Lisa Rab is a journalist in Charlotte. Her work has appeared in Mother Jones and The Village Voice. Reach her at [email protected]

Charlotte, N.C.—Sitting in a bar on the east side of Charlotte, Beth Hinson sips a can of Bud Light as she watches the men who want to be North Carolina’s next governor debate one another on a giant television screen. Nearby, a woman wearing a “You can pee next to me” button shares a table with a gay man in a cowboy hat who is running for the U.S. House. This is a debate-watch party organized by the left-leaning groups Greenpeace, Democracy NC, and Progress NC, but Hinson, a registered Republican, doesn’t seem out of place.

“I think a lot of what McCrory promised when he was running for the election [in 2012] was not what voters got,” she says.


Hinson supported Pat McCrory, the former mayor of Charlotte, when he ran for governor four years ago. Then she watched him eliminate tax incentives for the film industry and cut spending for education. Long before he signed House Bill 2, which allows private businesses to discriminate against LGBT people and requires transgender people to use the bathroom that matches the sex on their birth certificate rather the gender they identify with, she knew she could not vote to reelect him.

“The HB2 was just outright embarrassing,” she says. “I feel like he’s against business in North Carolina.”

Hinson, 39, is the kind of voter McCrory can’t afford to lose: white, female, college-educated, Republican. She’s also one of many people across the state’s political spectrum who are disappointed in a governor who ran as a moderate and then spent four years approving the Republican Legislature’s hard-right policies. House Bill 2 is the culmination of those policies. By damaging three things North Carolinians care about most—their national image as a progressive southern state, their ability to attract business and their beloved college basketball—the bathroom bill stoked anger many former McCrory supporters have felt for years.

Unaffiliated voters and moderate Democrats helped propel McCrory to office in 2012, and he needed their help. There are at least 644,334 more registered Democrats than Republicans in North Carolina, and roughly a third of all voters—more than two million people—are unaffiliated. CNN exit polls show McCrory won 62 percent of independents and a whopping 15 percent of Democrats four years ago. He even won the Democratic strongholds of Mecklenburg and Wake counties. But as Steven Greene, political science professor at N.C. State University, notes, “That Pat McCrory doesn’t exist anymore.”

In mid-October, Democrat Roy Cooper had a razor-thin lead over McCrory in the RealClearPolitics average of polls, but he has been in the lead since late August. The presidential race in North Carolina is easier to call, with the average of polls showing Hillary Clinton ahead of Donald Trump by 2.5 percentage points—but still within the margin of error. If Democrats can hold onto that narrow split in opinion, they can win through turnout, says veteran Democratic political strategist Brad Crone. It may also help that disenchanted Republicans such as Hinson—who voted for Mitt Romney four years ago—are planning to vote for Clinton.

In the meantime, McCrory, to the amazement of many, continues to defend HB2, a measure that more than 55 percent of likely North Carolina voters want repealed, according to an October poll conducted by Elon University. And, as if to confirm the disregard he has for his former coalition, McCrory is more than happy to say nice things about Donald Trump, the increasingly toxic candidate at the top of his ticket, whom he calls a “role model” who says “things that need to be said” on issues such as Syrian refugees. Playing to a conservative base might not be enough to help him. “That could be a very lethal strategy, because the base isn’t going to elect you,” Crone says. “You’ve got to get beyond the base.”

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When “Mayor Pat” won the governor’s mansion in 2012, he broke what was known as the “Charlotte curse.” Four of the city’s previous mayors had tried to win statewide office, only to be turned away because they weren’t humble or hard-nosed enough to appeal to the state’s more rural districts. McCrory had far more charisma than his Democratic opponent and, on the strength of his support for mass transit and a generally pro-business pragmatism, pulled together a coalition of urban Democrats and independents as well as the more conservative Republicans who long harbored suspicion of big-city politicians. When he beat his opponent by a whopping 11.5 percentage points, voters thought they knew what they were getting.

Over 14 years as a mayor of solidly Democratic city he had developed working relationships with people such as Lee Myers. A moderate Democrat and the former mayor of Matthews, a suburb east of Charlotte, Myers voted for McCrory for governor twice—once when he lost in 2008, and again when he won in 2012. “We agreed on most issues, and we were willing to sit down and work with him,” Myers recalls.

Now Myers barely recognizes the man. “I don’t know what happened to Mayor Pat McCrory,” he says. “I’m not sure the guy in Raleigh is really Mayor Pat McCrory.”

His main complaint is that during McCrory’s tenure, the state legislature has repeatedly tried to tell local governments what to do. In 2013, the General Assembly voted to take control of Charlotte-Douglas International Airport from the city and give it to a separate, regional authority. A year later, a judge granted the city’s request to permanently block the management change, and the Federal Aviation Administration upheld that decision.

Since 2013, the Republican-led legislature has pushed a raft of measures that prompted statewide protests and national criticism: passing a law requiring voters to show photo ID at the polls (which was later struck down by the courts); refusing to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act; slashing unemployment benefits. And McCrory followed his party’s lead. “They’ve pushed him to be more conservative than is his ilk,” says Susan Roberts, associate professor of political science at Davidson College.

The governor’s also faced criticism for budget cuts at the state’s renowned public university system and for how little North Carolina pays its public school teachers. Despite recent raises, last year the National Education Association ranked North Carolina 41st in the nation for average teacher pay.

His environmental record is another point of contention. McCrory, who worked for Duke Energy for nearly three decades, has given the utility several years to clean up its coal ash pits, some of which are leaking cancer-causing chemicals into drinking water supplies around the state. Some residents are still using bottled water more than a year after they were notified of the danger.

But the HB2 controversy propelled him into a particularly unflattering national spotlight. In February, Charlotte passed an ordinance that extended discrimination protections to LGBT people and allowed transgender people to use the bathroom of their choice. House Bill 2 overturned that rule and went much further, allowing private businesses to discriminate against gay and transgender people and prohibiting cities and counties from passing measures to protect them. “We’re punching on local people,” Myers says. “I’m tired of it. I’m fed up with it.”

Thomas Clark, a retiree who lives in a small town southeast of Raleigh, says McCrory’s administration has “sort of been one disaster after another”—from education funding to racially gerrymandered voting districts, House Bill 2, and “the denial of environmental science.” Clark has voted Republican or independent his whole life. Not this year.

“I think McCrory’s done a terrible job with HB2,” he says. “I’m gonna vote for Cooper.”

“The city of Charlotte solved a problem that didn’t exist,” he explains. “The legislature solved a problem that didn’t exist. It’s a tempest in a teacup.”

Clark doesn’t want taxpayer money used to defend a bill the federal government says violates the Civil Rights Act. In June, the state legislature designated $500,000 from the state’s disaster relief fund to cover the cost of defending House Bill 2 against multiple lawsuits. McCrory said he would use funds from other government sources instead, but it’s unclear how much has been spent so far. “The government of North Carolina is spending millions of dollars defending an indefensible position,” Clark says. “They’re going to lose. The feds are going to shut it down.”

Clark’s frustration extends to the national political scene as well. When asked about the presidential race, he sighs heavily. “A year ago, I could not have imagined that I would vote for Hillary Clinton,” he says. But Donald Trump “scares the hell out of me.”

So now he’s a Republican in a defiantly swing state, preparing to vote for Democrats at the top and bottom of the ballot. He says his daughter put it best when she told him: “My Republican Party has failed me. They’re not the Republican Party that I know. The nut jobs have taken over.”

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In early August, McCrory still had a good chance of winning. He was slightly ahead in the average of polls (his lead was just 0.3 percentage points, but it was holding steady), and he could brag about achievements such as lowering the corporate tax rate and unemployment. But the tide began to shift in September, when the NCAA and ACC canceled their college sports events in North Carolina because of HB2. They joined a long list of companies and entertainers that had protested the bill, from PayPal’s decision not to bring 400 jobs to Charlotte to the NBA’s announcement that it would move its 2017 All-Star Game out of the state. Estimated economic losses from canceled conventions, sports events, concerts and jobs would soon top $200 million.

Republicans in tight reelection contests around the state started calling for House Bill 2 to be repealed. “I don’t believe that anyone could foresee what this was going to do to the economy of North Carolina,” says state Senator Tamara Barringer, who represents the booming Raleigh suburb of Cary, whose population has exploded in recent years with an influx of people from other states and countries. In Wake County, which contains Cary, more than 34 percent of voters are registered unaffiliated. Barringer voted for House Bill 2, but in September, in the middle of a tight reelection campaign against a Democrat who opposed the bill, she became the first Republican legislator to call for the bill’s repeal. “It is our responsibility to fix this.”

Chambers of commerce in Charlotte, Raleigh and Cary joined the cry for repeal. “As a result of HB2 and national reaction to it, Cary is experiencing unnecessary economic losses from delays in business expansion, difficulties in attracting new businesses, and most recently the loss of hard-earned NCAA and ACC Championships,” the Cary Chamber of Commerce said in a statement. “As a former NCAA Championship Community, one of only six that were recognized nationwide, Cary is faced with losing our identity as a premier sports destination, a recognition that has been a key attraction for new residents and businesses.”

Instead of backing down in the face of such criticism, McCrory insisted that HB2 could be repealed only if Charlotte first repealed its nondiscrimination ordinance—a bargaining ploy the city refused to accept. By early October, the price McCrory was paying was clear. The governor sounded desperate when he spoke at an event hosted by the Family Research Council in Raleigh. “The head of Bank of America now, or some other companies that just this week told me they cannot support me—although you’ve been an outstanding governor, we still cannot support you because [the Human Rights Campaign] will attack us,” he said, according to a recording obtained by BuzzFeed. “And I’ve had at least five this week tell me that.”

The state’s electorate has changed in the four years since McCrory took office. Unaffiliated voters are the fastest-growing group—more than 345,000 of them have joined the voter rolls since 2012—and at least half of them moved from outside the state. (Locals, only partly joking, say Cary stands for Containment Area for Relocated Yankees.) This is why some political observers say unaffiliated voters will be the key to deciding McCrory’s fate. They are disproportionately white, educated and young (their median age is 43). About two-thirds of unaffiliated voters live in urban areas of the state, says David McLennan, visiting professor of political science at Meredith College in Raleigh. If they turn out to vote, he says “these unaffiliated voters could really shift the election to Roy Cooper.”

Ansley Rawlins, 29, is among those who are planning to show up at the polls in Charlotte. She’s registered unaffiliated, and is a former Bernie Sanders supporter who now plans to vote for Roy Cooper and Hillary Clinton. “I align mostly with the Green Party on most things,” she says. But “I’d rather have someone who’s at least somewhat liberal.”

There’s another big bloc of unaffiliated voters, which provides a counterweight to the liberal transplants. They’re the retirees living in the mountains or coastal areas of the state, often in Republican strongholds. They tend to favor lower taxes and care less about social issues such as HB2, McLennan says. And they could swing the election for McCrory. In the October Elon poll, unaffiliated voters appeared to be evenly split, with 51 percent supporting Cooper and 49 percent favoring McCrory. Twelve percent of Democrats—a decent number but fewer than the 15 percent he captured in 2012— said they would vote for the governor.

Back at the debate watch party in Charlotte, moderator Chuck Todd hammers McCrory over HB2, asking him where Caitlyn Jenner would shower if she visited the state. McCrory says that if Jenner ran on the track at UNC-Chapel Hill, “She’s going to use the men’s shower.”

The governor also calls Trump a role model during the debate, saying he “does stand strong on certain issues that need to be said.” In doing so, McCrory aligns himself with a presidential candidate who has played to his base and ignored moderates in his own party.

It’s a strategy that won’t help the governor with voters like Beth Hinson. “Shame on me for voting for him,” she says.