OUTMANNED OLD PARTY

Not long ago, the Republican Party was a political force in Charlotte-Mecklenburg, exerting influence on budgets and policies even when they lacked majorities on the City Council and county commission. Those days have gone, and plans for the 2020 Republican convention collapsed. What happened—and what might make the pendulum swing back?

- GREG LACOUR

The longtime politician, a man who for years practically defined what it meant to be a Republican in Charlotte, ponderosa question: If you run again today, what do you think the result would be?

There’s a pause on the other end of the line. “It’d be a …” He chuckles. “Ah …,” he says, still thinking. “I could make it close. But it would be a very difficult race, and the only reason it’d be close is that the mayor’s elections are off-year elections.”

Pat McCrory would know. In another era, he won seven of them.

It seems contradictory: Charlotte agreed to host the 2020 Republican National Convention in an era when the Democratic Party dominates local politics as it hasn’t since the mid-1960s when the ideologies of the two national parties began to realign during, and largely because of, the civil rights movement.

Democrats have held a 9-2 majority on the Charlotte City Council since 2011, through five election cycles. The Mecklenburg County Board of Commissioners, which last had a Republican majority in 2004, in 2018 went all-Democrat, 9-0, for the first time in 54 years. (Some members of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education are Republicans, but school board races in Mecklenburg County are, like most nationwide and in North Carolina, nonpartisan.) The county’s legislative delegation consists of 12 representatives and five senators. Of the 17, 16 are Democrats.