- A new Elon University poll follows the Roy Cooper- Michael Whatley U.S.

Senate race, and Republicans select a new GOP nominee to replace U.S.

Representative Chuck Edwards.

This is "State Lines."

- Quality public television is made possible through the financial contributions of viewers like you, who invite you to join them in supporting PBS NC.

♪ - Welcome to "State Lines."

I am Kelly McCullen.

Joining me today, Skye David of New Frame, Inc., Scott Falmlen of Nexus Strategies to his right, is Pat Ryan of Ryan Public Relations, and retired North Carolina Supreme Court Associate Justice and a very active attorney.

Nothing retired about Bob Orr.

Hi, Judge.

- Good morning.

- I called you retired.

You can always come back, you know.

- I am retired as a judge.

- You up for raising a few million bucks, jumping back in, you know, at this time?

- I think I have aged out.

- All right.

How are you doing, Skye?

- I am doing well.

- All right.

You ready to go?

- Yes.

- We have got some polling out.

Elon University and some other groups are increasing their investments in polling for North Carolina's U.S.

Senate race.

This week, the Elon poll of 800 likely voters gives Democrat Roy Cooper an 11-point lead over Republican Michael Whatley.

But the pollsters there say Whatley's name recognition among voters is rising rapidly and has been doing so since the spring.

The Carolina Journal is out with a weekly poll giving Cooper a 12-and-a-half-point lead over the Republican Whatley.

Carolina Journal's poll shows Cooper enjoying 51.5 percent total support to Whatley's 39 percent.

Well, usually a poll has been in this race 14 one way, then plus four.

But now we have two that are 11, 12-and-a-half-point leads.

This isn't close right now.

- Yes.

That's what the polls are saying.

And this was a real week for polls.

Besides those two polls, there was also a Carolina Forward poll, which is a more liberal leaning poll, and they had Cooper up by seven points.

That's the only one other than that PPP poll that was maybe a month ago that had it closer.

But these other polls, particularly Carolina Journal, they had him over that 50 percent threshold, which is something that you would heard Republicans say Cooper couldn't get over that 50 percent threshold.

So that seems particularly meaningful.

- For the Carolina Journal.

Scott, just to be fully transparent, you're very familiar with the Cooper campaign.

You're part of it.

You and Morgan Jackson are.

- Yes.

- 51.5 percent voters say they'll vote for your candidate, Roy Cooper.

Is there any temptation to just coast any at all in this race, or do you believe it could tighten?

- Not at all.

Yes, it's -- first of all, I don't think it's an 11- or a 12-point race, but we feel good where we are.

It's going to be a close race, as are all statewide races in North Carolina.

But Governor Cooper is running the campaign that he wants to run, that the people of North Carolina want him to run, talking about making things cost less.

And we're going to be pushing through for the next 90-some-odd days to carry us over the finish line.

- Pat, what is it?

The more liberal polls, if you will, show a closer race than some of the more conservative polls showing Roy Cooper with a large lead by any definition.

- Well, there's always a margin of error in any poll.

There's always going to be some difference.

You're sampling four, five, 600 people, and there's just going to be differences at the margins.

All the polls directionally show that Roy Cooper, who's a talented politician, who's been in this state for a very long time, not a surprise that he's ahead right now, and he has more money in his bank account than Whatley does.

It's going to be a tough road ahead.

This was always going to be an uphill climb for any Republican running against Roy Cooper for the U.S.

Senate race.

It's a fantastic environment for Democrats right now.

We have a second-term incumbent president.

All the sort of natural factors are against Republicans right now, and that's what you're seeing in the polls.

- Judge, you've run statewide before.

- Right.

- And you've come out on top.

You've also run primaries where you never could catch the frontrunner.

How hard is it?

How is it?

I mean, Cooper and these polls are showing Cooper may have an upwards of 83 percent at least name recognition, only 5 percent of North Carolinians.

Show me them.

Never heard of the guy.

And Whatley's in here at 53 percent.

That was lower than that, but it's tricking upwards.

But what?

We're under 90 days to early voting.

- Yeah, it's a tough, tough race for Whatley, as Pat was saying.

He's going to be behind in money.

He's behind in name recognition.

And really, what positive issues does he run on?

Let's keep the war in Iran going.

Let's keep hitting more and more tariffs.

I mean, I don't know what he runs on.

And it looks like, from an advertising perspective, his campaign is just trying to focus on running Cooper down and hoping that voters just pick Whatley as the other choice.

- Isn't that what you do in a race?

You try to beat down your opponent, get people not to vote for them more than so, than you're trying to be positive?

- Yeah, but I think that Whatley first has to establish himself, because, like you just said, everyone knows the name Roy Cooper, but people didn't really know that name Whatley.

So, you have to tell people who you are, as well as drag him down.

But I think the general thought is, this is going to pick up like crazy after Labor Day.

- Scott, you got the highest profile race in Cooper, Whatley, on the Coopers' side.

Do you give any attention down ballot at all?

Do you think Roy Cooper has some coattails, as they say, the right?

Or is this Roy Cooper and then legislature?

You're on your own if you're a Democratic candidate.

- Well, I mean, I think there are coattails from the standpoint that, as Pat alluded to, this is going to be probably a pretty good Democratic year.

There's higher Democratic enthusiasm.

And sure, the better that Roy Cooper does, the better that the down ballot candidates do, especially the judicial candidates and the legislative candidates.

But to your point about the name recognition between Cooper and Whatley, you have to remember, Roy Cooper has been elected statewide six times, four times as attorney general, two times as governor.

The people know Roy Cooper.

And I think some of these ads that the Whatley campaign and the Republican Party are running are just going to fall flat.

- Pat, somebody had to run against Roy Cooper for that U.S.

Senate seat.

Michael Whatley comes from D.C., but he's from North Carolina.

Is there any other Republican in this state that could do any better than Michael Whatley from the -- I guess you look at the legislature, maybe council of state.

I don't know.

- Yes, I think it's a really great question, Kelly.

I don't think so.

You know, it's -- so much of politics right now in the national environment, given the polarization, the nationalization of everything that we're talking about, even at the local level in politics, all that -- that means that the fundamentals of the environment matter a great deal.

There are very few swing voters left, right?

People are either voting for the red team... - Two percent.

- ...or the blue team.

- Yes.

- Right.

And so, you know, in some ways, the candidate doesn't really matter all that much anymore.

It certainly matters a great deal.

You can have a really disastrous race, right, as we saw in the gubernatorial election last year.

I think a lot of the numbers are just built in to a certain extent, because people are just so entrenched in their team, right?

Even a runaway race for governor in 2024 was decided by less than 15 points.

I mean, it's still -- it's a big margin, but it's not, you know, 70-30.

- Is the September surprise such a thing?

Because you referenced the gubernatorial race, but that was an April surprise and a May surprise and a June surprise.

- Yes.

- Anything pop in this race?

We haven't heard anything about that hurricane relief effort in Eastern North Carolina with the home rebuild.

There's a lot you could go to.

Haven't heard anything about that.

Is that going to roll out here soon, you think, PR-wise?

- Well, Scott, tell me.

But Cooper has been in office for such a long time in North Carolina, it seems to me, just as an outside observer, unlikely that there's something that happened deep in his past that nobody yet knows about.

I could be wrong, you know, but that just seems unlikely.

- Judge, September -- October surprise is too late.

We're voting then pretty much the midway through.

Could anything happen to pivot this race 13 points?

- Well, I've got to believe that Whatley's team has been polling issues to see what's resonating with voters.

And at least based on what they're running right now, it's the crime law enforcement issues, the only one they think that could even potentially stick.

I have to reference the old 1980s race between John East and Robert Morgan, where East folks ran one ad, you know, that Morgan gave away the Panama Canal.

And they ran it over and over and over and over.

And it worked, barely, but it worked.

So I don't know whether that's the strategy that Whatley's crew has come up with.

- There are certainly negative marks in Cooper's past, especially as governor.

I mean, his COVID response was, I think, far from perfect.

I was in legislature at the time working for the Senate, and there were a lot of things that we found lacking.

This prisoner release thing, I know that people can sort of nuance it to death and say, well, you know, they were going to be released anyway.

But the fact is, he signed a settlement agreement that resulted in, I think, 3,500 prisoners being released early.

And that's something to dig into and look at, right?

So there are things that the Whatley campaign has, and I think we will continue to focus on, that I think are genuine problems for former Governor Cooper.

- To Pat's earlier point about those independent voters, that Carolina forward poll was interesting because it had Republicans voting for the Republican, Democrats voting for the Democrat.

Independents about 45, 46 percent for Cooper, and still 30 percent of those independents in that poll said they hadn't made up their mind.

So those are the folks that you could win over with one of those issues.

- Scott, last word, they have talked about your campaign.

I have gotten the mailer that Roy Cooper released 3,400.

I have heard it.

I have read it.

I have been mailed it.

Is it bouncing off him?

Have you got a good counterstrategy?

- Well, I mean, the independent fact-checkers have said it's not true.

And he has a long record of fighting crime and putting criminals behind bars when he was attorney general.

So I think, you know, I think the cake is baked there, and people know that Roy Cooper is not soft on crime.

- I mean, his name is on the actual settlement agreement.

- That's why you have campaigns and PR.

This is State Lines, doggone it.

State Representative Jennifer Balkcom was selected the Republican nominee for the 11th U.S.

Congressional District race this week.

Balkcom replaces sitting Representative Chuck Edwards, who ended his re-election campaign last week.

The state GOP's executive committee for the 11th district made that selection.

She has since dropped out of her state house race, as North Carolina law will prohibit her from running multiple campaigns.

Over on the Democratic side is Jamie Ager, and he appears to have a multimillion-dollar campaign funding advantage as midterms approach, especially early voting.

Jennifer Balkcom and the Republicans have, what, 78, 79 days as we enter the weekend.

I can't -- Chuck Edwards hasn't given her money, I don't think.

So where do you start from ground up this close to an election?

- Yeah, it's not ideal.

I mean, you're just going to be doing all that you can as fast as you can.

She has to build a team, find a campaign manager, raise money, introduce herself to voters, build a Web site.

Like, there are so many things that go into campaign infrastructure, it's just really hard to do it all in such a condensed time frame.

But she has a fantastic reputation in the state house.

She sort of always seemed to me like a candidate who could climb the ranks in the future.

It just so happened that there was an opening pretty early, maybe earlier than expected here.

Trump won this district, I think, by 9.5 or 10 points in 2024.

So there's a pretty built-in advantage for her, even though she's coming in late into the game.

But, that said, she's a new candidate with no infrastructure and little money.

That's a problem.

I imagine national Republican organizations will be stepping in to help fund her, perhaps provide some campaign infrastructure and support.

That's not ideal.

You don't want to be diverting those resources towards a Trump-plus-10 district, when there are Trump-plus-2, 3, 4 districts that you want to be defending elsewhere in the country.

But, at the end of the day, I think it will all come together for her.

It's a red seat.

And she's a good candidate.

- Scott, in your career, have you ever faced a situation where you have a candidate that could otherwise be pretty good, but the timing is really bad?

Just in the general sense of philosophy, what do you do as a political scientist?

- Well, yes, the Harris race is an example.

But she had a billion dollars, so the money was not a problem there.

And she had an infrastructure.

But you know, the interesting thing about this is that the Republican Party in Western North Carolina just can't seem to get it right.

We've had three flawed GOP candidates and congressmen, with Mark Meadows and Madison Cawthorn and Chuck Edwards now.

And, unfortunately, Representative Balkcom is going to have the albatross of Chuck Edwards and Donald Trump around her neck.

And we'll see how it plays out.

Jamie Ager is a great candidate, well-funded, got a great grassroots organization.

And right now, I'd say it's advantage Ager.

We'll see what she can put together.

- Skye, I understand, Ager was actually recruited.

Democrats nationally saw him as an option for that race.

And now he gets to run against a brand-new candidate who's just opening an office probably this week.

- Well, she grew up there, so I do think she has roots in the community.

And what I know about Representative Balkcom from working with her at the legislature is that she is an incredibly prepared woman.

She presents a bill with kind of what you see with the press secretary, a binder with tabs.

She works her bills, and she really knows what she's doing.

So I think that she's a great candidate from that standpoint.

She works really, really hard.

And I think that she's going to have to work really, really hard throughout the rest of this campaign.

- Judge, hearing Pat discuss Chuck Edwards, kind of defensively, and Mr.

Falmlen here is a Democrat, it's just rolling off the tongue.

She's got to live with Chuck Edwards.

He's over this race, whether she's in it or not, and he's gone.

Is that -- that divide?

- Yes, to one extent.

But let me say, I have been a voter in the 11th Congressional District for virtually my entire life.

And I grew up in Henderson County.

And I really didn't know who this lady was when her name surfaced as a potential candidate.

It's a huge district, 16 counties, covers all of Western North Carolina, lots of pockets of rural voters here and there.

The media market is dispersed into Tennessee, South Carolina.

And the infrastructure that Pat was talking about, you just don't put together a congressional campaign in a hot five minutes.

I mean, it's just an enormously uphill fight for her.

- I know the district's changed.

It's rewritten these districts.

But someone was telling me earlier this week, if you go back far enough, you would see a Republican and a Democrat switch a version of that seat over decades.

- Every two years.

- That was not so long ago.

- I worked for Billy Hinton, who was a Republican elected in 1980, and he was the first Republican elected in the 11th District since Reconstruction, essentially.

And so, it has historically Democratic roots.

And it's just flipped to the Republican side, but I'd say a lot of the people moving in are at least less Republican, probably a lot more unaffiliated moving in.

So, I think the demographics of the District are changing.

And I go back to, frankly, the administration has not done a good job on hurricane recovery in Western North Carolina, and she now has to defend their response or lack of response all across the District.

- Why would Balkcom have to do that?

She's a state legislator.

The state has done some hurricane relief and gotten good bipartisan reviews.

- Well, everybody looks to FEMA and the federal government.

And her party controls the White House, controls both houses of Congress, controls FEMA.

And so, if you're out there on the ground, if you're out there on the ground, for two years now, and you're not seeing the kind of necessary responses to help people, who are you gonna blame?

- So, let me just recap here.

So, this woman, she has, let's see, she has an answer for Chuck Edwards, I heard.

She has an answer for FEMA.

She has an answer for Donald Trump.

- She has no money.

- I think this is a qualified woman who has a fantastic reputation in the State House and can probably speak for herself and run her own race.

- Good PR right there for you, Mr.

Ryan.

However, is there a chance, though, Republicans at the national level could say, we're not gonna fund this race at all.

They'll turn their attention elsewhere.

Is it worth putting a bunch of money?

- No, not at all.

I think for a Trump plus-10 District, look, I don't know what I don't know, but that would seem very unlikely to me.

I think the likeliest case, at least in my opinion, I may be wrong, hope somebody emails in, they begrudgingly have to dedicate resources because it's a district that really should stay Republican, but there's a new candidate with no money and that's what you have to do.

- 'Cause you hear about the Senate race.

There's a chance you need to pull the federal money away and put it towards other states where you can maybe win Michigan, win Texas.

- You would never write off - - How does that work, Scott?

- Well, I was gonna say, that might have been the case had Edwards stayed in the race.

- Sure.

- But I think they're gonna have to play.

- All right, let's talk health insurance.

The state health plan covers hundreds of thousands of state employees and their families.

It's recently, in recent years, year two, faced a $500 million shortfall that's been reduced substantially.

Premium increases and benefits restructuring, new deals with hospitals have helped fill that gap mostly.

The 2027 health plan creates a lower cost preferred status and a higher price non-preferred hospital tier.

State House Majority Leader Brendan Jones, Pat, says rural hospitals are being designated non-preferred.

That hurts small town medical access, pushes those rural patients toward favored hospital systems outside his county, and he wants the exemptions for the rural hospitals.

Pat, you've worked with Aetna, so you've got a side on this, but you're in the industry.

They want Brad Briner to balance this thing with minimal state investment from the outside, and he goes out and creates an efficient network, I guess, and now that doesn't work for Republicans.

Is that right?

- I think this is less a Republican Democrat issue than a insurer provider healthcare is sort of a disaster issue.

I don't think there's any clear partisan lines on this.

Just take a quick step back.

I'm gonna try to get through this as quickly as I can and as simply as I can, but we're talking about this because it's the state health plan, which makes sense, but the same issue applies to every single large employer in this state.

People blame their health insurance company for high prices because that's who sends them their bill, right?

But the insurers don't decide the cost of healthcare.

Hospitals largely dictate the cost of healthcare, and therefore, hospital prices largely dictate the cost of your health insurance premium.

And so, over the last 25 years, hospitals have jacked their prices higher than any other sector in the United States, higher than college, childcare, prescription drugs.

All these things have risen lower than hospital prices have risen this century.

Why?

Because increasingly hospitals have all the negotiating leverage over insurance companies.

They're big systems.

If there's no other hospital company within a hundred mile radius, then there's only one hospital system that dictates prices to the three or four insurance companies with whom they do business.

And that hospital system will decide what to charge, and it's often higher.

And so, every large employer in this state ought to pay attention to what's happening with the state health plan because the same dynamic, the hospital versus insurer dynamic impacts really what employers are paying every year in health insurance premiums.

- But Scott, on the campaign trail, it's always the greedy insurance company.

It's not the local hospital wanting to hold to a pricing structure that is unsustainable for the insurer and the premium payer.

How do we sort this?

- Well, that is true.

Insurance companies are the big boogeyman in all of this, and everybody likes their local hospital, and they want their local hospital to stay open.

And I happen to agree with Representative Jones that this is gonna put rural hospitals in jeopardy.

You know, the deal always used to be that state government never paid as much as the private sector did, but they made up for it in benefits like retirement and healthcare.

And you're starting to see that compact, if you will, kind of broken with these increased premiums and increased out-of-pocket costs that are gonna come with this new plan.

- Skye, the open market, though, you go to a marketplace of ideas and products and services, and this is what happens.

The rural hospital will struggle.

There's not enough patients there, but the patients who live there certainly need a local hospital.

- Yeah, and I think that's something that's happening nationwide.

North Carolina is not an outlier here.

I think that the rural hospital is getting shut down all over the United States.

And to your point earlier about people liking their hospital, I think that people like their doctor.

And so it's hard for folks to separate your doctor from the hospital system and the system as the machine versus your doctor that maybe you grew up with or have known your entire life, and you trust that person, but you don't trust the insurer.

- So the Assembly had a story published just this week from, I think, KFF authored it initially, looking at the various negotiating power and therefore the price disparities between hospitals in North Carolina.

So a hospital in Asheville charged $40,000 for a knee replacement surgery, drive 60 minutes outside of town to a different hospital, and it was $14,000.

This is what's driving the cost of healthcare, and this is what's driving people's health insurance premiums and therefore giving people like Brad Briner no choice but to address the fundamental mathematics of this problem.

- Gotta jump in there, Judge.

- Well, Brad Briner is an exceptionally talented treasurer for the state of North Carolina.

And what he's trying to do is lower the health cost by leveraging the power of the state health system with the various providers.

And if they're willing to lower their prices, as I understand it, then we're going to be sending people on the state health plan to those hospitals.

Now, you have a choice not to use them, but you're gonna pay a lot more.

And so I don't think he's trying to harm rural hospitals, and in fact, I believe there's a middle entity between preferred and non-preferred.

- It's complicated.

- Yeah, it's complex.

But I mean, he's trying to take a state health plan that was in a huge financial hole and make it as close to an equitable system as possible.

- And this story's got a few days on it.

I just wanted to go back and bring it up to this panel.

It's a complex topic, one worth reading about, frankly, if you care about this issue, which I think a lot of people would.

Final topic tonight, the North Carolina Alcoholic Beverage Control Commission was considering hiking prices on lower-priced liquor this week by creating pricing minimums.

Regulators say these higher prices would reduce excessive drinking while cutting youth alcohol intake by possibly up to 28%.

North Carolina collects over $18 a gallon for distilled spirits in taxes.

It's five and a half bucks down in South Carolina.

The restaurant industry and distillers heavily oppose the idea.

WRAL reports ABC stores simply aren't as profitable as they were three or four years ago, and the commission has since delayed the vote on increasing, I guess it's well liquor, they'll, you know, cheap vodka, cheap, you know.

- Right.

- The lower-tier things, I mean, we get it.

However, is this about health or is this about raising prices on lower-tier options to try to maintain profit margin for the ABC?

- In the greater scheme of things, I suspect it's more the profit margin.

I think that while I'm sure there's some statistics that would say if you up the price on the low-cost liquors that, yeah, maybe that reduces drinking to some small amount, but it doesn't cover wines or beers.

You know, it's just the ABC stores.

And frankly, I mean, I think restaurants and bars have suffered greatly between COVID and the economy and rising prices.

And if all of a sudden the lower-priced liquors are going up in price, they either have to eat the cost or pass it on.

- Skye, we talked about hemp a week or two ago, these drinks that are out there that people are lobbying heavily to preserve.

And there's a lot about, what about them?

If you raise it on us, what about them?

Don't ban us, but if you ban us, ban them.

I'm seeing a lot of this now.

- Yeah, and I think that is something that's playing into the ABC stores making less money because it's definitely trendier not to drink alcohol and to drink one of those types of drinks.

And younger folks just aren't drinking at the rates that older people are.

And so I think this article even talks about a little bit where they are selling less, but people are purchasing kind of the nicer products, but people just aren't drinking as much as they used to.

And how can you account for that?

Raise the prices.

- Scott, ABC meetings are so, they're dull, let's face it.

And this one, they fill the room.

I mean, don't mess with the screwdriver or the basic rum and Coke, my friend.

- Well, you know, I don't drink, so I don't have a dog in this fight, but as Judge Orr said, I'm not quite sure that the intended purpose of lowering consumption is the real reason here or will be the end result of this.

I think people who wanna drink are gonna drink.

But I do think there has to be some happy balance here.

And I also think this is probably another opportunity to look at privatizing the ABC stores.

- Yeah, I mean, I'm reading a book on the Cold War right now, and I could've sworn I came across a passage, somewhere in that book, and it's coming back to me a little bit.

When the local Politburo decided to raise the vodka prices, the proletariats revolted.

Like, this is insane.

Why, we have a Soviet-style pricing system for alcohol in North Carolina, and it's absolutely insane to me, and it should stop.

- Privatization never goes anywhere, though, Judge.

Is that just, they bring it up every two years.

There's always a bill at the end of session, and guess what?

They run out of time to pass it or even consider it.

- Well, there's a lot of political pressure to keep the current system, because every individual community has their own ABC board, which gives a certain amount of political power spread around the state, and if you go to privatization, these folks are no longer commissioners.

- And with that, it is five o'clock somewhere in this world, so we're gonna have an after-work beverage.

Thank you, Skye, Scott, Pat, Judge, good to have you.

More importantly, I like them.

We love you watching this show every week.

You make it worth it.

Email your opinions to statelines@pbsnc.org.

I'm Kelly McCullen.

Thanks for watching.

I'll see you next time.

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