NC’s 2024 governor race kicks off, a prominent politician faces criminal charges, and more

To subscribe to this weekly newsletter, go to newsobserver.com/newsletters.

Happy Friday! This is Will Doran, with your weekly update on all things North Carolina politics.

January is often the sleepiest month in state politics. Elections are over, and folks are taking taking a much-needed breather before the year’s legislative session kicks off.

But this January? Not so much.

Just take a look at everything that’s happened since last Friday’s newsletter:

▪ Attorney General Josh Stein officially announced the worst-kept secret in state politics, that he will run for governor in 2024, I wrote on Wednesday.

▪ The March For Life brought hundreds of anti-abortion activists to downtown Raleigh, and Dawn Baumgartner Vaughan was there reporting for us. The keynote speaker was Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson (who’s currently a “maybe” for the 2024 governor’s race).

▪ There’s continued fallout in the decision to overhaul the State Health Plan for its hundreds of thousands of members. Teddy Rosenbluth and Luciana Perez Uribe Guinassi wrote about that plus a “what you need to know” explainer for state employees.

▪ We learned that State Auditor Beth Wood is facing criminal charges for an alleged hit-and-run in December in downtown Raleigh, a story Avi Bajpai updated with the latest on Thursday.

▪ Former President Donald Trump announced he’d be in Fayetteville this weekend, for a memorial service for “Diamond” of the controversial conservative media duo Diamond and Silk.

Tillis as a DC shot-caller?

Late last week we reported that Sen. Thom Tillis said he’s still working on a big, bipartisan immigration bill. And if you feel like you’ve seen Tillis’ name a lot on big, headline-grabbing issues like this, you’re not imagining things.

This week the Washington Post wrote that he’s emerging as one of the more influential senators in D.C.

“Over the past year, Tillis has muscled his way to the heart of nearly every major bipartisan effort to emerge from the evenly divided Senate, taking a lead role in negotiating legislation on hot-button issues including gay rights, guns and immigration,” The Post wrote.

It’s not by accident.

Tillis is by no means a “never Trump” Republican, but he has separated himself somewhat from that wing of the party. I remember covering an event in 2017 when he proudly declared (to a packed room full of wealthy conservative donors and passionate activists) that he was a RINO.

▪ Used by the GOP base to insult anyone deemed insufficiently dedicated to the cause, RINO stands for “Republican In Name Only.”

▪ Tillis cheekily suggested a different meaning: “Republican In Need of Outcomes.”

▪ It wasn’t some gaffe. He wanted people to remember that message (and even reprinted my article on his official U.S. Senate website, where you can still find it today).

Now six years later, his gamble — and it was a gamble — seems to be paying off.

To the surprise of many, he didn’t face a serious primary challenge from the right wing when he was up for reelection in 2020.

And heading into 2023 with many of the Senate’s more statesman-esque Republicans having left politics, WaPo reported, he’s now stepping into their shoes as deal-maker.

The paper’s profile on Tillis quotes people like Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins and Connecticut Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy agreeing that senators often seek Tillis out on important bills because he has developed a reputation as someone who can come up with a deal that will get enough votes from both parties to survive a filibuster and actually pass.

What else we’re reading

▪ Former N&O boss John Drescher has a fascinating article in The Assembly for U.S. history nerds. It contrasts the recent drama in D.C. over the House speaker vote with a similar story here in the state legislature from 1989.

The North Carolina story had the opposite ending of the Kevin McCarthy vote: A band of Democrats and Republicans (including a young Roy Cooper) joined together to replace the N.C. House speaker with a reform-minded politician who went on to encourage bipartisan projects and deals.

▪ Raleigh police are going all-out to defend their “no-knock” raids, Virginia Bridges reports. In addition to using its own staff attorneys, the city has also hired numerous private lawyers to help RPD fight lawsuits from local families — whose homes the police raided unannounced, with weapons drawn and in some cases pointed at young children, only to later realize they were at the wrong address.

No-knock raids have led to police killing innocent people in other states, like Breonna Taylor. In Raleigh, some of the botched no-knock raids the police are now defending in court were mistakes on multiple levels: Not only did they raid the wrong houses, but the people they meant to raid were also innocent — framed with bogus drug charges, in a scandal I broke in 2021. (The City of Raleigh later paid those victims $2 million, ending their lawsuit before any police officials had to testify under oath about the fake drugs.)

That’s all for this week, in a surprisingly busy January.

Check in next Friday for more. In the meantime, tune into our stories, our tweets and our Under the Dome podcast for more developments.

— By Will Doran, reporter for The News & Observer. Email me at wdoran@newsobserver.com.