In the spring of 2010, the conservative political strategist Ed
Gillespie flew from Washington, D.C., to Raleigh, North Carolina, to
spend a day laying the groundwork for REDMAP, a new
project aimed at engineering a Republican takeover of state
legislatures. Gillespie hoped to help his party get control of
statehouses where congressional redistricting was pending, thereby
leveraging victories in cheap local races into a means of shifting the
balance of power in Washington. It was an ingenious plan, and Gillespie
is a skilled tactician—he once ran the Republican National Committee—but REDMAP seemed like a
long shot in North Carolina. Barack Obama carried the state in 2008 and
remained popular. The Republicans hadn’t controlled both houses of the
North Carolina General Assembly for more than a century. (“Not since
General Sherman,” a state politico joked to me.) That day in Raleigh,
though, Gillespie had lunch with an ideal ally: James Arthur (Art) Pope,
the chairman and C.E.O. of Variety Wholesalers, a discount-store
conglomerate. The Raleigh
News and Observer had called Pope, a conservative multimillionaire, the Knight of the Right. The REDMAP project offered Pope a new way to spend his money.
That
fall, in the remote western corner of the state, John Snow, a retired
Democratic judge who had represented the district in the State Senate
for three terms, found himself subjected to one political attack after
another. Snow, who often voted with the Republicans, was considered one
of the most conservative Democrats in the General Assembly, and his
record reflected the views of his constituents. His Republican opponent,
Jim Davis—an orthodontist loosely allied with the Tea Party—had minimal
political experience, and Snow, a former college football star, was
expected to be reëlected easily. Yet somehow Davis seemed to have almost
unlimited money with which to assail Snow.