To reflect on the year, Chapelboro.com is re-publishing some of the top stories that impacted and defined our community’s experience in 2024. These stories and topics affected Chapel Hill, Carrboro and the rest of our region.
We all knew that 2024 would be largely defined by the national election — it was only a question of how, exactly, it would play out. On the national level, that meant a narrow but clear victory for Donald Trump in the presidential race, after a last-minute shakeup on the Democratic side. Democrats had more to cheer on the state level, though Republicans took steps afterward to consolidate power in their own hands despite their defeat. And on the local level, 2024 was defined by a twist in the primary that ended with one apparently-reelected incumbent resigning from her position altogether.
In Orange County, the 2024 election season began with a local focus: before attention shifted to the national contests, there was the little matter of a school board race to attend to.
Orange County Schools holds its school-board elections in conjunction with North Carolina’s primary, so voters in the district were electing three board members on March 5 — or so they thought.
The race was close and contentious, reflecting the politics of the district, which had split into dueling factions over prioritizing equity — a debate that had led, in part, to the ouster of superintendent Monique Felder the year before. (Equity wasn’t the only source of conflict: financial concerns had also been an issue, along with the district’s COVID policies.)
Two official PACs emerged, each endorsing a slate of three candidates: the progressive Communities Supporting Orange County Schools endorsed incumbents Carrie Doyle and Jennifer Moore, along with first-time candidate Wendy Padilla; while the conservative Friends of Orange County Schools endorsed first-time candidates Cindy Shriner and Michael Johnson along with moderate incumbent Bonnie Hauser.
On March 5, the progressives scored a narrow but decisive victory, with Doyle, Padilla and Moore clearly outpolling their opponents. But the battle for third place was close, with Moore edging out Hauser by just over 400 votes. That race was close enough to trigger a two-person runoff election, at Hauser’s request.
And that’s when things got interesting.
Jennifer Moore and Bonnie Hauser.
Just three weeks before the May runoff, Moore abruptly resigned her seat on the school board. In a brief statement, Moore cited health concerns as the primary reason for stepping down. But there was another, even larger factor: a News & Observer investigation that discovered she’d never actually earned a doctoral degree, as she had long claimed.
The runoff election went ahead in May — with some advocates still urging residents to vote for Moore anyway, in the thought that a progressive-majority board would appoint a similar replacement. But voters didn’t go for it: Hauser easily won the runoff, to retain her seat on a still-divided board.
The turmoil surrounding that school board race took some attention away from the other races on the March primary ballot, but there were several other noteworthy outcomes on the state level. Most notably, Republican voters in North Carolina nominated a slate of highly controversial candidates for state-level seats: firebrand lieutenant governor Mark Robinson for governor; Dan Bishop, an author of North Carolina’s infamous anti-LGBTQ HB2 bill, for attorney general; and for superintendent of public instruction, Michele Morrow, a far-right candidate who’d once called for Barack Obama’s public execution (among many other things).
Robinson’s gubernatorial campaign, a long shot to begin with, went down in flames in the fall after a CNN report that uncovered a string of racist, homophobic, Islamophobic and antisemitic comments he’d made on a pornographic message board a decade earlier. But in keeping with North Carolina’s perennial status as a swing state, the other races went down to the wire: even just before Election Day, there was little consensus among observers about who would win.
Democratic North Carolina gubernatorial candidate Attorney General Josh Stein applauds supporters during an election night watch party Tuesday, Nov. 5, 2024, in Raleigh, N.C. (Photo via AP Photo/Grant Halverson.)
North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson arrives at a news conference in Raleigh, N.C., Tuesday, Oct. 15, 2024. (Photo via AP Photo/Karl B DeBlaker.)
That was also the case on the national level, where the presidential race saw one massive shakeup after another — Donald Trump’s fait-accompli GOP nomination; Joe Biden’s disastrous performance in a nationally televised debate; Biden’s subsequent decision to drop out of the race in favor of Kamala Harris; Trump’s own abysmal performance in a second debate; a pair of assassination attempts on Trump; and Trump’s felony conviction on hush-money charges, just the accusation of which was enough to end John Edwards’ career a decade ago — but not a single one of those shakeups seemed to have any significant effect on voters, or the pre-election polls. (Even Biden’s bad debate performance had little impact on polling numbers — though many Democrats urged him to drop out of the race, on the assumption that it had.)
In the end, Election Day proved to be a mixed bag, at least in North Carolina. Trump won the presidential election and the GOP claimed narrow majorities in the U.S. House and Senate, leaving progressives despondent on the national level. But in North Carolina, it was not a bad night for Democrats. Trump won the state’s electoral votes, but Josh Stein defeated Robinson in the race for governor; Jeff Jackson defeated Bishop for attorney general; Mo Green defeated Morrow for school superintendent; and Democrats overcame heavy partisan gerrymandering to pick up just enough seats in the General Assembly to break the Republicans’ veto-proof supermajority — albeit by only one vote, in the State House. Locally, advocates cheered as Orange County voters approved a $300 million bond to pay for infrastructure upgrades in the schools; and in Carrboro, Cristóbal Palmer easily won a race to fill an open seat on the Town Council.
And in the race for a State Supreme Court seat, incumbent Democrat Allison Riggs edged out her Republican opponent Jefferson Griffin by just over 700 votes — out of more than 5.5 million cast. How close is that? To put it into perspective: earlier in the year, Bonnie Hauser and Jennifer Moore were separated by almost 500 votes out of only 13,000 cast — and even that had been close enough to trigger a runoff.
Jefferson Griffin and Allison Riggs.
And so ended a highly eventful election season in North Carolina. But it’s North Carolina, and so the political wrangling never ends on Election Day. Shortly after the returns were finalized, Republican lawmakers returned to the state legislature to take advantage of the dwindling days of their supermajority — by passing SB 382, a bill that abruptly shifted power away from all the offices that Democrats had just won, including the governor and attorney general. (Incoming Governor Stein has already filed a lawsuit challenging the measure in court.) And even after the initial vote count and two subsequent recounts, the race for State Supreme Court remains not entirely decided — because Griffin and Republican leaders are challenging 60,000 votes they say shouldn’t be counted. (Those votes reportedly include Riggs’ own parents, as well as elected officials like Chapel Hill-Carrboro school board member Rani Dasi.)
So it goes in North Carolina: the election may be over — but the beat goes on.
Featured photo via the Town of Carrboro.
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Top Stories of 2024: Election Turmoil, Locally and Nationally Chapelboro.com.
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