The State of Our State

More North Carolinians are running for elected office, both in presidential and midterm election cycles. The number of candidates rose 11% between the 2012 and 2024 presidential elections, and nearly 19% between the 2010 and 2022 midterms. More people are also voting. 

Dustin Ingalls has long been interested in politics and helped manage others’ campaigns. In 2010, he had a rude awakening while working at Public Policy Polling, a left-leaning firm. Ingalls anticipated the Obama-era midterm would be bad for Democrats, but didn’t foresee it setting in motion the GOP’s 15-year grip over the state. 

Buying a house in Raleigh was too expensive, so he moved to Wendell in 2021 and decided to run for local office in 2025. In an eight-person field for three open spots on the town board of commissioners, Ingalls was the top vote-getter.

“There’s only so long you can keep people down to where you say, ‘To hell with the odds,’” Ingalls said. “I wanted to step up and do something, not just volunteer for candidates and hope it goes right.”

But even as more voters participate in elections, they are less likely to have a meaningful choice when it comes to who represents them in Congress and the General Assembly because of increasingly gerrymandered districts. In 2010, using districts drawn by Democrats, 32 legislative and congressional contests were decided by less than 10 percentage points. In 2024, there were only 23 competitive races.

“I’m all about saving energy, but I’m also about being comfortable,” says Asheville resident Jehd Beck with a laugh. Originally from South Florida, the 39-year-old Army veteran and general contractor has had his fill of hot, humid air.

Beck and other North Carolinians are having to balance those priorities as they face the state’s shifting environment. The N.C. State Climate Office notes that climate change, primarily driven by emissions from burning fossil fuels, is creating “a warmer, wetter, and more humid North Carolina.” Hot summer nights, which have sharply increased over the past 15 years, place particular stress on people and crops.

Air conditioning provides relief, but it requires electricity, much of which North Carolina still produces using gas and coal. At the same time, the state has made progress in reducing emissions—in part due to encouraging efficiency gains, like Beck experienced himself earlier this year.

Through the Asheville-based nonprofit Energy Savers Network, Beck received heat pumps and insulation under the floor of his 1960s home. He says his power bills have dropped by at least 30% compared to last summer, even as the new units have made the house substantially more livable. “It’s actually been a godsend. It really has,” Beck says.

In 2002, when Helen Nance founded Gray Stone Day School, North Carolina law limited the number of schools like hers—public charter schools run independently from the local school board. The number of these schools was initially capped at 100. But they soon had 20,000 names on their waitlists.

Eliminating the cap became a top priority for legislative Republicans, who abolished it in 2011. Since then, the number of charter schools has more than doubled. Traditional public schools’ market share has dropped to about 75% of all students.

While Democrats decried that North Carolina’s investment in traditional public schools lagged other states, Republicans expanded state support for alternatives. Even in rural areas, like Stanly County, where Gray Stone is located, parents have an expanding menu of options.

Nance’s college-preparatory academy now competes with a charter school that opened in neighboring Rowan County. Several nearby private schools also participate in the state’s programs to subsidize tuition. At least one private school offers online programs. Since 2011, homeschools in Stanly County have more than doubled. 

“The opportunities for families have grown tremendously,” said Nance, who founded the school after her eldest daughter reported that her Wake Forest University peers who came from metropolitan areas were better prepared. 

One drawback: Parents don’t have equal information about all their options. Traditional public schools and charter schools have to publicly report on their performance, while private schools do not.

North Carolinians are living shorter lives. After centuries of medical advances, life expectancy has slumped. Researchers suspect drug overdose and pandemic-related deaths have driven the decline. 

At the same time, the state’s overall population is aging. Paired with a declining birth rate, this shift is shaping decisions about infrastructure and resources.

Expanding Medicaid, the program that provides low-income people with health insurance, was perhaps the past decade’s defining political debate. Ten years after the Obama administration incentivized states to expand their programs, North Carolina legislators finally relented in 2023. 

Though more state residents are now covered by Medicaid, the Trump administration’s rollbacks will shrink the program in 2027.

For state residents covered through private, employer-provided insurance, annual premiums for a family have soared 56% since 2010, after adjusting for inflation. 

Alicia Luchsinger, 37, supports her two teenage children as an emergency department technician in Wilmington. To afford her monthly premiums, Luchsinger said she’s stuck with an insurance plan with high deductibles. She’s put her children’s medical expenses on a credit card and allowed her own to go into collections. 

The irony isn’t lost on her. “I work with the people getting medical bills,” she said, “and I can’t even afford to pay mine.”

When she started looking at colleges, Jaharah Yahaya set a goal: She wanted to graduate without student loan debt. As she prepares to turn her tassel next spring, she is on track to do so. 

That’s largely because of the low tuition she pays at Elizabeth City State University through NC Promise, a program lawmakers started in 2018 that charges in-state undergraduate students just $500 per semester (excluding fees students pay for things like campus security and technology).

“Knowing that I could receive a quality education at a much lower tuition cost definitely was a green flag for me,” said Yahaya, 24, who was born in Ghana and grew up in Greensboro.

NC Promise is just one effort that UNC System leaders say has helped keep the cost of an education at the state’s public universities low and affordable over the past decade-plus. Adjusted for inflation, in-state tuition and fees in the UNC System increased about $2,000 between 2010 and 2024, but debt for enrolled students dropped by more than $2,500. 

Campus officials, at the direction of the mostly Republican UNC System Board of Governors, kept tuition costs flat for nearly a decade before getting approval to raise rates for the 2026–27 academic year.

In 2010, North Carolina was still reeling from the impact of the 2008 financial crisis. Homelessness and housing instability had spiked due to lost jobs and foreclosures, and the state didn’t fully recover economically until the middle of that decade. But the construction of apartments and single-family houses, which had largely paused during the recession, took much longer to bounce back.

The result was a constriction in supply that led to higher home prices for just about everyone. Though the state more than doubled its production of affordable units using public funding—mostly federal low-income housing tax credits paired with some state and local money—the numbers are still tiny. 

Rental costs have climbed steeply, single-family home prices have increased at more than twice the rate of inflation, and homelessness is rising (although it’s still estimated to be less than it was in 2010). The “housing crisis” has become a familiar catchphrase. 

Brandon Travis is definitely feeling the pinch. “Rent is kind of out of control,” said the Durham resident, who pays $1,700 a month for an apartment he shares with his 13-year-old son. Travis, 38, works with people with special needs; it’s important work, but with an annual salary of $34,000, it’s been difficult to keep up with the rent. “It adds up quickly,” he said. “I’m hearing it from everyone.”

The Mecklenburg County District Attorney’s Office handles about 10,000 felony cases a year, including murder, armed robbery, and sexual assault. To handle those cases effectively, District Attorney Spencer Merriweather III said he needs sufficient numbers of prosecutors and support staff. 

The money for those positions comes from the state. In the 2009–10 budget, North Carolina spent $136 million (in today’s dollars) on district attorney offices. That increased to $179 million in the 2025–26 budget. 

The state adds prosecutors based on population, crime rates, and other factors. Mecklenburg is the second-most populous county in the state, and Charlotte is the largest city. Crime has been a persistent problem. Last year, Iryna Zarutska died after she was stabbed while riding the light rail. Her death sparked a political firestorm that resulted in the 2025 passage of Iryna’s Law. Among other things, the law restricts pre-trial release and seeks to revive the death penalty. It also added 10 new prosecutor positions to Merriweather’s office. 

When his office doesn’t have enough prosecutors and other staff, the system slows down. And that means “it’s going to take longer to reach your case,” Merriweather said—whether you are a victim or a defendant.

Legislative Republicans moved quickly to overhaul tax policy, ditching the state’s bracketed income tax system in 2013 in favor of a flat, lower rate. They’ve also slashed the corporate income tax and expanded the state sales tax to include mobile homes, some services (like automobile repairs), and ticketed events like concerts and ball games. 

On average, North Carolinians are paying less in taxes today than they did 15 years ago. But the burden has shifted. Lower-income people now pay more in state and local taxes, and higher-income people pay less.

Tre Harris, a 32-year-old server at the downtown Raleigh barbecue staple The Pit, has made $50,000 to $60,000 each of the past five years. During this time, the state’s income tax rate dropped by 1 percentage point, a tax savings of roughly $500 for Harris. 

But the effective state and local tax rate—which includes sales, property, and income taxes—for the lowest 40% of earners has grown from 9% to more than 10% now. The rate for the top 20% of earners has dropped 2 percentage points to 7.5%.

Harris, whose income places him in the middle 20%, said he’s fine with the rate he pays. As for the flat income tax, “I can’t say I agree with it. I’m all for taxing high earners.”

Sophia Lyons loves to take the train. Once a week, the 26-year-old from Winston-Salem takes Amtrak from Greensboro to Raleigh to work as a graduate assistant at North Carolina State University. 

It can be a long day, but on the train, Lyons can work, either for school or their day job as an editor for an academic publisher.

In 2010, the state reported 435,000 one-way passenger trips by rail. By 2025, that number had grown to  740,000. 

North Carolina has spent more money on trains, with the federal government’s help. The state received a billion-dollar grant in 2023 earmarked for rail projects linking Raleigh to Richmond, Virginia. And the state is investing in more stops along the route from Charlotte to Raleigh.

Lyons said using public transit has helped their career; there isn’t an equivalent graduate assistant program in the Triad. Plus, Lyons likes riding the train. 

They’ve had serendipitous interactions with the other passengers who ride every week—people carrying backpacks with corporate logos and students going home for the weekend, wearing hoodies and sweats. 

“It’s a really interesting slice of life,” Lyons said.

After a year at Eli Lilly, Nikkita Mahon earns $23.50 an hour, more than she’s ever made. The 26-year-old Durham resident, who works in the pharmaceutical company’s medication-filling department, is proud of that. Her previous jobs—as a state prison correctional officer and a security guard—paid much less, and paying for day care for her son, now 4, was often a struggle. 

Mahon landed the position at Eli Lilly with the assistance of Made in Durham’s BULLS Life Sciences Academy, which helps young people break into life sciences careers, and she’s grateful for her good fortune. “But at the same time, it’s still survival,” she added. “I’m still living paycheck to paycheck.” Rent and day care eat most of her regular paycheck, so she works overtime to afford other essentials.   

Mahon’s hourly wage sits just below the state’s median, which was $24.21 in 2025. Adjusting for inflation, that’s up 15.7% since 2010. The state has also seen improvements in job growth, household income, and other economic indicators, though the national economy expanded more steadily during this period compared with the previous 15 years. Income inequality has also risen. 

“You have to stay with a career or an industry or a company for a while for your pay to be lovely,” Mahon said, “so I’m just trying to work my way from the bottom up.”

Raymond Joseph Lilley Jr. survived driving a petroleum truck for the Army in an active war zone, only to be injured driving a tractor-trailer carrying soybean meal in North Carolina.

At 5 a.m. on a cold Sunday in February 2019, the then-47-year-old broke his neck when his truck overturned after hitting a soft patch of dirt along a two-lane highway in Fayetteville. He now has to move his entire body to look left and right, up and down. He can no longer work as a truck driver and is living off his workers’ compensation.

Fewer nonfatal workplace injuries like Lilley’s are happening in North Carolina than they were in 2010. But fatal injuries are trending up. The state Department of Labor has not met its annual safety compliance inspection goals. To address ongoing vacancies in its safety inspector positions, the department has increased starting pay. More than 90% of those jobs are now filled. 

Lilley said more can be done to keep workers safe, like improving equipment. He said the shoulder strap of his seat belt failed during his crash. 

“I’m hoping that the powers that be remain vigilant,” Lilley said. “I’m hoping that they continue to better themselves and not just relax with just the bare minimum.”