Battleground State Candidates Embrace Moderate Brand Despite Immoderate Positions

As the 2022 midterm elections hit the home stretch, Democratic candidates in battleground races continue to make clear they think a moderate brand is beneficial to their electoral prospects. This is the case even for progressive candidates who have voting records and stated policy positions that are well to the left of most Democrats, let alone the overall electorate.

An effort is now underway to apply the moderate label to Cheri Beasley, the Democratic senate nominee in North Carolina, whose race could determine the balance of power in the U.S. Senate. “She is not a wild, liberal progressive,” a New Yorker article published on October 13 asserted about Beasley. “She is a classic moderate, centrist Democratic candidate of the type that tends to do well statewide, and can win.”

Yet many North Carolina voters will take issue with the New Yorker’s standard for what counts as liberal or progressive. Just as statehouse reporters most familiar with congressional candidate and North Carolina state Senator Wiley Nickel’s voting record had a hard time believing his recent claims of moderation, many of those familiar with Beasley’s policy positions view it as a stretch to call the former state Supreme Court chief justice a moderate. There are many examples to cite, starting with the enormous change in state labor law that Beasley wants to impose from Washington, D.C.

North Carolina is one of 27 states with a Right-to-Work law that prohibits workers from being forced to join and fund a union as a condition of employment. Cheri Beasley wants to repeal North Carolina’s Right-to-Work law.

However, rather than make the case to state legislators for Right-to-Work repeal, Beasley wants federal lawmakers in Washington, D.C. to repeal this state level worker safeguard and those on the books in 26 other states by passing the PRO Act, federal legislation that has already been approved by the U.S. House of Representatives. The PRO Act, in addition to depriving workers of the right to independently contract, would repeal all 27 state Right-to-Work laws.

In addition to repealing Right-to-Work laws in 27 states from Washington, D.C., Beasley is also open scrapping the filibuster and having a slim congressional majority add a 10th U.S. Supreme Court justice. Beasley also supports H.R. 1, legislation that would impose a federal takeover of all 50 state-run election systems.

“Great innovations should not be forced on slender majorities,” Thomas Jefferson once said, a remark that was frequently cited by President John F. Kennedy, one of the most revered Democrats in history. Contrary to this sentiment, Beasley wants to impose transformational policy changes nationwide through the slimmest of congressional majorities. The PRO Act is but one example.

Demonstrating how much the Democratic Party has changed over time, Congressman Ted Budd (R), Beasley’s GOP opponent, finds himself more in line with JFK on fiscal policy than does Beasley. JFK once remarked that raising taxes “would be contradictory” to promoting economic growth and job creation. While Ted Budd has committed to opposing net tax hikes if elected, going so far as to put that promise in writing, Cheri Beasley has decided she will remain open to raising taxes if elected this November.

The contrast between Budd and Beasley on tax policy shouldn’t be surprising, seeing as Beasley has applauded the passage of federal tax hikes while on the campaign trail. She supported, for example, the tax increases that were part of the Inflation Reduction Act signed into law by President Joe Biden in August. Analysis released by the non-partisan Joint Committee on Taxation found that bill will raise taxes on middle- and low-income households, including on those making less than $10,000 annually.

Policy proposals aside, there is also incongruity between Democrats’ moderate branding and their rhetoric. During an August NPR interview, for example, Governor Roy Cooper (D-N.C.) claimed the U.S. Supreme Court is controlled by former President Donald Trump, a most immoderate claim to make.

Here is the governor of the nation’s ninth most populous state, who is frequently referred to as a moderate, responding to court rulings he does not like by accusing most U.S. Supreme Court justices of being controlled by the former president. Compare Cooper’s reaction to court decisions he dislikes with President Kennedy’s 1962 remarks, in which he said that when it comes to Supreme Court rulings, “a good many people obviously will disagree…but I think that it is important for us if we are going to maintain our constitutional principle, that we support the Supreme Court decisions, even when we may not agree with them.”

Beasley, like Cooper, has also made controversial remarks about the courts. While she was Chief Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, Beasley made statements that critics viewed as an attack on the whole state judicial system.

“Too many people believe that there are two kinds of justice,” Beasley said in 2020 from the state Supreme Court chambers. “They believe it because that is their lived experience — they have seen and felt the difference in their own lives…We must openly acknowledge the disparities that exist and are too often perpetuated by our justice system.”

“To state that ‘we must openly acknowledge the disparities that exist and are too often perpetrated by our justice system’, denigrates the hard work of every stakeholder in the judicial system,” Michael W. Miller, the elected district attorney for Cleveland and Lincoln Counties, said in response to Beasley comments.

“Coming from the head of the judicial branch of North Carolina’s government, it tells citizens that you cannot trust the justice system to be fair,” Miller added. “The system is either explicitly or implicitly biased.”

As some of the most prominent Democrats in the battleground state North Carolina are demonstrating, left-skewing voting records and policy platforms containing controversial planks are not stopping candidates from attempting to claim the moderate mantle in 2022. Time will tell whether this approach works. However, if Cheri Beasley, Roy Cooper, and Wiley Nickel are now the standard for what is moderate in the Democratic Party, as their supporters want voters to believe, then the case that JFK was really a conservative is as strong as it’s ever been.