Why the 2026 NC Supreme Court Race Matters More Than Ever

Thank you for joining us this Saturday morning. 

Later this year, voters will decide whether to retain Anita Earls on the state Supreme Court, or to replace her with Sarah Stevens. The state’s high court has a tremendous impact as the terminal point for legal and constitutional questions. 

But the role of state judiciaries has taken on yet more prominence in recent years. Courts have become battlegrounds for political and policy disputes, and they’ve taken up commensurate attention from donors and political consultants. 

It’s against this backdrop that Earls and Stevens face off for a critical statewide elected office in one of the most contested political battlegrounds in the country. 

***

On November 3, 2026, North Carolina voters will choose between two women with starkly different views of what courts are for. The outcome will shape the balance of the state’s highest court, influence who draws the next decade of political maps, and send a signal about whether the national campaign to remake state judiciaries through electoral politics is losing momentum, or just beginning.

To understand this race, you first have to understand the trendline in governmental power in recent decades. 

Politics has never been a competition of principles. It’s a competition of persuasion, with appeals to principle frequently deployed in pursuit of power. That is why the Democratic Party can go from celebrating anti-gerrymandering urban murals to passing one of the most sweeping gerrymanders in American history. One can find similar about-faces from the Republican Party, too.

But the judiciary has long been insulated from power politics. A culture of impartiality – of cool aloofness – has been hammered into the institution’s arbiters for two centuries. But insulation is not immunity. There are no impregnable walls.

Slowly but surely, political questions best answered by legislators have crept into courtrooms. Reasons abound, and we won’t derail this piece to answer why. But, just as water flows downhill, so too does money and campaign sophistication flow into centers of political power.

The 2023 Wisconsin Supreme Court election, for example, cost an estimated $50 million for a single seat. Then, in April 2025, another Wisconsin Supreme Court race shattered that record entirely, drawing more than $100 million in spending. North Carolina, as an evenly divided perennial battleground, has also seen campaign spending for Supreme Court races skyrocket.

***

Before running her first campaign for the state’s highest court in 2018, Earls, a Democrat, founded and ran the Southern Coalition for Social Justice (SCSJ). The litigious organization pursued legal action on education, redistricting, and more during Earls’s tenure. While on the high court, Earls participated in decisions for which she was actively involved as a litigant previously, inviting conflict-of-interest challenges.

She won her 2018 election with substantial financial backing from former Attorney General Eric Holder (his organization, the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, subsequently filed a lawsuit in North Carolina that Earls ruled on). Earls won with less than 50% of the vote in a race shaped by a dubious partisan trojan horse strategy. Shortly before the election, attorney Chris Anglin switched parties to run as a Republican and, with support from well-connected Democratic operatives, split enough Republican support to help defeat incumbent Justice Barbara Jackson. 

Earls’s challenger this election is Sarah Stevens, a long-serving Republican member of the state House of Representatives representing Surry and Wilkes counties. When Stevens announced her candidacy last year, she pledged to “be a conservative voice for justice and families on the Supreme Court. My experience as a family law attorney and a state legislator has prepared me to be a voice for those who cannot advocate for themselves.“

Both state political parties have spent the past year sniping at the other’s candidate, underscoring the weight they place on the outcome of the race. A Stevens victory would move the court to a 6-1 Republican majority. Three Republican-held seats are up in 2028, so a Stevens victory now would require Democrats to win all three elections in 2028 to reclaim a majority. 

Whichever party controls the high court after the 2030 election will almost certainly decide challenges to newly-drawn political maps in advance of the 2032 state and federal elections.

***

Earls’s campaign has nearly $2 million cash-on-hand as of her most recent campaign finance report, nearly 10 times as much as Stevens’s campaign. The political mood also favors Earls right now, with President Donald Trump’s approval numbers hitting low points in his presidency. Still, statewide Republican judicial candidates have performed remarkably well in recent election cycles, winning almost every contest since 2020.

The U.S. Senate is up for grabs this year, and North Carolina is a critical battleground with an open seat, which means money will be pouring into that race. Whether that crowds out funding for Earls or Stevens remains to be seen.

For many business leaders, the choice comes down to a simple philosophical test of judicial temperament. Earls and Stevens self identify as having markedly different judicial philosophies. Earls’ statements and record suggests she will not hesitate to use her power as a judge to wade into policy battles historically reserved for the legislature. Stevens, by contrast, has pledged judicial restraint.

The Earls-Stevens race is a state contest with national implications, but it is also a symptom of something larger. Power has migrated, in recent decades, toward courts. Whether that is a correction or a distortion depends entirely on who you ask, and that is the uncomfortable place American jurisprudence now occupies. This November, North Carolina’s voters will add their chapter to that story.