Rep. Tricia Cotham will run for reelection in new GOP-leaning Charlotte area district
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North Carolina redistricting
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State Rep. Tricia Cotham, who secured Republicans a coveted supermajority that enabled them to pass more than a dozen major bills over Gov. Roy Cooper’s vetoes this year, is running for reelection in the N.C. House.
Cotham, a Mint Hill Republican who ran from House District 112 in 2022 as a Democrat, confirmed on X (formerly Twitter) Saturday morning that she will run for another term in the House from the recently redrawn, and more conservative-leaning House District 105 in southeastern Mecklenburg County.
The new district Cotham will run from includes her hometown of Mint Hill, and parts of Matthews. It leans Republican by a 52% to 45% margin, according to past election data.
Cotham’s intention to run for reelection from District 105 was confirmed to The Charlotte Observer and The News & Observer on Friday morning by Stephen Wiley, the caucus director for House Republicans.
Later on Friday, Cotham told WSOC and WBTV that she hadn’t yet made a decision about her political future. Saturday morning, she said on X that she had decided to run from the 105th district after prayers and talks with her family.
News of Cotham’s plans to run for reelection was first reported on Friday by freelance reporter Bryan Anderson.
Speculation about Cotham’s political future began almost instantly after she announced in early April that she was switching parties and in the process delivered Republicans the minimum number of seats they needed to obtain a veto-proof majority in the House, after having regained a supermajority in the Senate in 2022.
In late March, Republicans overrode Cooper’s veto of a bill that repealed North Carolina’s long-standing permit law for buying handguns. That vote, which marked the first time Republicans had defeated one of Cooper’s vetoes in five years, since losing their supermajority in 2018, was entirely along party lines, but Cotham and two other Democrats were absent.
When Cotham announced she was leaving the Democratic Party, she said she felt driven out by a lack of tolerance for dissenting views, and increasing hostility she said she felt from some of her colleagues. Democrats called her decision to switch parties in the middle of the legislative session a “betrayal,” and called on her to resign.
Republicans continued to receive Democratic support on some of the most contentious bills passed this year from a small group of swing-voting House Democrats, but Cotham joining the GOP ranks meant that in some cases, the majority party could enact legislation on its own with no support from the minority.
In total, Republicans overrode 19 of Cooper’s vetoes this past session. Those included:
▪ The state’s new abortion law that bans most abortions after 12 weeks of pregnancy;
▪ A ban on transgender girls and women playing on female sports teams in middle school, high school, and college, and a ban on gender transition care for minors;
▪ And multiple elections-related bills, including one that took away Cooper’s appointment power for elections boards, and required them to be evenly split, and another that eliminated a three-day grace period for receiving mail-in ballots after the election.
This story was originally published November 17, 2023 at 11:57 AM.
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