Are Non-Partisan Races a Thing of the Past?

In September, Citadel Church in Greensboro held a candidate forum ahead of the city council primary. After a lively evening of questions for mayoral, at-large, and district candidates, there was one last inquiry from the moderator, Irish Spencer.

“If the president of the United States of America declared that Greensboro, North Carolina, was an unsafe city and that the National Guard would be sent to our city, what would be your response to the president—yes or no?”

Nicky Smith, a Republican running for the council’s District 4 seat, tried to dodge a politically loaded question.

“I’m going to abstain from that,” he said. “It’s not a local issue. I’m sorry.”

The crowd groaned loudly, leading Spencer to push back.

“They locally will be coming to the city of Greensboro,” Spencer said, though she let Smith’s abstention stand.

The question passed through the candidates with several ”no” responses and one “hell no.” “No, Mr. President—I’ve got this,” answered Jim Kee, a Republican running in District 2. Zack Matheny, the Republican incumbent in District 3, submitted his “no” via text,  as he’d had to leave before the event ended.

But other candidates also avoided giving a clear answer.

Carla Franklin, a former Democrat who went unaffiliated before her run for an at-large seat, followed Smith in abstaining, as did Steve Ignac, a Libertarian running in District 4. So did Robbie Perkins, the Republican former mayor, who bristled against partisanship throughout election season as he ran to return to that position.

The Guilford County Democratic Party swiftly edited Perkins’ answer from the full video and shared it on social media.

“He cannot be mayor,” the party wrote on Facebook. “Vote Marikay Abuzuaiter!”

The Democrats aren’t alone in swiftly jumping on any chance to rally their followers. After The Assembly broke a story about sexual harassment accusations against April Parker, the Democrat running in District 3, the local Republican Party quickly used it in a text-message blast to voters.

These would seem like normal moments of partisan crossfire at the height of election season, but for one thing: The Greensboro City Council races are officially non-partisan. Candidates run without a party identifier attached to their names, have traditionally avoided partisanship in campaigning, and eschewed national issues to concentrate on local concerns.

That appears to be over—not just in Greensboro but across the state. The partisan shift has divided candidates, as some worry it will drive a wedge between local officials while others argue it’s unavoidable in today’s caustic political atmosphere.

“It’s happening in larger cities like Greensboro, it’s even happening in tiny Sylva, North Carolina,” said Chris Cooper, a professor of political science and public affairs at Western Carolina University and author of Anatomy of a Purple State: A North Carolina Politics Primer. “And it’s not just North Carolina. It’s really partisanship run amok everywhere.”

Embracing a New Reality

The General Assembly has formally made more nonpartisan elections partisan in the last few years, Cooper said, such as races for seats on the state Supreme Court.

Strategically, that makes sense for the Republican dominated legislature. “There are more red places in North Carolina than blue,” Cooper said.

But when it comes to the state’s largest, most populous cities, including Greensboro, GOP state lawmakers have been slower to push for change. In largely blue areas, an “R” next to a candidate’s name certainly won’t help their chances.

“There’s a reason they’re more eager to do it in Madison County than Guilford County,” Cooper said.

Perkins, the Republican who ultimately lost his bid for mayor of Greensboro this week, said he has found the increased partisanship, including by his own party, irritating. He describes himself as a moderate Republican, not particularly aligned with the local, state or national GOP. He and other local Republican candidates said they asked the local party not to list them on sample ballots or refer to them as Republicans in social media posts, pointing to the non-partisan nature of the election. That didn’t stop it from happening.

“Honestly, I have always believed there is not a Republican or Democratic way to fill a pot hole,” Perkins said. “We’re talking about local issues here, and you don’t want to come on to a council already divided by political party. It just makes everyone less likely to compromise and to work together. It becomes more about scoring political points and whether you’re doing what your party wants you to do. It’s hard enough to get to five votes on a council without that.”

The problem, Cooper said, is that an increasing portion of the electorate has come to believe there are, in fact, Republican and Democratic ways to fill a pothole.

“Which potholes get fixed and which don’t might be partisan,” he said. “Which part of town gets their complaints addressed and which part gets ignored. The question of whether it’s worth raising taxes to fill potholes, whether that’s a proper function for government or something that should be done privately, whether roads are paved, and which ones at what times. That’s all definitely political, if not partisan.”

A lot of voters view partisan labels as a shorthand for certain values, Cooper said. That’s always been the case, even if those values sometimes change. Messages about supporting the local police are often seen as conservative and appeal more to Republicans, Cooper said, while police accountability and criminal justice concerns play better with Democrats. To the degree voters are looking for shorthand signaling a candidate’s values, partisan labels can be seen as helpful.

Labels also have their downsides.

“Partisanship does make compromise more difficult,” Cooper said. “People begin a negotiation from a place of distrust when things are seen as partisan.”

But division over an increasing number of social issues is impacting both local elections and governance, Cooper said. He pointed to fights over reparations in Asheville and Charlotte’s attempt to let people use the bathroom aligned with their gender identity.

“Are those local issues partisan? Of course they are,” said Cooper. “We’re talking about the ability of municipalities to control their own fate and fights over local powers versus the state and the federal government.”

In Guilford County, both the local Democratic and Republican parties say increased partisanship—even in non-partisan elections—is just embracing a new reality.

“Right now, I don’t think that non-partisanship is a viable option,” said Kathy Kirkpatrick, chair of the Guilford County Democratic Party. “Donald Trump has been a huge, glaring impetus for this, but it’s also the North Carolina General Assembly.”

From political gerrymandering at the state level and removing powers from fairly elected Democrats any time they win statewide elections, Kirkpatrick said, Republicans seem to see governance as partisan warfare. Asking Democrats to be above it all simply doesn’t work when voters want to be sure they’re electing people who share their values, she said.

“They say all politics are local,” Kirkpatrick said. “So I think it’s very important people know who they’re voting for. When you have federal agents in masks kidnapping local residents from local streets, yes, I think you do need to answer whether or not you support that when you’re running for local office.”

Chris Meadows, chair of the Guilford County Republican Party, agreed.

“What we’re seeing now is a national conversation about where people stand on issues,” Meadows said. “We know there are technically non-partisan elections, but we know they’re not really non-partisan.”

“I care about how people govern,” Meadows said. “So I don’t think people should run away from their affiliation. … We should be talking about the larger issues. Crime is a local issue. Do you want to support the police or defund the police? You can’t tell me there’s not a Democratic or a Republican way to look at that.”

As for Republican candidates in majority blue cities like Greensboro who want to be left out of Republican messaging, Meadows said he had little sympathy.

“Well, they could change their party registration,” Meadows said. “Everybody knows who they are anyway. Why run from it?”

Tuesday’s elections offered an answer.

As Democrats won around the country Tuesday, from the New York City Mayor’s race to the gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey, political analysts called it a referendum on the first term of the second Trump presidency.

In Greensboro, where the council’s only registered Republican was ousted and GOP hopefuls were defeated in landslides, Democrats seem to have been right about how effective it would be to bring a new level of partisanship to races where it wasn’t technically invited.

‘People Vote on Values’

Taking partisanship into nonpartisan local elections is nothing new to Anderson Clayton, chair of the North Carolina Democratic Party. She made her name in state politics by “flipping” three of the five city council seats in her hometown of Roxboro from Republicans to Democrats when she was chair of the Person County Democratic Party. That was also a “nonpartisan” election.

Those wins gave people of color a majority on the small town council for the first time and, she said, changed the values that underlie local decisions.

When she became chair of the state party, she brought that same ethos to that job: Political values matter at every level, and the Democratic Party needs to center those values in elections large and small, whether or not they are officially partisan.

“It’s been the mission of the North Carolina Democratic Party to compete everywhere since 2023,” Clayton said. “I wouldn’t credit Trump too much with that, but I do think he has made a lot of people think about the values they are actually for, and people vote on values.”

Marikay Abuzuaiter, a Democrat who was elected Greensboro’s mayor Tuesday, said she’s concerned increased partisanship may further divide local governing boards.

“When someone calls me as a constituent, I don’t ask if they’re a Democrat or a Republican,” Abuzuaiter said. “If they’re a constituent, I’m bound to help them with what they need. But I know that people do want to know what party you are now, and they want you to be vocal on the issues of the day in politics, whether it’s local or national or even international. We’re all seeing that.”

Abuzuaiter considers herself a moderate, she said, a position she said is increasingly difficult for people to accept.

“I think people really want to label you,” Abuzuaiter said. “I think they want to consider you a far-right conservative or a liberal when maybe what you are is a moderate who votes conservatively on some items and liberal on some others.”

The last time Greensboro’s elections saw so much blatant partisanship, Abuzuaiter said, was in the conservative backlash to the 2008 election of President Barack Obama. A conservative “Tea Party” movement swept the nation and briefly helped win a conservative majority on Greensboro’s city council and the Guilford County Board of Commissioners. It was one of the most politically divisive times she could remember locally.

But wave elections don’t always make for lasting victory. Many of the Republicans elected at the council level were on their way out again the next term.

Nancy Vaughan, Greensboro’s outgoing mayor, agrees. During her 12 years on the job—the longest run in the city’s history—she said she’s come to see overt partisanship as dangerous to the relationships the city needs to grow and thrive.

“Sometimes those are relationships on the council itself, where members who may be Republicans or Democrats realize they have more in common than separates them,” Vaughan said. “Sometimes it’s relationships with the business community, with our state legislators, or even the federal government.”

While she believes Greensboro should adhere to its own values, she said, she’s seen what can happen when partisanship causes antagonism among officials who might otherwise work together.

“We’re not going to agree on everything, and we can certainly see that everywhere now,” Vaughan said. “But I think we’re better off, especially at the local level, when we start off as people instead of as labels.”