they need, and everything is so expensive.

Obviously, you're going to see it with are people going to buy things.

I'm interested to see how Christmas turns out this year.

Are people going to spend as much when your health care went up?

Everything you buy at the grocery store is more.

So how much of your spending is going to go for all these extras that, you know, our economy depends on?

- Morgan, this inflation debate and price increase debate, if you're a Republican, I remember they blamed Joe Biden's policies, government spending for inflating the economy.

It looks like it never got better, and it's just coming back cyclically to debate.

So Democrats had a shot stimulating the comedy -- the comedy?

- There's a comedy involved here!

[laughter] - Take me through this.

It seems it hurts worse when the other party that I don't like is in charge, therefore inflation is an issue.

But when my team is in power, it's not such a big deal.

- Listen, here's the facts, Kelly, is that no time in our, at no point in modern history in all of our lifetimes has the party in power not paid the price when voters have a high level of economic anxiety.

And that's whether, and we've seen it at different things.

It was inflation in 2024.

It is clearly an inflation in 2025.

We saw back in 2008, 2010, it was employment anxiety, that it was more coming from that angle than it was inflation.

And so I think it's a huge problem for Republicans, largely because they're in charge.

And it was a huge problem for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in '24 because they were in charge.

And voters punished them both in separate, separately and individually when they were running the top of the ticket for everything being more expensive.

And you know, now we're a year later and everything is way more expensive than it was a year ago.

And so, I mean, sort of second everything everybody said.

The one thing I want to come back to on health care is it is a crisis and it's a looming crisis that's going to get worse because you have to follow through.

So what happens is when premiums go up, healthy people drop out of the process.

Right?

They say, I can't afford those premiums.

I'm healthy.

I don't need it.

So they end up, when they have catastrophic things, going to the emergency room and that all gets spread to every other person.

But you end up losing access to health care because when people drop out of the process, then those that are still in it, their premiums continue to go up.

Everybody else who's in the health care marketplace goes up and we lose services.

And so as people lose services and don't have access to treatment, doctors move away, close practices.

And it is a bad cycle once you get in this.

And all of that, from the shutdown to the Medicaid jam that we are in in Raleigh right now and that not being fixed, is contributing to something that's going to continue to put pressure on health care prices to go up.

- You asked earlier about impacts in District 1 and District 3, and there is a danger for Republicans who redrew that congressional map.

They made District 1 more Republican, but in doing so had to make District 3 less Republican.

Both of them are still in a good place for Republicans in a normal year.

But if it's a really good Democratic year, really bad Republican year, both of those seats could go to Democrats and Republicans could end up losing.

- If I remember correctly, last time they redistricted, this was back when Representative Lewis was in charge of that in the House, they thought they had a Republican majority in the House congressional district, wound up 7-7.

Is that, is my memory failing me?

Or is that Democrats snuck in there and won some races?

- They ended up with 7-7 because of a court-ordered plan.

Okay, a court-ordered plan.

But the last time around, they did the 10-3 and 1 flip district, which ended up being 10-4.

Now they want to make it 11-3, but they could end up with 9-5 or even worse, potentially, if it's a really good year for Democrats.

- Here's the thing about the midterms we all need to understand.

Because, I mean, you have presidential elections, and we had a change of power, a different party takes over the White House.

But midterm elections are about failed expectations and anger management.

That's what they always come down to.

And that anger management in this case is going to be the unaffiliated voters, because they make up 40% of the voters.

Their swing voters, I call them ping-pong voters, they'll go for, they'll vote for one side, put one side in, and then that side reminds them what it is they didn't like about them, so they won't go turn around and vote them out.

But the fact of the matter is, is that the anger is not going to be managed by saying or making the case that the economy's doing better or you're doing better.

It's going to be driven by the emotion and the feel.

And that's the toughest part about this for Republicans, is that it's not about trying to convince people things are better.

They have to feel that it's better at the end of the day.

And they have a short window of time to do that.

They got 12 months to turn it around and make everybody feel better.

- And you think about it in '24, it's the same thing, is Biden would come out and show record high stock market, declining inflation, the highest GDP, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

But because people didn't feel it, it didn't matter what your statistics showed.

And the same, it's a bad cycle to get caught in, and that's where Republicans are right now.

- Morgan, can the federal government subsidize working people out of feeling the pain of deficit spending or whatever we're calling this cycle as we get towards 38 or go beyond $38 trillion in debt and all that?

- 100% they can.

The truth of the matter is, the reality for legislators and members of Congress is, voters don't really care about the debt anymore.

I mean, they should, but they don't.

What they care, and part of it is 'cause they're in crisis.

So many voters and their families are in a financial crisis of what they can't afford week to week, that they can't worry about the big global issue.

They're actually focused on, can I pay my grocery bill on Friday after I get paid, or can I afford health insurance, or can I afford for my kid to go to the movies?

And those are things that, when they're in those kind of crises, they can't scope out and look at the bigger, broader picture.

- And how would suddenly everything be affordable by the primary or a year from now?

We could have a Hooverville like a year from now.

There's no idea on how things could go.

- I understand the fundamental reason why we have the shutdown right now, and I call it a COVID hangover, all right, is that we had healthcare benefits extended, we had subsidies put into place during COVID that were supposed to be temporary.

We threw more money at the problem to keep economic stability, which was a good thing during COVID, and we had a lot of money pushed into the system.

That money is now evaporating, that money's now going out, just like with these subsidies were supposed to be suspended.

Now we're saying let's keep it.

So yes, we can spend our way out of this problem.

The only problem is we're kicking the can down the road to a bigger shutdown and a bigger physical crisis, a cliff that sooner or later we're going to have to come pay the price for.

- Got about two and a half minutes.

I want to touch on federal lawsuits being filed against North Carolina's brand new first and third congressional districts.

Those are over in eastern North Carolina.

Republicans shifted Republican votes into the first, created a Republican majority.

First District Congressman Don Davis is now in the third, if I got this correct.

One suit calls the redistricting an act of racial gerrymandering.

The other one is novel, Morgan.

It says it's a violation of free speech rights, it's political retaliation for electing a Black Democrat in the first district in 2024.

Very quickly, one's a novel legal argument.

We'll see how that goes.

- Listen, we've had a lot of novel legal arguments in North Carolina over the last 40 years.

We've sort of led the nation in redistricting and redistricting lawsuits.

At the core of this, the issue is you took a district, the first district to elect an African-American since reconstruction, and that has been represented by an African-American for the last 33 years in an area that is where there are historically these historic African-American communities in eastern North Carolina, and you split it in half.

These are things over the years that the courts have said you can't do.

Now, obviously, the U.S.

Supreme Court is also considering the Voting Rights Act as we speak on a separate issue that this will play into, but the courts will ultimately make a final decision on these districts as they have the last 10 times.

- We've got a minute to go around the horn.

Mitch, on this issue of the two district the lawsuits.

- Yeah, I think it's going to be interesting to see how this comes out.

Luckily, for all concern, what happened with these two suits is these are two suits that have already gone through a trial.

There's all kinds of evidence, so we don't have to start the whole process from scratch.

Basically, two sets of plaintiffs who already dislike the 2023 maps just say, "Well, we dislike this, and even more.

Let us challenge this one, too."

I think that will help simplify this process.

- Dawn, are voters paying attention in those districts yet?

Is it all just so much turmoil we'll just have to wait until next year from, I guess, a year from now?

- I don't know if the average voter knows the exact boundary of their district.

They do know that they have to look it up frequently because who represents them changes, but I think this is, every time there's a map, there's a lawsuit, and it was all getting ready as this was going on.

We still have a year.

We'll see what changes.

- 20 seconds, Paul, you'll close it out.

- More of a national narrative here.

It underscores the frustration that voters are going to have because of what's taking place on redistricting across the country, is that Republicans and Democrats can't make the government function.

They can't pass a budget, but they do know how to draw congressional lines to benefit both parties.

- And we'll leave it at that.

Thank you, folks, for watching us today.

Thanks to this panel, a great group of experienced talent right here.

Email us your opinions, though.

I know you have them, statelines@pbsnc.org.

We'll read them.

We'll share them.

I'm Kelly McCullen.

I appreciate you for watching, and I will see you next time.

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