A 1-point tax increase isn’t exactly remarkable. What’s remarkable is that if it takes effect, the change will mark a turning point in a war between Charlotte and the state that has been going on for nearly 30 years.
All the way back in 1997, the city asked for new taxing authority, and the state legislature balked. This was still going on in 2020, when a local task force called for a 1-cent increase, and the legislature proclaimed the idea dead on arrival.
These are key events in a seemingly endless city vs. state transportation war, but the war involved other issues as well. In 2013, the legislature tried to take control of the Charlotte airport out of the city’s hands and turn it over to a state-created commission. That ploy failed when a Superior Court judge ruled it out of order. But the rocky relationship continued.
An effort in 2023 to raise the local sales tax to fund new transit projects got nowhere in Raleigh. The Republican House speaker, Tim Moore, complained that too much money was already being spent on transit and said the city “needs to be focused on road capacity.” A local news publication, Carolina Forward, accused Moore and other legislative Republicans of harboring “a long-running resentment of Charlotte.” It was hard to dispute that.
It’s also hard to dispute that there was a strong element of partisanship involved in the argument. Once Republican in its voting habits, and then pretty closely divided, Charlotte and Mecklenburg County have become a Democratic stronghold. In 2024, Mecklenburg gave Kamala Harris 65 percent of its presidential vote.
The quarrel was still going on as the current year began. A columnist for the Charlotte Observer put the chances of the city getting new transit money at “awfully close to zero.”
And yet the referendum is probably going to happen. That’s partly because the new money wouldn’t be entirely for transit. Some 40 percent of it would be earmarked for road projects. There’s also the fact that Charlotte isn’t begging the state to give it anything — just asking for permission to make a decision on its own. That appeared to turn some Republicans toward allowing the referendum. But it’s also possible that this year’s events will mark the beginning of a prolonged ceasefire in a multidecade political and partisan war.
NORTH CAROLINA ISN’T THE ONLY STATE where urban Democrats and state-level Republicans have been long at odds. The fact is that being a blue city in a largely red state is a more or less permanent challenge.
Take Boise, for example. Idaho’s largest city isn’t exactly a hotbed of liberalism, but in recent years it has attracted a significant cadre of center-left newcomers, many of them from California, and it looks dangerously liberal to the hard-right Republican Legislature. This year alone, the Legislature took up at least 14 bills pre-empting local government (read Boise) on a whole array of fronts. It prohibited cities from requiring electric vehicle charging stations, curtailed local child-care regulations stricter than those of the state, prohibited mask mandates and limited what flags can be flown at public facilities, a measure seen as aimed at the display of pride flags. In the words of Ilana Rubel, the House minority leader, “They have no interest in local government.” It sounds more like what they have is a vengeful interest.
Salt Lake City has a somewhat similar problem. No one would confuse it with San Francisco, but as a city that has elected a series of Democratic mayors, it frequently finds itself in conflict with the overwhelmingly GOP Legislature that sits within its borders. It’s not entirely clear what Salt Lake City’s posture is toward guns, but it really doesn’t matter. State law prohibits it from enacting any serious gun restrictions, and authorizes residents of the state to carry weapons without obtaining a permit. This year, the Legislature curtailed Salt Lake City’s authority to redesign its streets to promote safety.
But the national capital of blue city/red state animosity is Texas. Taking aim at most of the state’s population centers, the Legislature enacted a measure in 2023 that urban opponents quickly began calling the “Death Star Law.” That legislation allows private entities to sue cities and counties over local regulations in eight different policy areas where no explicit approval from the Legislature exists. In the words of one Democratic legislator at the time, “It’s the greatest transfer of power away from the public and into the hands of a few people in Austin that we’ve ever seen. … The handful of people that want to control our state do not want cities acting in their own interest.”
The Death Star Law applies to Houston, Dallas and San Antonio, all of which have been moving left, but there is no mistaking that its primary target is Austin, which (along with surrounding Travis County) gave Kamala Harris 68 percent of its vote in the 2024 presidential election. Residents of the city long ago adopted the slogan “Keep Austin Weird” as a way of citing its differences from most of Texas. Those words were (and are) meant as a form of self-congratulation; the Legislature has treated them as something to be seriously afraid of.
This year, legislators went even further in efforts to keep left-leaning urban critics under control. One bill would authorize the state attorney general to freeze local property taxes of any city deemed out of compliance with state policy. An even more drastic proposal was to put Austin under state control altogether. Neither of those efforts made it into law, but they served notice that the blue city/red state war is still going full blast. As one Austin City Council member put it, “They are once again beating up on Austin to score political points.”
IN NO OTHER STATE has the war gone quite as far as it has in Texas. Charlotte is getting along with its state legislature, at least for now. But elements of it are likely to turn up in other cities around the country where the same demographic imbalance exists.
Back in 2008, the journalist Bill Bishop attracted national attention with his book The Big Sort, which argued that American communities were rearranging themselves by ideology and partisanship, with liberals choosing to live in like-minded neighborhood clusters and conservatives settling in opposite ones. Since then, there has been ample evidence that Bishop was essentially right. Now we are seeing signs of a different big sort asserting itself at the state level.
In several midwestern states, the largest city, usually the capital city, has been breaking away from the broader constituencies elsewhere in the state. Some of this clustering is happening in unexpected places.
In Republican Indiana, for example, Indianapolis has had a Democratic mayor for the past nine years. Des Moines has had Democrats running city hall for most of the last two decades, even as Iowa (like Indiana) has been reliably Republican in state and presidential politics. And earlier this year, Omaha, Neb., unseated its long-serving Republican mayor and installed a Democrat in her place. All three of these cities have been in the midst of a significant demographic transition, with young people from around the state moving to the population center in search of amenities and professional opportunities. This has had its effect on local politics.
It seems inevitable that more of this will happen over the course of the coming decade. That doesn’t mean Omaha will turn into Austin, or even Charlotte. But it may mean more blue city/red state conflicts of the kind Texas and North Carolina have grown used to.
Governing’s opinion columns reflect the views of their authors and not necessarily those of Governing’s editors or management.
