Cotham came back in 2023 to a different Democratic caucus. How it led to her leaving

Returning to political office in January after six years away, North Carolina Rep. Tricia Cotham found many new faces and more scrutiny.

When Democrats first appointed Cotham to office in 2007, the Mecklenburg County lawmaker received attention for being one of the youngest state House members and the youngest woman. More-experienced lawmakers mentored her.

But the group she rejoined this year had seen turnover, and some of its leaders didn’t serve with her previously. And instead of being chosen as a mentor, in recognition of her previous service, she says, she was given one.

“The caucus today is very different than what it was when I first came into the House — and when she came into the House — and sometimes those changes drive us to make different decisions,” former Rep. Brian Turner of Buncombe County said.

Fast-forward three months, and instead of mentoring the newest House Democrats, she’s the newest House Republican.

Whatever the personal and political motivations of Cotham’s party switch from Democrat to Republican, it shows another shift in the political party that continues to lose power in North Carolina.

Democrats’ losses, pressure from Cooper

Within days of Cotham announcing she would change parties, Democrats used it to raise money.

On Monday, the subject line of a fundraising email from Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper said:

“We need you to read this message ASAP.”

The email went on: “The state of NC politics has been completely shaken up by a Democratic representative’s decision to defect to the Republican Party.”

It recapped Cotham’s switch, stressed the importance of supporting Cooper, and asked for donations.

Continued success at campaign fundraising won’t be enough on its own to turn around the fortunes of a party that has won governor’s races in recent years but lost most federal races and now is losing ground at the state level, too. Republicans took over control of the state Supreme Court in last year’s elections, and with those elections combined with Cotham’s move, they have veto-proof supermajorities in both chambers of the General Assembly.

That means Democrats, even while harshly criticizing Cotham for switching parties, still need her vote.

So about the same time the fundraising email went out, in the first of a four-tweet thread on Monday afternoon, Cooper said: “Much has been made about the @triciacotham switch from D to R in the legislature. If she keeps her word on the issues, her votes and the positions she takes in Republican Caucus can still stop bad legislation that hurts people she promised to help, regardless of her party.”

Cooper is more than halfway through his second term as governor, and can’t run for a third term.

At the start of this year, Republicans only needed one Democrat’s vote for a total legislative supermajority. That very small buffer of one seat, rather than a few, added scrutiny to Cotham. She said during the Republican press conference announcing her switch that the Democratic Party she had known to have a “big tent” had changed, and wanted lawmakers to do what they were told.

She said it was clear that she was expected to “vote in line with everything that Gov. Cooper wanted you to do ... All of this sense of control. I will not be controlled by anyone.”

Cotham said in her speech that Cooper even wanted to be involved in choosing where lawmakers sit on the House floor. Floor seating is determined by the controlling party, which is Republican.

Last year, Cooper supported a primary challenge of sitting Democratic Sen. Kirk deViere, who lost his primary. Cooper’s involvement in the race led to Democrats spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep an already blue seat blue.

DeViere, who had voted with Republicans on a few key issues ahead of being primaried by Cooper, faced a similar directive when he was in office to the one Cotham described.

“I was told by someone on Cooper’s political team to ‘push the button I tell you to push. We made an investment on you, and we want a return,’” deViere told The N&O this week.

“I don’t think it’s a healthy strategy. I think you build teams. I don’t think you lead through threats, you lead through building teams, and mutual respect and loyalty,” deViere said.

He said he was asked to switch parties but did not, and after he lost his primary, he worked to elect other Democrats.

“Everybody makes their own individual decisions. I did not find a need to leave the party, even though what I had gone through with the leader of the party,” deViere said.

Cotham ‘deceit?’

Cotham said she switched because Democrats targeted her for not always toeing the party line, saying there were attempts to control her as well as attacks against her on social media.

“This doesn’t help women in politics,” Cotham said during the Republican press conference, saying Democrats will “slice and dice you in a second with malicious, vicious, untrue rumors and do not celebrate your success.”

“It bothers me that they’re hypocritical,” she said.

North Carolina Democratic Party Chair Anderson Clayton called Cotham’s switch “a deceit of the highest order.”

But Cotham was already voting with Republicans on some issues and was expected to continue to do so as a Democrat. Not on every vote, though: She signed on as a co-sponsor with all the other House Democrats early this session to codify Roe v. Wade.

Now, as a Republican, she could vote with the rest of her new caucus more often, though so far she has not publicly discussed any changes in policy positions.

Turner, the Buncombe County Democrat who did not run for another term in 2022 and now works for North Carolina Audubon, said when they served together, Cotham was “an effective legislator.”

House Democratic Leader Robert Reives of Chatham County pushed back on Cotham’s comments about being given a mentor even though she had a decade’s previous service in the House. He said that returning lawmakers are part of that session’s new freshman class, and that House Democrats knew of her service and held her in high esteem.

“A lot of people felt we were lucky to get her back, including me,” Reives said.

House Democrats were taken aback by her party switch, he said.

Reives texted Cotham the day Axios Raleigh broke the news of her switch, after he received a press inquiry. The text was simple: how did she want him to handle press inquiries?

Reives said she never responded.

He said that outside groups put scrutiny on lawmakers and “everything we do is watched.”

Hot button issues like guns and abortion garner a lot of scrutiny, including nationally.

“It’s hard on them,” he said about lawmakers in competitive districts, acknowledging “intensity is high.”

But he said: “I don’t believe in criticizing each other as caucus members. You’ve got to understand that we’re all we’ve got,” Reives said.

“If you don’t want the attention and scrutiny, [the House Democratic Caucus] are not your problem. That attention is there, and there’s nothing we can do about it,” Reives said.

Back home in Mecklenburg County, Democrats ask why

For Democratic leadership in Mecklenburg County, the “why” of Cotham’s departure remains elusive.

Jane Whitley, Mecklenburg County Democratic Party chair, said that when Cotham gave her speech announcing her departure, “I had no idea what she was talking about. Nothing had been brought to my attention. She had not contacted me about any of these issues. To my knowledge, I don’t know anyone else that knows anything about what she was talking about.”

For Whitley, Cotham’s decision to leave appeared to be based on “personal issues rather than policy issues.”

Cotham “had been out of office since 2016,” so Cotham having a mentor, Whitley said, “may have been just to try to bring her up to speed with any changes.”

“If she was upset because she was assigned (a) mentor, and I don’t know if that was true or not, but if that was a reason for her to leave, it does not sound like a very good reason,” Whitley said.

Asked whether the allegations of the party limiting dissent had a foundation, Whitley said the party has many “people who disagree on different issues” and that following Cotham’s missed vote on a repeal of the state’s pistol permit requirement, many angry constituents contacted the Mecklenburg office.

Shortly after her missed vote, Cotham announced her departure from the Democrats.

“We did not as the party” address the missed vote with her but “we did direct people who had complaints about her missing the vote, we did refer them to her office to express those concerns,” Whitley said.

“She campaigned as a Democrat. She ran as a Democrat. So the people in her district are the reason that she’s there,” Whitley said.

‘Wake-up call’ for Democrats?

Asked what Cotham’s switch meant for the future of the Democratic Party, Whitley said there was “a lot of anger” among the voters and “what we’re seeing is, it’s kind of a groundswell. People want to know what they can do to keep this from happening again.”

Braxton Becoats, president of the African American Caucus of Mecklenburg County, said Cotham’s departure, rather than lead to further disarray, would have “the opposite effect.”

“I think her switch is going to galvanize and push more Democrats to get out and get active because we now know that the Republicans can pass anything,” Becoats said.

This is not going to further “disjoint our political party,” he said. “I think it’s going to actually bring us together and motivate us to get out, get active and figure out what we need to do in order to elect Democrats. So that we do not continue to have people switching parties.”

Cotham’s departure will help mobilize the party, said Kevan Woodson, former president of Senior Democrats of Mecklenburg and a member of the state’s Democratic executive committee.

“We have not done the best job in terms of capturing the mindset of the voter, particularly the unaffiliated, and we need to do better to carry a message that everybody can get behind,” he said.

“Yes, there are some issues there. Is that a reason for her to leave? No,” he said, “‘You don’t like it, say something to somebody, don’t just walk away, unless, again, a personal opinion, you feel you have nothing to offer.”

Responding to criticism of Democrats, Woodson said, “Well, we’ve lost connection. So let’s get out and re-establish connection. ‘We don’t have a platform to stand on.’ I disagree with that. But the fact is the platform needs to be constructed better and we’re going to be doing it, there’s going to be a lot of changes that are coming forward. And it’s a wake-up call.”

“Things have changed and you need (to) change with it.”

GOP House coalition

Stephen Wiley, the N.C. House Republican Caucus director, said when he heard about Cotham’s upcoming switch, the weekend before it happened, he met with Cotham and gave her the “10,000-foot view of what the process would be, and what the fallout would be.”

Wiley said he told Cotham what he tells other Republicans who have a more traditional recruitment to the caucus: “to be themselves.”

“We will never ask them to be anything other than themselves,” he said.

Cotham brings the number of women in the House caucus to nine, out of 72.

“There is a desire in our caucus leadership to grow our coalition,” Wiley said. “You win elections by growing your coalition, and to have Tricia Cotham in our caucus is certainly a way to grow our coalition — a professional woman with extensive background in education and policy in a suburban area,” Wiley said.

He said that unlike Republicans in other states like Tennessee and Michigan, North Carolina Republicans in the House are more interested in persuading voters and winning seats, not just turning out their base. Wiley said Cotham is an example of a vote persuaded.

The General Assembly has been on recess this week. Committees are scheduled for Tuesday, include House Education, which is co-chaired by Cotham.

Reives doesn’t think anything in the House will be different when it reconvenes, he said.

“We only had a one vote margin as it was. Everything in that building is controlled by two people — [House Speaker Tim Moore and Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Berger] — and they have incredible amounts of carrots and sticks.”