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There was no joy in Reidsville.
At least not in the Penn House, the two-story brick Colonial Revival turned wedding reception venue that longtime state Senate leader Phil Berger’s campaign rented last Tuesday for his election night event.
To call it a party would abuse the term. There was no music or dancing. The open bar—beer and wine served in plastic cups—saw little use. The make-your-own “Burgers for Berger” table got more action.
About 100 guests, many in suits, milled about the room, conversation humming at a polite murmur. An exhausted-looking Berger, 73, shuffled in and out, sometimes chatting, occasionally smiling, often glued to his phone. A palpable uncertainty hung in the air.
Berger had spent a quarter-century in office without facing a serious political threat. But while he could point to a long record of conservative accomplishments, many activists viewed him as an insider beholden to deep-pocketed interests.
“He’s been in power so long, he’s become almost an emblem of the Republican political establishment,” said Carter Wrenn, a veteran GOP consultant. “And that’s not popular anymore.”
Berger fueled the fire by backing a doomed 2023 proposal to build a casino in deeply religious Rockingham County. The county’s popular, MAGA-aligned sheriff, Sam Page, challenged Berger in this year’s Republican primary for Senate District 26, which covers Rockingham and rural parts of Guilford County.
For a year, the bitter rivals had waged a battle royale. Berger’s machine likely spent more than $10 million on an unprecedented barrage of ads, while local allies turned a harsh spotlight on Page’s time in office. With far fewer resources, Page pitched his law-and-order background and attacked Berger as an insider who had sold out MAGA’s priorities.
The question was “polls versus vibes,” a Berger operative said early in the evening, before disappearing into a makeshift war room. Internal polls indicated that Berger had enough support in Guilford to win. But Page’s Rockingham supporters were more enthusiastic.
The margins came in as expected: Berger won Guilford 68% to 32%, while Page took Rockingham 67% to 33%.
At 11 p.m., the last precincts reported. Page held a two-vote lead.
Two votes. Out of 26,152. In the most expensive legislative primary in state history. (After provisional ballots were counted three days later, Page’s lead expanded to 23 votes.)
Page declared victory. “We just showed that money don’t win elections,” he told reporters. That was premature. A recount is almost certain, and litigation is possible.
No matter what happens, however, Berger has already lost.
The election shouldn’t have been close. Berger has been the state’s most powerful politician for 15 years. He entered the primary with every conceivable advantage: incumbency, money, key endorsements.
But instead of campaigning from a position of strength, his allies scorched the earth. They saturated the Triad with attack ads portraying Page as incompetent, corrupt, soft on immigration, and, at the end, falsely insinuating that he’d been accused of having sex with jail inmates.
Berger, meanwhile, clung to President Donald Trump to drag him across the finish line. Trump had endorsed Berger in December as an apparent reward for redrawing congressional districts to boost Republicans in the midterms. (Berger denied a quid pro quo.)
The campaign made a political giant look small. And he still only managed a virtual draw, while getting blown out in his home county, Rockingham.
Berger has little chance of a happy ending. If he emerges victorious after all ballots are counted, his win might tear the state GOP apart. For many Page supporters, a Berger victory would be proof that he cheated. Soon after the election, Page and his supporters cast doubt on the vote counters. The State Board of Elections denied that politics would affect the process, but that’s unlikely to assuage concerns about possible backroom machinations.
“We’re going to move right up the DEFCON scale,” said Brant Clifton, who publishes the hard-right blog The Daily Haymaker. “The county board of elections [in Rockingham] and the State Board of Elections are both heavily influenced by the Berger machine. You can understand how it would not be perceived as a fair process.”
Berger vs. the Base
Six years after Senate Republicans made Berger their leader in 2004, he led them out of a century-deep wilderness to the political mountaintop. It wasn’t all his doing, of course. The state Democratic Party assisted in its own immolation, and the 2010 Tea Party wave was a national phenomenon.
But Berger had overhauled his caucus’ approach to fundraising and candidate recruitment, and Republicans capitalized on the opportunity. After seizing power, Berger wielded it with relentless efficiency. Republicans slashed taxes, regulations, and unemployment benefits, restricted abortion, implemented school vouchers, and solidified GOP control over higher education, elections, and the judiciary.
“Senator Berger is the conservative movement in North Carolina,” said Brian Lewis, a lobbyist and host of the podcast Do Politics Better. “He is the reason they are running the legislative branch. He is the reason the courts are conservative right now. If you like conservatism, you like Senator Berger.”
But Berger became a victim of his own success, said Mitch Kokai, a senior political analyst at the conservative John Locke Foundation. As Republicans checked the major items off their agenda, base-pleasing policy wins became less frequent and more incremental.
“It’s a case of what have you done for me lately,” Kokai said. “To add to that, the things that you are hearing about the General Assembly lately haven’t been as positive. I mean, they can’t come up with a budget.”
The longer Berger remained Senate leader, the more cracks emerged. Immigration hardliners—including Page—were outraged that Berger overrode former Gov. Pat McCrory’s 2013 veto of an E-verify bill they thought was too lenient toward businesses that employ temporary workers. Social conservatives were angry that Berger repealed the so-called bathroom bill in 2017 amid a corporate backlash.
Others felt betrayed when Berger agreed to expand Medicaid in 2023 or thought he should have fought harder to expand gun rights or oppose vaccine mandates. Last September, Senate efforts to ban shrimp trawling and raw milk led the 3rd Congressional District Republican Party’s executive committee to pass a resolution condemning Berger.
Some of the flak was inherent to Berger’s position: A caucus leader can’t always cater to activists.
After the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade in 2022, Republicans passed a 12-week abortion ban. Many conservatives—and voters in Berger’s district—favored more restrictive measures. But Berger quashed those proposals to spare senators in swing districts a politically difficult vote, Lewis said.
“Senator Berger is the conservative movement in North Carolina.”
Brian Lewis, lobbyist
Other difficulties stem from the fact that the Trump era’s fiery populism isn’t Berger’s native language.
“Trump is a showman, and there are a lot of people in the Republican Party today who really like that,” Wrenn said. “Berger is not a showman. He’s more old-fashioned in that regard. He disagrees with Josh Stein, but he doesn’t call him a scumbag.”
The Senate leader has maintained a friendly relationship with Trump and avoided the president’s social media invectives. But Berger is, at heart, an institutionalist who is more at home with old-school, fiscal conservatives. At times, he’s kept his distance from Trump.
Berger told The Assembly after the January 6, 2021, insurrection that he didn’t want to be labeled a “full-throated Trump loyalist.” He also declined to endorse Trump ahead of North Carolina’s 2024 presidential primary.
Break the Wheel
Underlying the grassroots’ discontent is the sense that Berger has accumulated too much power. Legislation lives and dies at his whim. Friends and benefactors are rewarded; enemies are, if not punished, then left out in the cold.
Page told The Assembly in February that he’d be doing his fellow Republicans a favor by defeating Berger.
“By running and being elected in the Senate, even as a newcomer,” he said, “the thing about it is, it frees the membership up to basically be what they were elected to do, to represent the people in their district instead of following suit under one person.”
Berger’s tendrils reach deep into Raleigh’s political substrate. Phil Berger Jr. sits on the state Supreme Court. Berger’s daughter, N.C. Department of Labor general counsel Ashley Snyder, was formerly the state’s codifier of rules, an important but obscure regulatory post. At least seven former Berger staffers have high-profile roles in the state’s higher education system, as The Assembly reported last week. Berger alumni are also influential consultants for powerful political and business interests.
“A number of the groups that lobby the General Assembly for things that wouldn’t thrill conservatives have hired Phil Berger people as their representatives,” Kokai said. “So Phil Berger is hearing from his former staffers to do things that, regardless of whether they make sense policy-wise or not, they’re not appealing to the conservative base.”
One, Kokai said, was NCInnovation, a nonprofit to which the General Assembly awarded $500 million in 2023. Last year, the state House proposed clawing back that money, with critics complaining that the initiative represented government interference in the private sector.
“He’s been in power so long, he’s become almost an emblem of the Republican political establishment.”
Carter Wrenn, GOP consultant
Lawmakers have also passed legislation recently that benefited major contributors.
The Assembly reported in August that, months after Illinois-based RedSpeed deposited $220,000 into House and Senate Republican coffers, lawmakers passed a bill that could make the company millions. The News & Observer reported in October that lawmakers spent $15 million to help a Mooresville developer after his politically connected project manager donated $132,000 to key lawmakers, including more than $17,000 to Berger.
“The perception that hit Berger pretty hard was that he’s catering to these big-money PACs,” Clifton said.
Nothing cemented that perception like the casino.
In July 2023, Berger and then-Speaker Tim Moore unveiled legislation to allow a single company to open casinos in three rural counties, including Rockingham. Cordish Gaming Group, whose executives donated about $92,000 to Berger’s and other Republicans’ campaigns in 2022 and 2023, had already purchased 187 acres in Rockingham County via a proxy.
In August, the county’s board of commissioners—including Kevin Berger, the Senate leader’s son—rezoned the land over the objections of more than 800 residents, paving the way for a casino if the gaming bill passed.
House Republicans balked, and the casino proposal died in September 2023. But it had already damaged Berger in Rockingham County.
Page was the perfect foil. He’d led the casino opposition. He’d been a Trump supporter from the beginning and an anti-immigration crusader before that. Since becoming sheriff, he’d run for reelection six times without losing a precinct. He also cut a sharp contrast to the incumbent.
Berger is a politician, a lawyer fluent in complex policy, and the boss of a sprawling political machine. Page, like most Rockingham County residents, never went to college. Berger is often seen in dark suits. Page is known for his cowboy hats and jeans. Berger is reserved and spent much of the last decade in Raleigh, where he owns a downtown condo. Page is gregarious and ubiquitous at community events.
Page was, to many voters, outside of politics. Berger represented the wheel that many MAGA activists wished to break.
Trump’s Man in Raleigh
Page announced his campaign in February 2025. Two weeks later, Berger introduced the North Carolina Border Protection Act, which required state agencies to cooperate with the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
More red meat followed: Berger introduced bills to eliminate government jobs, ban diversity initiatives, and postpone a carbon-reduction deadline. He sponsored more legislation than he had in any session since he became Senate leader in 2011.
It was an unsubtle display for a typically behind-the-scenes operator.
In September, rumors swirled that Berger had cut a deal to redraw the state’s congressional districts, all but guaranteeing Republicans another seat, in exchange for Trump’s endorsement.
Berger denied speaking to Trump about an endorsement but said he was willing to redraw the map. In October, Berger did just that. Trump delivered the endorsement in December.
Berger’s campaign materials touted Trump’s “powerful endorsement of our own senator,” who had delivered “massive and historic MAGA victories.” “While Donald Trump looks out for us in Washington, Phil Berger fights for us in North Carolina,” a police officer said in one ad.
Another ad declared that “Phil Berger fought back” against the “radical left” that wanted “boys in girls’ sports and in their locker rooms,” echoing Trump’s 2024 campaign. Berger was “helping Trump stop illegals,” said a closing ad, which featured an elderly man in a garage holding a shotgun for no apparent reason.
Many activists weren’t swayed by Trump’s endorsement. In Berger’s internal polling, Trump’s endorsement boosted the Senate leader’s numbers in Guilford County, but not in Rockingham. Instead, Trump’s favorables there “took a nosedive” after he backed Berger, a campaign source said.
All Politics Is Local
Kokai cautioned against reading the results as a rejection of Trump or the state GOP. “Factor No. 1 is that old Tip O’Neill statement that all politics is local,” he said.
The casino was likely the most important local issue in Rockingham. But it wasn’t the only one. Berger angered some residents of the Guilford County town of Summerfield in 2023 when he pushed through legislation that deannexed 943 acres to allow a developer—and donor—to build a residential project that town officials had rejected.
Voters were also concerned about rising property taxes. Last month, Guilford County’s property reevaluations showed appraisals rose by about 40% on average—though, in some cases, much higher—which means many homeowners could soon see significant tax hikes. Rockingham faced a similar situation after its last reevaluation in 2024.
Days before the election, Berger said he would introduce legislation to freeze property reevaluations for one year. Page said Berger’s legislation was “too little, too late.”
Throughout the campaign, Berger’s supporters argued that the district would be worse off without him. A Senate leader could steer tax dollars to the rural community. Page, as a freshman backbencher, would have difficulty getting anything done.
Page countered that while other parts of the state prospered, Rockingham stagnated. Its population—about 93,000—hasn’t grown since at least 2010. An N.C. Department of Commerce report listed it among the state’s most economically distressed counties. Its economy has shrunk by an average of 1.6% per year since 2010, according to an analysis by the liberal group Carolina Forward.
Berger’s campaign ads didn’t focus on these local concerns. They mostly tied Berger to Trump and MAGA priorities. Friendly super PACs, meanwhile, bombarded mailboxes and televisions with ads accusing Page of all kinds of misdeeds.
There were legitimate lines of attack: As The Assembly reported, Page’s jail has the state’s second-highest death rate since 2021. Of the 12 inmates who have perished, nine died by suicide or drug overdose. Those deaths contributed to the sheriff’s office losing its liability insurance.
But the ads didn’t stop there. The super PAC NC True Conservatives—an ostensibly independent committee with deep connections to Bergerworld—ran ads accusing Page of opposing the state’s E-verify law (Page thought Berger’s version was too weak); opposing Trump’s deportation plans (based on a brief clip from a decade-old speech); and taking taxpayer-funded vacations (Page said the trips were for work-related conferences).
NC True Conservatives’ final ad ominously warned viewers: “Sam Page’s world has a dark side: sexual battery charges, a sexual harassment lawsuit, sex with inmates.” Several Rockingham deputies have faced these accusations over the years, but Page has not.
The onslaught hit its mark in Guilford, where Page was less known. But in Rockingham, polls showed voters turning on Berger.
“You had big boys from the big city coming in, trying to perpetrate the big-city strategies in a small-town political environment,” Clifton said. “People know Sam. I think Berger’s team did him a disservice by coming in so heavy-handed.”
Turnout in Rockingham surged, pushing Page—for now—into the lead.
The Battle to Come
Summerfield resident Bronni VanDerwerker traveled to downtown Greensboro on Friday to watch Guilford County’s elections board review provisional ballots, which are used when there are questions about the voter’s eligibility.
VanDerwerker supported Page, though she—along with many of her neighbors—was carved out of Berger’s district in 2023. Even so, the Summerfield area was the only Guilford precinct that Page won.
Grassroots Republicans are sick of establishment politicians like Berger, VanDerwerker said. But those politicians control the levers of power—including the power to oversee elections. She said she expected Berger to drag out the recount process. “He’s not going down without a fight,” VanDerwerker said.
“And neither are we,” added her friend Aryn Schloemer, who said she voted for Page.
With provisional ballots counted, only a half-dozen or fewer overseas and military ballots remain outstanding, not enough to erase Page’s 23-vote lead. The counties’ election boards will certify the results on March 13. After that, Berger can request a recount from the State Board of Elections. He said last Friday that his legal team is evaluating options: “If we believe a recount is merited, I will pursue that avenue as allowed by law.”
Here things could get messy. After the 2024 election, Republicans tucked a provision into a disaster recovery bill that transferred control of the state elections board from the Democratic governor to the newly elected Republican state auditor.
The auditor, Dave Boliek, appointed the local and state officials who would oversee a recount. Boliek also endorsed and campaigned for Berger, and his chief of staff and spokesperson previously worked for Berger in the General Assembly.
Last Wednesday, Page called for Boliek to recuse himself. A spokesperson for the elections board said Boliek wouldn’t influence the outcome.
Jay DeLancy is a conservative Berger critic who heads the Voter Integrity Project and sits on the Lee County Board of Elections. He said he doesn’t want to “damn the process, although a lot of my people are complaining about Boliek campaigning.” He laughed. “If I had done it, [Boliek] would have kicked me off the board of elections.”
DeLancy said his group is preparing for the battle to come. He’s not sure if it will end up in court.
Uncertainties abound: How long will the fight drag on? What will that mean for the ongoing budget stalemate and looming Medicaid cliff? Will the resources Berger poured into his own race haunt other Republicans in November? Who will replace Berger as Senate leader if he loses? How will MAGA loyalists react if Berger wins?
“It’ll be a depressing day,” DeLancy said, “because it will dispirit the base.”
The Next Era
For most of North Carolina’s history, the lieutenant governor led the Senate. But Democrats changed that after voters elected a Republican in 1988. Marc Basnight, a Jesse Helms-supporting, anti-abortion Democrat from the Outer Banks, took charge in 1993 and dominated the chamber until Berger’s Republicans overthrew him in 2010.
Like his predecessor, Berger has run a tightly controlled ship. Page and other conservative critics—and, privately, some Democrats—hope that toppling him will democratize the chamber.
“We need to get rid of the all-powerful positions,” said Clifton, the blogger. “You’ve got like five people in each chamber who run the whole place. You’ve got 50 senators sitting over there, and 45 of them are sitting around waiting to find out what the big five are going to tell them.”
Berger needs one more term to match Basnight’s record longevity. Like Basnight, he’s watched his party change. Basnight’s Democrats became more urban and liberal, less Jim Hunt and more Barack Obama.
Berger was elected the year George W. Bush won the presidency. But he became Senate leader during the Tea Party wave, and he’s been North Carolina’s most prominent Republican throughout the Trump era. Those movements redefined conservatism. For some activists, Berger no longer fits the mold.
“None of us would have thought 15 years ago that anyone would have ever called Phil Berger a RINO,” Kokai said, referring to the term “Republicans in Name Only.”
Lewis, the lobbyist, sees warning signs for the state GOP.
“Democrats were in their heyday when they had their own state brand of what the Democratic Party was,” he said. They lost “as they started creeping closer and closer to the national Democratic Party.”
Berger’s version of Republicanism—conservative but not extremist, allied with but distinct from Trump—has been key to the state party’s success, Lewis argued. Some Page supporters “believe that the Republican brand in North Carolina is impervious,” he said. “I would tell those people that they need to look across the aisle at the Democratic Party as it stands right now. That could be your future if you go too far.”
Perhaps it’s as simple as this: Berger stuck around too long. He wagered that he could navigate his party’s shifting tides and lost. He could have departed on his own terms, as the conservative champion who reshaped the state in his own image. Instead, he might suffer an ignominious defeat.
Or perhaps it’s simpler still: Berger didn’t realize how much Rockingham County voters hated that damn casino.
Or maybe he didn’t realize that because he’d been in Raleigh too long.
Joe Killian contributed reporting.
Correction: This article has been updated to reflect that Aryn Schloemer does not live in Summerfield.
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