- Hi, I'm Marc Rotterman.

Coming up on "Front Row," enrollment in private schools soars in North Carolina, a new survey finds over 70% of Americans don't want president Biden to run again.

And what was left on the table during the short session?

Next.

[dramatic music] - [Announcer] Major funding for "Front Row" is provided by Robert L. Luddy.

Additional funding provided by Patricia and Koo Yuen through the Yuen Foundation, committed to bridging cultural differences in our communities.

And by... funding for the Lightning Round provided by, Boddie-Noell Foundation, NC Realtors, Mary Louise and John Burress, Rifenburg Construction, and Helen Laughery.

A complete list of funders can be found at pbsnc.org/FrontRow.

[dramatic music] ♪ - Welcome back.

Joining the conversation, Mitch Kokai, with the John Locke Foundation, Political Analyst, Joe Stewart, Colin Campbell of the North Carolina Tribune, and Michael Hyland with CBS 17.

Mitch, enrollment at private schools is soaring in North Carolina.

Fill us in would ya'.

- We've seen major changes throughout education in recent years, thanks in no small part to the COVID 19 pandemic.

And private education is no stranger to change as well.

We saw the latest numbers showing nearly 8,000 more students in private schools in North Carolina during the last school years.

That was a 7.4% increase.

The largest increase since 1971.

There are now 115,000 plus students in private schools in North Carolina.

One of the factors here in this state is the Opportunity Scholarship Program, which through a scholarship, provides to families of modest means, the same type of parental school choice that wealthy families have always enjoyed.

There were more than 20,000 students in the Opportunity Scholarship Program last year.

And that number could jump by 28% under some estimates.

The budget that's on the table right now, has $56 million more for Opportunity Scholarships.

To put this in context, that 7.4% increase in private schools, in the traditional public schools, the enrollment increase was 0.8% during the past year.

It's still more than 4% lower than it was before the pandemic.

- Joe, you have a floor.

- Yeah, I think this is just a reflection of the changing times in which we live.

People see the education of their children through a different lens than maybe they have, historically.

As I've said before, I mean this notion of building a facility and having everybody go there to learn is deeply wedded in the Third Century, BC.

I mean, this is an innovative economy that we have.

We need to apply more innovative ways to educate our young people.

Private school options clearly, are appealing.

There are a lot more online options for education.

It is undoubtedly a time for us to scrap the way we educate K12, and come up with an entirely different approach to the education of our young people.

- Michael, how does this impact public schools though, and funding as well?

- Well, that was a key talking point, we're hearing the debate over the budget is this is happening against the backdrop of the Leandro school funding case that's still moving through the court system.

The State Supreme Court's gonna be hearing arguments about that at the end of next month.

And the Democrats were trying to make the case that look, we have money on the table.

We're putting it toward the Opportunity Scholarship Program, for example.

We have money in reserves.

We could put toward more funding for the Leandro Plan, but the Republicans have been saying for a long time now, they don't believe that the courts have the authority to force them to put that money toward the Leandro Plan.

- Now, and that's about what?

$750 million they want for Leandro?

- Yeah, and that's still gonna work its way through the court system the rest of the year.

But I think that's a situation where, particularly if it goes into next year, and we have a new State Supreme Court that perhaps leans a little more to the Republican side, then I think a lot of that gets revisited, and you may end up be looking a much different dollar figure for what gets mandated, if anything is mandated.

- Mitch, you've been following Leandro.

- Yeah, one of the interesting things is that the main point right now is, does a judge have the authority to shift money outta the state treasury without getting any input from the legislature?

the legislature, and the most recent precedents from the state Supreme court have said, no.

But the argument from the plaintiffs, and from the attorneys working for the Justice Department at the North Carolina level for the State Board of Education are saying, look, 18 years ago, the State Supreme court said, there was a constitutional mandate, and the state has failed to comply with it.

Something has to happen.

The legislature's not doing it.

A judge will have to do it.

- Joe, parents want more options though, don't they?

- They absolutely do.

And I think even this generation of parents are slightly younger than I am have kids in elementary age school, they've come up in a time in America where innovations through technology is really the way that everything is made more efficient and more effective.

I think that's what they wanna see.

Some more innovative approaches that are tailored to the educational needs of their young person, that rely more heavily on technology.

Not just having kids go to a classroom, but having the opportunity to learn in a way that makes sense to them as innovators using technology.

- Colin, wrap this up in about 30 seconds.

[all laughing] - So I think you know, COVID has pushed a lot more people towards private schools, and a lot of them got there, and liked it.

There's also more affordable private schools now, more opening all the time that aren't the sort of country club type private schools that you have to be wealthy to be able to afford.

And so that's gonna continue the trend.

- Okay, I wanna change gears and talk about some new polls that came out for Joe Biden.

They're not very helpful to him.

- Not very helpful at all.

Unfortunately, the Harris Poll, Harvard Center for American Political Studies did a poll late June, of 1300 sample, very big size, national poll.

It makes president Biden look a little bit like the fellow that fell outta the boat in the deep end of the lake, and come to find out he's got rocks in his pocket.

- That's done by Mark Penn.

- Mark Penn, who also was the pollster for Bill Clinton.

So there's some credibility to these numbers as a result of that.

But the president's unpopularity continues to increase, I guess, is the way to look at it, on issues that are of concern to voters.

Only his handling of COVID, does he break even in terms of popularity.

All of the other issues, inflation, the economy, price of gas, all of those things, hovering in the low 30% approval levels.

But here's the one factor in this poll that I think represents the biggest challenge for Democrats up and down the ballot in this election.

Of Independent voters who were asked the question, do you feel that the president is fit for office?

67% of the Independents in this sample said, no, they felt the president was not fit for office.

And 73% of the respondents, among Independent minded voters said, that the president's simply too old to continuous service.

71% of the respondents overall, of all partisan and ideological stripes, said they do not want Joe Biden to run for reelection in 2024.

- Michael, what struck you about this poll?

- The thing that really jumped out to me wasn't even just about the political dynamic, it was the economy.

Only 12% of people think they were gonna avoid a recession.

Almost 40% of people said we're already there.

And almost half of people said, we're gonna be there in the next year.

Clearly that's weighing on people's minds right now, and it's hard to see anything eclipsing the economy and inflation as a top issue in the election.

- You know Colin, two thirds of the folks said that they thought their finances was getting worse.

- Yeah which is interesting because I mean unemployment is still low, there's some decent hiring numbers that came out just today, but when you've got inflation, high gas prices, people know how much more they're spending on things, that's the perception that the economy is bad even if we're not yet in a recession.

- You know it was interesting Mitch, Pence, Trump, and Bernie Sanders were the most popular figures in this poll.

- Very interesting to see that, that's gotta be bad news for the sitting president.

One of the other interesting things that we saw in recent polling is there's been a lot of talk about Joe Biden, what's gonna happen with him, does President Trump run again, former President Trump run for another term?

But we're also seeing behind the scenes that some of the secondary candidates are making their way, and we're seeing basically sort of a shadow run as it's been reported.

- Well Gavin Newsom of California governor has all but announced, right?

- Exactly, you're seeing sort of this shadow debate between Gavin Newsom, the California governor and Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor attacking each other as if they're going to be the candidates in 2024 even though neither one of them has emerged as a likely person.

- Wrap this up in about a minute my friend.

- Yeah I think the challenge for President Biden is that all of this bad news hurts his chances of being effective as president.

As other democrats in leadership positions continue to feel as though he is a drag on the rest of the democratic ballot going into the midterm.

- Is he a lame duck?

- Well I think to some extent, we will see undoubtedly a red wave election, how big it is will determine how much of a lame duck, whether he's lamer than he is right now is probably yet to be seen.

- Do democrats want to be seen with him?

I watched what happened in Ohio, and the governor candidate on the democratic side and the senator running for senate, Tim Ryan didn't want to be anywhere near him when he was in Ohio.

- I think that becomes a problem, and his other democratic leaders are expressing frustration with the administration, things like the Roe decision out of the Supreme Court, they feel like the White House was caught flat footed even though that decision had been leaked before it was officially announced, the president didn't seem to have a plan to respond to that issue, and I think other democrats are saying if he's a drag on the ticket and he's not delivering as we had hoped he had when he was elected president, then maybe the calls for his the decision not to run again become louder.

- Okay, moving on, I want to talk to you Mike about what was left on the table during the short session, fill us in.

- In short, a lot.

It was a really interesting session to cover, and Colin was there every day too, and it started so quickly.

The state senate started acting really fast on some really high profile issues.

They passed a bill almost immediately to expand Medicaid coverage, and would also make other changes to healthcare regulations in the state.

They passed a bill legalizing medical marijuana, and they also passed a bill dealing with parental rights that was controversial because it also dealt with how LGBTQ issues are taught in schools.

All that goes over to the house, and the house basically says no, we're not touching those things right now.

They also sent a bill dealing with online sports betting over to the house several months ago.

- Lost by one vote.

- It ended up losing by one vote, and so then eventually.

- The speaker recused himself on that right?

- He did, every time we asked him about it he said he had filed a recusal on that and he said he wasn't getting directly involved in the conversations about that.

They eventually in the house came around to this idea of passing a bill dealing with Medicaid expansion that essentially has them looking at the issue for the next several months and then they would come back and take a vote in December.

That didn't go anywhere in the senate.

So the main thing that really got done was getting a budget passed, which we're waiting to hear if Governor Cooper's going to sign that.

We have all these other high profile issues that are still unresolved, may not get resolved until perhaps sometime next year.

- Joe, is Medicaid expansion a foregone conclusion in 2023?

- I think it is.

I think the decision now has been made to expand Medicaid, and the question may be how.

And the negotiation between the house and senate would be the specificity for that expansion, but I think it's pretty sure at this point.

- We didn't have a super majority or hoping for a super majority.

- Well I think some part of the decision relative to which approach to take between the house and the senate versions is as much as anything speaker Tim Moore and the conversations he's having with the house republican caucus to make sure they're aligned within their own caucus on what the right approach should be.

- Mitch.

- One of the most interesting things to me about this is that the house really didn't go into the session with any big things that it wanted or needed to get done, which actually gave the house, on a rare occasion now, sort of the upper hand in the debates with the senate.

Often the senate has gotten the better of the house on things, but this time it was the senate that put forward some major issues and the house said no, we don't really want those and we don't have anything that we'll trade with you on that so basically the house got its way.

But another interesting thing to keep in mind is although the session is kind of over, they are coming back, and one of the things they can deal with is something called a conference report.

And as we've seen, basically the legislature can stick anything in a conference report, so any of these issues could come back.

It's not as if they're dead until the final gavel drops and the hanky drops at the end of the session, all of these things could still re-emerge.

- Colin, you've reported on this.

- Yeah, so there's just a lot of things, and I think a lot of the issue was they set this deadline for themselves to be out of town by July fourth.

So it was really only a six week session, you had the bills we just talked about, some other things that state treasurer Dale Falwell wanted involving healthcare pricing transparency that didn't go anywhere.

A lot was sort of left on the floor when they adjourned.

- Gas tax holiday didn't go anywhere, right?

- Yeah that was something democrats wanted, they wanted sort of a rebate of $200 cards going to everybody who's got a driver's license, that went nowhere.

No tax cut proposals ended up in the budget.

So there's a lot that was just left out there and it could resurface, they come back for a day or two each month all the way through December.

Whether they do anything during that time remains to be seen.

- Wrap this up in about 40 seconds my friend.

- Senator Berger and Speaker Moore have said they're gonna continue to have conversations with each other, especially about Medicaid expansion, some of these other issues where there seems to be broad popular support to do something as Joe mentioned, the questions is how do we get to these points?

It's hard to see though maybe that resolution coming until after the election, and certainly as you were talking about with the issue of the republicans trying to get the super majority, they did not even get into the issue of abortion during this session.

They are certainly waiting to see if they get the super majority to touch that.

- Mitch, do you have any final thoughts?

- Yeah that's certainly something that's going to be a major factor is what happens with the election.

I think there are a lot of these issues that republicans and strategists are saying do we really want to take this up when we don't know what's gonna happen in these swing districts that will decide whether it's majority or super majority control next year.

- Okay talking about swing districts, and this may not be a swing district, there's a new 14th congressional district.

Talk to us about that race Colin.

- Yeah so this district is really sort of a product of the whole gerrymandering lawsuit process.

It was really drawn by the special masters.

Originally this district was sort of the western suburbs of Charlotte and points west.

That included the hometown of house speaker Tim Moore and he was largely expected to run for congress in that seat as it was initially drawn.

When the special masters came in and redrew it, suddenly it's a district that's just sort of the southern.

Half of Mecklenberg County, the Charlotte area, and Gaston County.

So it looks a lot more blue than the red district that the Republicans have drawn, which allows Democrats to pick up an extra seat, at least for this round.

And so what we saw there was instead of being a primary contest with a lot of Republicans running for what would've been a safe seat, now it's probably closer to a safe democratic seat.

Nothing may be completely safe for Democrats during this cycle.

But state Senator Jeff Jackson, who had previously ran for- - Democrat.

- Democrat.

Ran for Senate, and then dropped out because looked like Sherry Beasley was winning the primary, said he was gonna take a step back.

Well, lo and behold when a congressional district gets drawn that includes his house, and looks pretty blue, he announces for that.

So he's running in that race, is probably the favorite to win.

The district leans about 57% democratic by some of the the numbers that I've seen.

He's running against Pat Harrigan who like Jackson, is a military veteran.

They both served in Afghanistan.

Harrigan is interesting because he owns a gun manufacturing company.

- [indistinct] Ted Budd.

- Exactly.

And so Jackson has attacked him for that.

He's pointed to some comments that Harrigan made in the past saying that his company actually made more money following the Sandy Hook school shooting, which was probably the case for every gun manufacturer in the country.

Harrigan sort of defended his record on that.

He's not a hugely high profile Republican candidate, so I don't know how much of a shot he's got.

He's certainly got a fundraising disadvantage pretty substantially, but it will still be an interesting race to watch, and every year, that does favor Republicans around the country.

- Joe, that's a very expensive media market.

And I think Harrigan has, Jackson has a distinct financial advantage.

- Yeah, I think that is a large part a result of having been in the Senate, US Senate democratic primary for as long as he was in fundraising in that capacity.

But I think this race ends up being a lot more competitive because of the red wave dynamic, that this is a district now where those independent minded suburban voters are gonna make up a big part of the difference in that election.

If democratic voters are less than enthusiastic going into November, you may see that that advantage as a Republican newcomer, who Harrigan really is.

But the profile of the two candidates is pretty consistent.

Military veterans.

They're young, they're good looking.

They're both dynamic candidates.

So I think this is gonna be actually a lot closer than people think it's set to be.

- Mitch, will this district get redrawn in 2023?

Is this a Tim Moore district?

- It certainly could become a Tim Moore district again.

- It's- - Speaker Tim Moore wants to run for Congress or said he did at one point.

- At least he was rumored to be interested and did not dispel the rumor, is probably the best thing to to be said about that.

But yes, that's gonna be one of the really interesting dynamics about this race, how much money, how much attention are the parties going to put to a district that they know is going to change?

And if Republicans get their way, this will be a clearly different district that will be much more favorable to Republicans after this election cycle.

- Michael, could Harrigan get pulled in, in a red wave?

- Certainly.

Well, we know that national Democrats are focusing on this district too.

Here and then the 13th district, and the triangle, the first district where GK Butterfield is retiring.

Those are the three they've identified that they're prioritizing here in North Carolina.

- Any outside groups coming in there, you know?

- I, not that I have heard of specifically, but I mean, I imagine that's coming here in the next few months, especially as we get closer to Labor Day and people start really focusing in on these races again.

I'm sure this is gonna be one of the ones that they'll be focusing on quite a bit.

- Wrap this up in about 40 seconds, Joe.

- Yeah.

This is a good example.

We should remember, we have a 14th congressional district now because of the state's growth.

And we continue to grow at a pace of about 120,000 new residents every single year.

Even the districts such as they've drawn now, don't take into account fully, about 250 to 300,000 people that have moved to North Carolina since the 2020 census.

So there are voters in all of these congressional districts that were not necessarily counted when the district lines were drawn, but they will be voters in November.

- Mitch let's go to the most underreported story of the week my friend.

- There was plenty of reporting about the very sad incident that took place on Independence Day with a shooting at a July 4th parade in an Illinois community.

But one piece of it that has not been reported very much, is this is the type of thing that has happened in a community that had some of the strongest gun laws possible.

There's a red flag law in Illinois.

There are permission requirements to get to purchasing and ownership of guns.

You like concealed carry restrictions?

Well, there definitely was in that particular community.

- Didn't that shooter's father sign for him though?

- He got- - I think that's, I think that's the case.

Yeah, he definitely got his gun legally.

So they followed the process.

It was all, it was all legal.

You have bans on the straw purchasing in Illinois.

So one of the outcomes that should come out of this, is in addition to trying to look at ways to deal with the issues involving people like the person who committed this crime, is to say, "All right, what of these gun control ideas that are being pushed, will actually make a difference, and which of them just seem to be window dressing?"

- Joe?

- Yeah, interestingly enough, the FBI, the cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency, and the treasury department announced this week, that they have uncovered that the North Korean government is behind a concerted effort to place ransomware in public health and healthcare infrastructure in this country over the last year.

We think of modern warfare as being about planes, and bombs, and rifles, but cyber security becomes a significant factor now.

North Korea attacking US hospitals.

- Is that the war of the future, cyber security?

- It absolutely is.

In fact, we see with what's going on in Ukraine.

the Russians are now trying to use cyber attacks to weaken the Ukraines while volunteers are attacking Russian technology infrastructure using ransomware and other hacking techniques.

This is the modern way that nations attack each other.

- Colin, underreported my friend.

- Yeah.

So this is underreported 'cause it's in the far Western corner of the state.

Macon County, very conservative area west of Asheville.

They got in the news because their library had put up a display in honoring LGBT pride month.

Republican county commissioner didn't like the message that was being sent there in a taxpayer funded building.

So he arranged to cut the funding that the county provides to that library, in the amount of I think about $20,000.

And then you saw community pushback for that where they raised a decent amount of money.

I think actually 30,000.

So more than the county had cut, to offset those cuts, and sort of stand with the librarians that had put up this display, and say, "We like what you're doing there."

But it's interesting to see.

Another place where libraries are getting roped into the culture war issues around LGBT, things like that, and creating an interesting community conversation.

- Thanks for bringing that to our attention.

Michael.

- I was struck by an op-ed that a couple of people, we were talking about the mobile sports betting bill that failed earlier.

A couple of the Democrats who voted against it, Marsha Morey and Pricey Harrison, wrote an op-ed, they outlined all the reasons that they were against it.

And then at the end they said, "Well we could support allowing this in-person, at the professional sports facilities if you're paying cash.

Maybe there's some kind of compromise to be found with this, but when I talk to the supporters of this, Republican Jason Saine about it, representative in the House.

I had asked at one point, did you consider some kind of incremental approach to this to maybe see if you might get some more people on board?

And he said, no, basically we really felt like we had to go all in, as they say, on this in order for it to really make sense for the State.

- Well, let me ask you this, on the floor, was there mismanagement on the floor of this bill?

That's what I heard.

- In the months leading up to it they were very confident they had the votes.

Even that morning people who were supporting it were telling me they thought they had the votes, but then you saw as the day went on, they were adding in all of these changes to the bill targeting where the money would go to try to get more people on board.

There were some people who were telling us they were changing their minds on the floor as they were hearing the debate about this.

Some say it reflected the polling we did about this, actually, earlier this year.

It found people were split on the idea.

And as you saw, it wasn't a Democrat Republican issue.

It really was just an individual issue.

People who you never would expect to agree were agreeing on this.

- Okay, let's go to the Lightning Round.

Mitch, who's up and who's down this week, my friend.

- What's up is drinking in the capital city.

Raleigh has adopted its first social drinking district which is a new change that's been authorized by state law where a person can purchase alcohol in one location and take it to another location without- - So go down to New Orleans?

- Yeah, something like that.

So Raleigh has introduced its first district.

Other cities, Greensboro, Kannapolis, and Munroe already have it.

Charlotte and Durham are looking into this.

So that's what's up.

Who's down, the National Education Association.

They just had their national conference in Chicago.

And through the intrepid work of my colleague, Terry Stoops, we learned that they, in their publications, were not really talking about learning loss or the things that parents really worry about, but they were talking about abortion rights, and taking out the words mother and father, and using birthing parent instead.

So the NEA has some egg on its face.

- Lot of pushback on that, Joe.

- Yeah, up, Black voter support for Republican candidates for Congress.

A "Wall Street Journal" poll conducted in March showed that Black voters were supporting Republican candidates 27%, up from 12% last November, and even among candidates that are running as Republicans for Congressional seats, 160 Black Republicans had filed.

They're now 80 on the ballot across the country running for Congressional seats as African American Republicans.

Down, the attempts to thwart the protest in Russia for the Ukraine war.

The protestors are continuing to act out.

There was a young lady, a 31 year old lady in St. Petersburg who was arrested.

She was in a very subtle way, protesting the war, replacing the price tag on certain items in the grocery store with small decals expressing opposition to the war.

So I think the Russian people are pushing against Putin's war with Ukraine.

- Colin.

- Up, is Marsha Morgan.

She is the new Democratic Party nominee for a very competitive Senate district down in the Wilmington area.

The other candidate who was a Democrat dropped out after some allegations of misconduct, so the Democrats have put her into that race, and so she's got a big fight ahead of her.

Down, the property tax rate in Scotland County, which is a rural county down near the South Carolina border.

Has the unenviable distinction of the highest property tax rate in the state.

Leaders there are trying to deal with that, so they've decreased a little bit, still the highest though - Michael, who's up and who's down this week?

- Well, up, we got the new jobs report today, and even amid all these concerns, but are we heading toward a recession?

Some businesses are clearly still hiring.

So we've got another 300,000 plus jobs in the country this year.

- Good news for the Biden administration.

- And then down, job openings are actually down a little bit.

We got that same report this week.

In May they were down by about 400,000, but the job openings still outnumber the number of unemployed people by almost, it's almost double, essentially.

- Headline next week, my friend.

- Cooper clears final bills from his desk from the last Legislative session.

- Headline next week.

- Biden administration pushes hard for economic partnership with China trying to get some good economic news heading into the election.

- So they're gonna lift the tariffs, you think?

- I think they're gonna look at that, and any other thing that they can do to try to undo the supply chain problems we've had with particularly high tech and technology related products out of China - They're really in a box on the economy, aren't they, on inflation?

- They really are.

And to your point, I mean the indicators would be that there are plenty of jobs out there, just not enough people, but the perception that people have is that their own personal circumstances is not very good, and that doesn't bode well for Democrats running in November.

- Headline next week, Colin.

- Governor Cooper's COVID 19 state of emergency expires on the 15th.

My prediction is he's not gonna renew it.

It'll end.

- Were we still in a state of emergency?

- Yeah, but it really- [host laughs] Yeah, you know, it's just about healthcare flexibility or something like that now.

- [Host] Headline next week, Michael.

- Latest inflation data comes out from the federal government.

Inflation rate is probably still much higher than any of us would like.

- Great job, gents.

That's it for us.

Hope to see you next week on "Front Row."

Have a great weekend.

[dramatic music] ♪ - [Announcer] Major funding for "Front Row" was provided by Robert L Luddy.

Additional funding provided by Patricia and Koo Yuen through the Yuen Foundation, committed to bridging cultural differences in our communities.

And by... Funding for the Lighting Round provided by Boddie-Noell Foundation, NC Realtors, Mary Louise and John Burress, Rifenburg Construction, and Helen Laughery.

A complete list of funders can be found at pbsnc.org/frontrow.

[dramatic music] ♪