Understanding the impact of the Attorney General race

Today we’re continuing our series about statewide races with outsized impact on the business community. We wrote previously about the Agriculture Commissioner  and Labor Commissioner – today we’re talking about the Attorney General.

The last Republican elected as attorney general in North Carolina was Zeb V. Walser in 1896. Another Republican, James Carson, Jr., served briefly in the 1970s after Gov. James Holshouser, Jr., appointed him to fill a vacancy. Might 2024 end the Republican Party’s 128-year drought?

Congressman Dan Bishop (R) hopes so. After two terms in the North Carolina General Assembly, Bishop won a heated special election for Congress in 2019, where he has served since.

Bishop has a reputation as a hard-charging conservative warrior, but not in the mold of other china shop bulls. He’s a lawyer by training, and is just as prone to issuing deeply-researched and complex policy statements as he is to offer up red meat rebukes of the deep state. One should not mistake Bishop for the bloviator his opponents will surely caricature him to be.

A testament to Bishop’s standing among North Carolina Republican leaders and the rank-and-file, his 2023 announcement that he would seek the nomination for attorney general cleared the field – he faced no primary challengers.

Bishop knows his general election opponent well, Congressman Jeff Jackson (D). Jackson and Bishop served together in the North Carolina General Assembly, and Jackson joined Bishop in Congress after the 2022 election.

Congressman Jeff Jackson’s biography is strong and appealing on paper – he’s a major in the National Guard who enlisted after witnessing 9/11, a UNC-Chapel Hill grad, and a former assistant district attorney.

Jackson, as a freshman in the minority, has not had as much opportunity to make a name for himself in Washington. Still, he’s amassed a huge social media following – he has more than 2 million followers on TikTok (the controversial social media platform that houses short video posts and is dominated by teens) – with plain-spoken, accessible videos about the inner workings of Congress (and the General Assembly before that).

But Jackson’s brand has not translated to productive relationships with fellow policymakers. Few if any of his General Assembly colleagues supported his bid for U.S. Senate in 2022 (he dropped out of the race and instead ran for Congress).

An in-depth 2021 Politico dispatch on the U.S. Senate primary quoted unnamed Democratic colleagues as referring to him derisively as Baby Jesus: “They think he’s better at generating attention for himself than he is at crafting legislation for his constituents — a show horse. . .more than a workhorse.”

Even so, Jackson is certainly the establishment standard-bearer in the race for attorney general, and his large following among “regular people” is not to be overlooked. He likely earned some goodwill from party grandees by dropping out of the Senate primary to clear the way for Cheri Beasley, and the party establishment of course prefers Jackson over Bishop.

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Republicans swept every statewide judicial race in 2020 and 2022, causing some to suggest that the electorate favors them on crime and justice issues. And incumbent Attorney General Josh Stein, who is running for governor, barely won the 2020 election, squeaking out his challenger by just 13,622 votes – Stein outspent his Republican opponent Jim O’Neill 10 to 1. 

Bishop told Spectrum News earlier this year, “It is a seat waiting to be won.”

It’s also a seat with outsized impact on the state’s business climate.

First, the attorney general defends the state’s laws from constitutional challenges in court – at least, that’s what he’s supposed to do. Stein, the incumbent, has invited the ire of leaders in the General Assembly for declining to defend laws involving voter ID and abortion.

It seems apparent that Stein declined to defend these laws – though he’s supposed to as attorney general – because they’re politically charged. Still, with such a precedent firmly established, it’s possible future attorneys general will decline to defend North Carolina laws that may impact disfavored business interests.

Second, an overtly political attorney general may inject unpredictability into business operations if the community fears he would target companies for their political stances (or lack thereof). Might a political attorney general launch investigations on unrelated matters into a company that supports, say, school choice or crisis pregnancy centers? Further, the office houses a number of attorney’s who are specifically assigned to matters of government agencies who, by their regulatory nature, are engaged with thousands of businesses on a daily basis, across the state. 

Third, North Carolina has a sordid history with attorneys general extracting sums from private industry via civil settlements, and then using those funds for what some see as political gain. Former Attorney General Mike Easley, for example, was sued over this practice in the late 1990s – the allegation was that he built a slush fund by pressing target companies to “settle” investigations brought by his office, and then used that slush fund to pay for TV ads promoting  his actions. 

When former Attorney General Roy Cooper assumed office, he ended the practice – but that doesn’t mean a future attorney general wouldn’t fire it back up, in order to appear on tv screens across North Carolina.

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There’s a reason some half-joke that “AG” stands for “Almost Governor” – it’s a high-profile post that’s a natural launching point for gubernatorial bids. The office carries tremendous hard power and soft influence over the business community, and whoever wins the job in November will decide how to wield it.