Pat McCrory’s Raleigh Reckoning

This excerpt is adapted from The Change Agent, Andrew Dunn’s biography of former N.C. Gov. Pat McCrory.

North Carolina governors were not particularly known for walking down Jones Street to spend time with the General Assembly. Pat McCrory intended to be different.

On the opening day of the first legislative session of his administration in early 2013, he went to the Legislative Building and told reporters he planned to be a more frequent presence than his Democratic predecessors. He met with both Democrats and Republicans in that initial trip, taken with chief of staff Thomas Stith and chief lobbyist Fred Steen, a former state representative.

“You’ve got quite an entourage. It used to be just you,” Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger cracked as they passed in the hallway.

Aspirations were high heading into the 2013 session. The previous November’s election had felt like a culmination for North Carolina Republicans. While they had flipped the legislature in 2010, a slim majority and a Democrat in the Executive Mansion had slowed down their work.

Now they had the mansion, too, with the first Republican governor in 20 years. The two top men in the General Assembly, Berger and House Speaker Thom Tillis, campaigned for McCrory, and their big goals largely overlapped.

For North Carolina Republicans, this was the moment they had spent decades trying to reach. The question now was whether they could all move in the same direction.

‘Cut Your Ribbons’

The first legislative session would show how hard that would be. The early conflicts weren’t mainly about ideology. They were about personality, power, and politics.

McCrory came out of Charlotte with a mayor’s eye toward setting the agenda and expecting people to follow his lead. His administration had spent the better part of a year laying out a vision for where the state should go.

In Raleigh, though, legislators were not so inclined to follow. The General Assembly also had a two-year head start and a new supermajority that meant a governor’s veto had less importance. One lawmaker told him early, behind closed doors: “You just go cut your ribbons; let us handle the work.”

The state House and Senate had their own disagreements with each other, too. And personal dynamics among McCrory, Tillis, and Berger complicated things. The governor and House leader were both Mecklenburg Republicans, more metropolitan in style and more used to selling business-minded pragmatism.

In the early days of the administration, McCrory and Tillis regularly conferred on legislative priorities. The Senate was harder to read. The upper chamber had a stronger point of view and some of its members were more openly antagonistic toward McCrory. While they shared a lot of the same goals, Berger did not want negotiations to become a two-on-one exercise, with McCrory and Tillis lining up together and expecting him to fold.

McCrory didn’t always help himself on the political side. He entered office with the idea to separate politics from governing, keeping political operatives at a distance and instead staffing much of his administration with business leaders and others without much political experience.

Immediately after the inauguration, some in McCrory’s orbit pushed him to begin raising money, both for himself and for legislators as a show of goodwill. That would allow McCrory to build a political operation in a state he had just carried with 55% of the vote, a substantial majority if not a mandate.

McCrory wasn’t interested, instead focusing on the mechanics of governing. He wouldn’t realize until later just how intertwined the two could be.

Rocky Relationships

By the middle of his term, McCrory had built a record with visible results. In November 2014, the N.C. unemployment rate reached 5.8%, its lowest point since before the recession and finally even with the national figure. 

That same month, Site Selection ranked North Carolina third in the country for business climate. The “Carolina Comeback” was no longer a campaign promise. McCrory had the numbers, rankings, and ribbon cuttings to back it up.

Relationships with the General Assembly were still rocky, but on the upswing. In January 2015, McCrory brought Jimmy Broughton into the administration as a deputy chief of staff. In practice, he was there to work the legislature. Broughton was a Winston-Salem lobbyist who had worked for U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms and understood legislative bodies from the inside. 

Broughton spent months trying to get on the good side of state Sen. Tom Apodaca, the chief McCrory critic in the General Assembly. Once, when Broughton was trying to move judicial nominations, Apodaca had a hold on the administration’s nominees. Broughton went to him and said he needed help.

“Get out of here,” Apodaca said.

McCrory had entered Raleigh thinking good ideas and public pressure could carry a large share of the work. By 2015, his team had learned that much of governing happened in smaller ways: watching the calendar, knowing which senator was irritated, knowing when a bill had been sent to a committee from which it would never return, knowing when the governor should call and when he should leave the building.

Broughton later said the administration got “90, 95 percent” of what it wanted in the 2015 budget. That did not mean the year was easy. It meant the administration had learned how to lose less.

‘Bathroom Bill’ Origins

In February 2016, the Charlotte City Council had taken up a nondiscrimination ordinance that included protections for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender residents. Supporters framed it as a civil rights measure. Opponents focused on bathrooms and locker rooms, warning that Charlotte was forcing businesses and public places to change rules around sex-specific facilities.

For McCrory, the issue cut in several directions at once. It touched on local control, business regulation, civil rights, religion, gender, and the authority of cities to set rules beyond state law. It also arrived in a presidential year when national politics were already rewarding confrontation.

McCrory was sitting on the edge of his bed in the governor’s mansion late one night when the call came in from a New York number. On the other end, the Republican nominee for president did not bother with small talk.

“What’s this bathroom s—t?” Donald Trump said in his trademark Queens style.

“Well, sir,” McCrory replied, “it’s a long story.”

By the late summer of 2016, it had become a story almost no one could fully control. On paper, the fight had started with a few short lines in Charlotte’s city code about nondiscrimination, public accommodations, and bathrooms. In reality, it had never been that small.

The Match is Lit

Jennifer Roberts had moved into McCrory’s old office on the 15th floor of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Government Center in December 2015, after winning a sleepy, low-turnout mayor’s race in which fewer than one in ten registered voters had bothered to vote.

Four terms on the county commission, three stints as its chair, a near-miss run for Congress—each step made Roberts more familiar to donors and activists, and to the national Democrats scanning the South for presentable progressive talent. 

She campaigned and governed with that larger audience in mind. In her swearing-in speech, she promised more “international business,” more “economic opportunity,” and, with the same careful cadence, “non-discrimination for the LGBT community.” 

A year earlier, a nondiscrimination ordinance that would have extended protections to gay and transgender residents—and, crucially, applied those protections to public accommodations like restrooms and locker rooms—had failed by a single vote. Roberts had run for mayor vowing to bring it back.

She had help. National LGBT advocates, including staff from the national nonprofit Human Rights Campaign, were in regular contact with City Hall, urging her to revive the ordinance and not to flinch at including bathrooms and locker rooms.

In early 2016, Roberts began circulating a draft nondiscrimination ordinance similar but more expansive than the one considered the year before. 

On paper, the ordinance looked unremarkable. Charlotte would simply take the categories it already protected—race, religion, sex, national origin—and add sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression. Those protections would apply not just to city hiring and services, but to most businesses open to the public.

Buried in the legal language was the change everyone had come to talk about: extending those protections into restrooms and locker rooms in private businesses, dropping the carve-out that treated those spaces as different.

Supporters framed the update as a matter of dignity and basic respect. Opponents worried it created a gray area that would invite abuse, blurring lines that had been clear for generations. 

After hours of testimony on February 22, 2016, the council voted. The ordinance passed.

From the governor’s office, McCrory began working the phones, trying to lower the temperature. He told legislative leaders he thought Charlotte had overreached and that doing nothing was not a realistic option. But he also urged them to think small—a tight, bathroom-only bill in the regular session, not a sweeping special session that would invite national scrutiny.

For a brief stretch, that seemed to be the consensus. If it had been left to McCrory and the legislative leadership, the story might have ended there: a narrowly drawn preemption bill folded into the ordinary work of the short session. 

Others were not in such a patient mood.

Dan Bishop’s Bill

Lt. Gov. Dan Forest and social conservatives did not want to wait until April. They wanted Charlotte’s ordinance dead before it took effect.

No one was more eager to act than state Rep. Dan Bishop, a Republican from Mecklenburg County. A lawyer by training, with a methodical way of speaking and a courtroom habit of worrying particular phrases like a bone, he had been watching Charlotte’s ordinance with a litigator’s eye.

Two days after the vote, he followed with a legal brief calling Charlotte’s ordinance a “blunder.” In his reading, by moving the word “sex” into the section of the code that barred discrimination in “the full and equal enjoyment” of public accommodations and deleting the clause that exempted “restrooms, shower rooms, bathhouses, and similar facilities which are in their nature distinctly private,” the council had effectively outlawed sex-specific facilities altogether.

It was classic Bishop: no soaring rhetoric, just dire conclusions drawn from the placement of commas and clauses. The city attorney insisted that was not what the council intended, but Bishop kept pointing back to the text. Intent didn’t matter, he said. Language did.

Inside Republican caucus rooms, Bishop’s certainty mattered. If he said Charlotte had exceeded its legal authority and that the legislature had no choice but to clarify the law statewide, many were inclined to believe him.

Calling legislators back for a special session would cost money and telegraph alarm, but it would also concentrate power: a one-day session, tightly scripted, would let legislative leaders write the bill, control the hearings, and hand the governor a finished product with little time to renegotiate.

When Berger and Moore’s lieutenants finally pressed him—if we bring them back, will you sign?—McCrory gave them the answer they needed.

If you call them in, he said, I’ll sign.

The 12-Hour Law

By mid-morning on March 23, the galleries above the House and Senate floors were already full.

What almost nobody outside the Republican inner circle had that morning was the actual text of the bill. Bishop had been working with staff for days on language that would do three things: wipe out Charlotte’s ordinance, set birth-certificate sex as the dividing line for multi-user bathrooms and locker rooms in government buildings statewide, and bar cities and counties from creating new protected classes in their own nondiscrimination codes. 

Democrats on key committees received copies minutes before meetings gaveled in. Some rank-and-file Republicans saw only the title on the screen before they were asked to vote. 

The chairman glanced down the row and saw the majority was not interested in slowing down. The motion carried. The bill moved. On the House floor, the tempo stayed fast. Constitutional rules requiring bills to be “read” on three separate days—a guardrail meant to prevent exactly this sort of rush—were waived by procedural moves.

By the time the House voted—83 to 25 in favor, with a handful of Democrats joining the majority—the bill had been in public view for only a few hours.

In the Senate, events moved even faster. The bill was sent straight from committee to the floor, bypassing the usual multi-stop route through subcommittees. Democrats, outnumbered and furious, tried the few procedural tools available to them and watched them fall one by one.

Finally they did the only thing left to register a protest: They walked out. When the clerk called the roll, every “yes” came from a Republican. Every seat in the Democratic section sat empty. The final vote tally read 32-0. From gavel-in to final vote, the General Assembly had taken just over nine hours to turn Bishop’s draft into House Bill 2.

After meeting with advisors, McCrory settled on a path. He would sign HB2, but he would pair it with an executive order that restored some protections for state employees and pressed the General Assembly to restore the private right to sue in state court. It was a workaround, not a solution, a way to blunt the damage from what Bishop and the legislature had written without provoking a constitutional fight he was certain to lose.

Without fanfare, he picked up the pen. The law took effect the moment his signature dried.

PayPal First

Within hours, big-name companies with operations in North Carolina issued statements and tweets saying they were “disappointed,” “concerned,” or “reviewing” HB2. A bank praised “inclusion and diversity” and said it would be “monitoring developments.” A tech firm said it was “troubled by any law that appears to limit protections.” NCAA and NBA spokespeople told reporters they were “studying the situation.”

PayPal was the first to cave. The financial tech company had only months earlier announced plans to open a global operations center in Charlotte, bringing more than 400 jobs. In early April, PayPal pulled the plug. 

Inside the Capitol, McCrory understood that the first high-profile cancellation made it easier for the next company, the next convention, the next league to follow. Deutsche Bank froze a planned expansion. CoStar dropped Charlotte from its shortlist for expansion.

Entertainers from Bruce Springsteen to Pearl Jam began canceling shows. Academic conferences moved bookings to Atlanta and Nashville. Governors and mayors in blue states announced bans on “non-essential” government travel to North Carolina and took turns denouncing HB2 as discriminatory.

By the fall, HB2 seemed to have pushed McCrory’s accomplishments into the background. Attorney General Roy Cooper, who was running to unseat McCrory, seized the opening. In March, he had announced that his office would not defend HB2 in court. Cooper praised Georgia’s Republican governor for vetoing a contentious “religious freedom” bill, and all but accused McCrory of lacking the same backbone.

On the trail, Cooper criticized HB2, promised to repeal it, and largely sidestepped detailed questions about what should replace it—even as his campaign and the Democratic Governors Association used every cancellation and boycott to raise money and define the race around bathrooms.

As North Carolina voters were still sorting out what they thought of HB2, the national Republican ticket saw something else: a governor standing in the middle of a cultural crossfire and refusing to cave. That fall, after one especially bruising week of interviews, McCrory checked his voicemail and found a message from Trump praising his television performances and telling him, “We’re proud of you.”

On the ground in North Carolina, the reaction was far less comforting. McCrory’s walkabouts and rope lines turned into something closer to a gauntlet. Protesters trailed him to ribbon cuttings and economic-development announcements.

Trump on the Trail

Trump complicated McCrory’s race before he ever helped it.

In April 2016, with House Bill 2 consuming North Carolina politics, Trump broke with McCrory and said the state should have left bathroom policy alone. In July, though, Trump reversed course, saying he had spoken with McCrory and was “going with the state.” That summer, the two men began appearing together regularly on the campaign trail.

But even then, they were often working at cross-purposes. On the stump, McCrory was trying to persuade voters that North Carolina was in the middle of a Carolina Comeback. The state, he argued, was moving in the right direction because Republican reforms were working. Tax rates and unemployment were down, while jobs were coming back.

Trump’s message was almost the opposite. He described an America, and a North Carolina, in a decline that only he could fix. In Trump’s message, the country was a mess, the economy was a disaster, and jobs were scarce.

That tension showed up virtually every time Trump came to North Carolina. At a June 2016 rally in Greensboro, Trump praised McCrory from the stage and said the governor was doing a fantastic job. Then he slipped right back into his darker national pitch, warning that communities were in chaos and that the government had lost control. 

As one consultant told Politico, Trump’s rhetoric did McCrory no favors because it confused voters and sucked the oxygen out of McCrory’s economic message. Another said Trump was putting the governor in the position of having his “successful economic record” criticized by his own party’s nominee.

McCrory understood Trump’s appeal better than many establishment Republicans did. But he never embraced Trump’s style of politics, particularly his penchant for crass personal attacks and insulting language.

The night before the election, Trump came to Raleigh for a final rally at Raleigh’s Dorton Arena, and McCrory introduced him there believing he had caught up and still had a real chance to win. 

He also believed, at that moment, that Trump was headed for defeat. In McCrory’s mind, he was walking into that arena on his way to victory while Trump was headed the other direction. 

He got both calls wrong.