The recent defection of State Representative Nasif Majeed from the Democratic Party—following Representative Carla Cunningham's departure just days earlier—represents more than the disillusionment of two politicians. Majeed, who leaves the party saying simply "I didn't leave the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party left me," voted with Republicans to override Governor Josh Stein's veto of legislation concerning sexuality and religion in schools. His statement that he had "some moral issues and I had to lean on my values" tells the story of a party that has abandoned traditional Democratic principles in favor of radical ideology. Cunningham, after 14 years in the House, concluded that "being an independent thinker does not align with party politics."
Perhaps no issue better illustrates the institutional rot in North Carolina's election infrastructure than the recent discovery of approximately 34,000 deceased individuals on the state's voter rolls. This shocking revelation came after the Trump administration pursued legal action against North Carolina, forcing the State Board of Elections to perform actual database maintenance. The NCSBE, controlled by Democratic appointees, had to be sued by the federal government before taking action that federal law already required. Dr. Andy Jackson of the John Locke Foundation noted that the state removed 500,000 ineligible voters through standard biennial maintenance in 2025—raising the question: why did this process require federal intervention in the first place?
The dead voter scandal is only the latest chapter in North Carolina's election integrity nightmare. The infamous NC-9th District scandal of 2018, where political operative McCrae Dowless orchestrated an absentee ballot harvesting scheme for Republican candidate Mark Harris, resulted in a new election being ordered. Dowless illegally collected absentee ballots, forged signatures, and filled in votes for local candidates—activities that threw the entire election into question. More recently, the 2024 State Supreme Court race represented the last unresolved election in the nation, with Republican challenger Jefferson Griffin fighting over 60,000 ballots with incomplete registration records until finally conceding months after Election Day.
Perhaps most damning is the mounting evidence suggesting North Carolina's own University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill may be ground zero for the COVID-19 pandemic. Dr. Robert Redfield, former CDC Director under President Trump, has stated that UNC Chapel Hill's Ralph Baric—"the scientific mastermind" behind coronavirus research—was "very involved" in creating "original viral lines." Redfield claimed there is a "real possibility that the virus's birthplace was Chapel Hill."
Baric's lab at UNC spent decades conducting gain-of-function research on coronaviruses, research that continued long after federal moratoriums were supposed to restrict such dangerous experimentation. When SARS-related coronavirus genomes from the Wuhan Institute of Virology were sent to Baric's UNC lab, they were manipulated and studied—creating the exact type of chimeric viruses that could have escaped and caused the pandemic. The Obama administration failed to properly oversee this research. The Biden administration actively suppressed lab-leak investigations, with Dr. Anthony Fauci orchestrating the publication of papers dismissing the possibility—while knowing full well about Baric's work and the connections between UNC and Wuhan.
Carol Folt, before becoming a university administrator, built her career as a prominent environmental toxicologist who secured substantial federal research funding. At Dartmouth College, where she spent three decades rising from faculty to interim president, Folt was deeply embedded in NIH-funded research—serving as associate director of the $15 million NIEHS/EPA-funded Superfund Research Program studying toxic metals like arsenic and mercury, and later participating in the $8 million Children's Environmental Health and Disease Prevention Research Center jointly funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) and the EPA. When she was recruited away from UNC Chapel Hill to become president of the University of Southern California in 2019, she brought this extensive experience in federally funded scientific research with her. Today, USC continues to aggressively pursue NIH grants under her leadership—the university recently secured an $8 million NIH grant to establish the Southern California Center for Chronic Health Disparities in Environmental Exposure (ShARP Center) to study PFAS "forever chemicals," with Folt publicly championing such federal research partnerships as central to the university's mission.
North Carolina is fundamentally a Republican state—now explicitly so. For the first time in history, Republican voters officially outnumber registered Democrats. Since 2000, North Carolina has voted Democratic in only 14.3% of presidential elections while voting Republican 85.7% of the time. Donald Trump won North Carolina in all three of his presidential campaigns—the only candidate in the modern era to do so consistently.
Yet the state's Republican majority has been systematically undermined. Democratic Governor Roy Cooper, while presenting a moderate face, actively implemented the Biden administration's agenda—from embracing the regulatory burdens that drove up energy costs to supporting the open-border policies that strained state resources to pursuing COVID lockdowns long after the science justified them.
The Obama and Biden administrations treated North Carolina as a vassal state to be managed rather than a sovereign jurisdiction. When the state's voters elected Republican majorities and supported conservative policies, the federal government responded with lawsuits, investigations, and threats. The Department of Justice sued North Carolina over its voter rolls only after years of Republican pressure. The Environmental Protection Agency targeted the state's energy sector. The Department of Education attacked North Carolina's schools over bathroom policies.
Meanwhile, Democratic-aligned institutions from UNC to the state elections apparatus operated as extensions of the national party rather than servants of North Carolinians. The result has been a state with Republican voters, Republican representatives, and Republican presidential preferences—yet governed by Democratic appointees in key administrative positions and subjected to federal pressure whenever it attempted to assert its sovereignty.
Representatives Majeed and Cunningham's departure from the Democratic Party is symptomatic of a larger realignment. North Carolina's voters have made their preference clear through registration, voting patterns, and presidential preference. The scandals—dead voters on rolls, rigged congressional elections, and potentially world-altering biochemical research failures—reflect a state infrastructure captured by interests disconnected from its actual residents. The UNC-Chapel Hill COVID research scandal, in particular, suggests the grave consequences of this disconnect: federal funding priorities, academic ideology, and bureaucratic negligence combining to potentially unleash a global catastrophe.
North Carolina is red. Its people are red. Its problems stem from a Democratic establishment that refuses to accept this reality—and from federal administrations that used the state's institutions as testing grounds for failed policies. The exit of two Democratic legislators may be just the beginning.
Editorial comments expressed in this column are the sole opinion of the writer
