During a kindergarten math lesson at Washington Gifted and Talented Magnet Elementary School, an unusual visitor sits cross-legged with fidgeting students on a patterned carpet.
North Carolina’s governor, Roy Cooper, is on his first in a series of visits to schools across the state.
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During his short appearance, Cooper dips in and out of classrooms with a scrum of reporters and photographers in tow. He shakes hands with teachers, talks about his late mom, who was an educator, and asks students about their favorite classes. In one class, the answer is almost unanimous: art.
That gives him the perfect segue: “When funds are short, this is often the first thing to go, which is tragic,” Cooper warned a group of second-graders as they drew shapes on paper.
In recent weeks, Cooper, a Democrat, has orchestrated events like this to highlight and criticize measures being pushed by the Republican-controlled legislature. The school visit — where he denounced Republicans’ educational funding priorities including a GOP effort to expand a voucher program and let even the state’s wealthiest families receive thousands of taxpayer dollars each year to pay for their kids’ private school tuition — was just one of the latest.
If it becomes law, supporters and opponents all agree, the new voucher plan will cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars — at the expense of public school budgets, state researchers have said.
To the most casual political observer, the funding fight and other recent political battles might seem like business as usual. Governors visit schools, make big speeches, take digs at the other party — standard fare. But that hasn’t always been Cooper’s style.
For most of his two terms in office, Cooper has frequently preferred to work behind the scenes to bring his priorities to fruition. He has wielded the gubernatorial veto — more often than any other North Carolina governor — to thwart bills pushed through by Republican leaders, often applying pressure on fellow Democrats behind closed doors to ensure his vetoes would survive. He has also relied on lawsuits and executive orders to fight the legislature, or push his own priorities, on topics from elections to climate change.
But the new calculus of the North Carolina General Assembly has forced him to change tack.
In recent weeks, Cooper has used the bully pulpit — one of the few political tools left at his disposal — to preach his opposition and to harangue moderate Republicans into siding with him.
The shift has yielded little legislative success and considerable criticism from political opponents. But it could have implications for the 2024 elections — with Cooper energizing Democratic voters in his travels across the state, a needed infusion for his party that lost nearly every important race in last year’s midterms. It has also fueled speculation about Cooper’s future ambitions.
“He certainly recognizes that his institutional power is very much limited at this point,” said Michael Bitzer, a Catawba College political scientist and close observer of state politics. “He's in a lame duck status. He's got nothing really to lose. He wants to keep Democrats relevant.”
A new political battleground
When this year’s legislative session began, Republicans were just shy of having a veto-proof majority in the legislature — by a single seat in the House. Then, in April, Charlotte-area Rep. Tricia Cotham abruptly announced that she was switching sides, to the GOP. She had become disillusioned with the Democratic party, she said, and she described Cooper as a behind-the-scenes bully who pressured her and others to toe the party line on issues such as guns and immigration.
Her defection largely destroyed Cooper’s veto power, allowing Republicans to more forcefully push through their agenda. Within weeks, Republicans had introduced and passed the most extensive reduction in abortion access in decades. Cotham, who had long been an advocate for abortion access — and even filed a bill this session, as a Democrat, to expand access — ultimately voted the party line, but this time with her new party.
Cooper vetoed the bill, as he had dozens of other measures. What followed was anything but ordinary for Cooper in recent years.
In the days before Cooper vetoed the abortion bill, he crisscrossed the state. He held roundtable discussions about the GOP’s proposed abortion restrictions. The visits were strategically held in competitive districts represented by Republican legislators who Cooper called out by name, pressuring them to keep what he described as campaign promises to keep abortion laws as-is.
“They still have time to keep those promises if they vote to sustain Governor Cooper’s veto,” his office said in press releases pressuring the Republican legislators, including Cotham, and citing previous statements on their abortion stances.
The pressure campaign culminated in a veto rally across from the legislative building, which attracted more than 2,000 people — an extraordinarily high-profile approach to what is essentially a two-step administrative process: apply veto stamp, apply signature.
Days later, every Republican — including the four he tried to lure to his side — voted to overturn his veto.
The education funding and school voucher debates are the next battleground.
Opponents, like Cooper, see vouchers as a massive transfer of public funds to private schools, many of them affiliated with conservative religious groups. The schools face little accountability; lawmakers have never required them to prove how their students are performing academically in exchange for getting taxpayer dollars. They also remain free to discriminate against students and parents based on religion, sexuality and more.
Supporters see vouchers as a way to help kickstart an education system that has struggled since the COVID-19 pandemic — and to give parents more options on how to school their kids. Only about half of public school students were testing at grade level or better, according to an annual report last year. In a key test that’s often used as a benchmark for future success, reading skills in 3rd grade, 48% of students passed. And the Department of Public Instruction says reports of student misconduct and violence are up.
Like so many other hot-button political issues, the voucher debate is divided strictly along party lines. Even if Cooper vetoes education proposals, Republicans can still pass them into law — as long as there isn’t a single GOP defection, since the party has the bare minimum votes needed for a supermajority.
A 'partisan temper tantrum'?
Even though Cooper’s attempts to stop the abortion bill from becoming law failed — and Republicans also appear to have the party discipline they’ll need to overhaul education funding in the coming weeks — some progressive activists want to see more of this version of Cooper.
Bishop William J. Barber II, who has led a series of high-profile legislative protests at the legislature in the past, wants Cooper to put similar efforts toward shining a light on the private school voucher proposal, GOP budget proposals and other initiatives moving through the legislature.
"I'll say it to the governor: ‘Just like you had a rally over abortion rights, you got to have a rally on this budget,’ ” Barber said last week at a budget protest in the legislative building. “‘You got to have a rally over voting rights. Because it's all connected.’ ... Whether they vote for it or not, we've got to expose it. And we've got to have a long memory, when it comes to the polls next year. A long memory."
Republicans say Cooper’s roundtables and rallies reek of desperation. “It appears to me to be an attempt to appear relevant,” Senate leader Phil Berger said. “And I think he’s missed the mark by a long shot.”
Wilmington Sen. Michael Lee, one of the Republicans Cooper tried pressuring on abortion, recently let loose on Cooper over similar tactics opposing private school vouchers. He slammed the governor’s decision to declare that public schools face a state of emergency over the voucher bill, even if Cooper never actually made it an official state of emergency with an executive order.
“I live on the coast, and we view states of emergencies for things where property’s damaged and lives have been lost, from hurricanes,” Lee said in an interview last week. “And so for him to go on television and talk about a state of emergency [from vouchers], it really diminishes those of us who actually live through them.”
The criticism is even coming in from Washington, D.C. “Through his partisan temper tantrums, it’s clear that Roy Cooper isn’t handling being a lame duck governor very well,” U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis wrote in a press release.
The fact that a U.S. senator is weighing in on a state legislative debate — a rarity — is proof Cooper’s push has been working, said Ford Porter, a Cooper spokesman. Republicans are simply trying to distract from the governor’s message, he said.
“They’re very eager to make it about our tone, or the governor, or anything other than the practical impacts of what this stuff could do to schools,” Porter said. “And that’s because they’re already hearing from people outside the little bubble, who by and large think schools are struggling, might want some more options, but think strong public schools are critical.”
Setting the stage for 2024
Cooper’s public efforts on abortion and education issues might not have had immediate impact or benefit, but they’re a way for the state’s top Democrat to show he’s fighting for the issues that matter most to his party, said Bitzer, the Catawba professor.
“It's certainly sending the signal that, even in a potentially weakened state, Cooper is going to attempt to do everything that he can to put the positions of the Democratic Party out there to try and lobby public opinion to his side,” Bitzer said.
Behind all of this is the looming 2024 election. Republicans believe vouchers have bipartisan appeal, particularly among minority communities where public schools sometimes have lower test scores and lower funding than other public schools in white neighborhoods. Democrats, however, believe voters on either side of the aisle will oppose cuts to already-strapped public schools.
Cooper is term-limited and can’t run again in 2024. His heir apparent, at least on the Democratic side, is Attorney General Josh Stein — who’s likely to face whoever wins a Republican primary between State Treasurer Dale Folwell, former U.S. Rep. Mark Walker and Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson.
In the past two presidential elections, Cooper won the governor’s race even as voters also picked Republican Donald Trump for president. Bitzer said Cooper’s efforts could be aimed at setting himself up for potential future political aspirations, and are certainly intended to at least help Stein in 2024.
“He can certainly try and rally support, even though it is razor-thin in terms of the margins and the state,” Bitzer said. “Stein's going to need as much assistance as he can get from the party establishment.”
Cooper is a prodigious fundraiser, part of his ability to win the governorship in a pro-Trump state. And recent actions on abortion, school funding and more have also seen a flurry of fundraising pitches from Cooper and other Democratic leaders.
But Cooper is making his pitch everywhere, not just to donors and big crowds, with the understanding that his veto threats don’t carry as much weight as they used to.
In a lower-stakes political contest already underway — in a fourth-grade classroom at the same Raleigh elementary school where Cooper bemoaned the potential loss of arts funding — five students are running for classroom governor.
They promised to make their classmates happy and to not take sides “even if my friends are on it,” among many other things.
Cooper had one request for their campaigns: “I hope it’s a strong platform for public education.”
WRAL education reporter Emily Walkenhorst, WRAL state government reporters Travis Fain and Paul Specht, and WRAL state government editor Jack Hagel, contributed to this report.