After getting many political predictions wrong in 2016 – including, but not limited to, the results of the presidential election – I threw my long-cherished crystal ball out and started building a new one.
Figuratively speaking, of course.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve gone fishing among my contacts again. There was reasonable consensus around five big questions, although not about the likely answers.
Here are the questions:
* Will Roy Cooper sign a new state budget for North Carolina? Government has been operating under a budget originally enacted in 2018, then modified somewhat by “mini-budget” bills passed when the Democratic governor and Republican-led General Assembly found agreement.
* Will the General Assembly’s new legislative and congressional maps withstand legal challenge? While past litigation resulted in some constructive changes in North Carolina’s redistricting process – changes that legislative leaders vow to preserve when they redraw maps in 2021 – Democrats will certainly file suit, no matter what the new districts look like.
* Will widespread immunization lead to rapid recovery in employment? Despite some reasonably good recent months of job gains, North Carolina’s economy is still down some 242,000 jobs from the start of the COVID pandemic.
* Will a new generation of higher-education leaders, including Peter Hans at the state’s public-university system and Thomas Stith at the community-college system, help their institutions effectively navigate the final stage of the COVID pandemic?
* Will the first few months of the new year feature multiple candidates running aggressively for the Democratic and Republican nominations to fill the Senate seat Richard Burr will vacate in 2022?
… Oh, wait, never mind.
Even my hard-won humility about political predictions won’t keep me from offering a solid “yes” to that question.
Make that four unanswered questions in North Carolina politics for 2021.
John Hood is chairman of the John Locke Foundation and author of the forthcoming novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution (MountainFolkBook.com).