Politico: “The road to political morass began six years ago in North Carolina, when national Republican donors and strategists launched a concerted effort to create a bulwark against the emerging multiracial, center-left coalition that swept Barack Obama into the White House. They sank millions of dollars into cheaply bought local and state races, seizing control of the statehouse for the first time since a now-unrecognizable Republican Party that supported racial integration and voting rights for African-Americans held it during Reconstruction.”
“Because 2010 happened to be a once-a-decade redistricting year, the new Republican majority gerrymandered districts in which Democrats couldn’t win—which resulted in ever-more-hardline conservatives winning primaries in each election. A Southern economic powerhouse once known for a careful, if awkward, political balance (from 1999 to 2003, the state’s voters sent both John Edwards and Jesse Helms to the U.S. Senate) became a conservative lab experiment.”
