The big lesson for both parties from NC’s startling primary results | Opinion

The old saying in politics goes: you dance with the one who brought you. Most people hear it as a loyalty test, stick with your base, reward your allies, don’t forget who funded the campaign. But the deeper obligation isn’t about loyalty at all. It’s about attentiveness. Voters don’t just bring legislators to the dance. They are the reason for it. When legislators lose sight of that, when the distance between their decisions and their constituents’ lives grows wide enough that accountability feels abstract, the dance ends. On March 3 in North Carolina, for nine incumbents, their dances ended.

Legislators navigate constant competition for their attention — from business interests and advocacy groups to legislative leadership and the endless churn of insider politics. Most legislators understand that. What is easier to lose sight of, especially from a safe seat, is the hierarchy beneath all that noise. Constituents are not just one stakeholder among many. They are the foundational ones. When that relationship gets buried under everything else, legislators have not just made a political miscalculation. They have inverted their purpose.

NC Rep. Carla Cunningham had represented her Mecklenburg County district for over a decade, an incumbent with name recognition, party support, and every structural advantage that comes with holding a seat. Then she cast a vote on an immigration enforcement bill that her constituents experienced as a direct betrayal. Not a complicated policy disagreement. A betrayal. On March 3, her constituents made their response equally clear. She lost by nearly 50 points.

Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger, one of the most powerful legislators in North Carolina history, lost his primary to his home county’s sheriff in a narrow photo finish that will go to a recount. Like Icarus, the altitude cost him. He pushed a casino project in his own backyard while Rockingham County, one of the poorest in the state, stayed a Tier 1 distressed community. His constituents had not asked for a casino. They had asked, in the ways constituents do, to be remembered. Berger forgot who brought him to the dance. On March 3, they reminded him.

What both losses share is something worth naming plainly. At some point, each of these legislators stopped treating their constituents as the foundational stakeholders and started treating them as a captive audience. The feedback was there. The listening was not. And in a democracy, that gap does not stay open indefinitely. It accumulates until an election gives it somewhere to go.

The lesson here is not simply that inattentiveness has consequences. The harder lesson is institutional. Stakeholder engagement cannot be an election-year tactic. It must be a governing posture. That means getting in the room with constituents, with opponents, with people who will tell you things you do not want to hear and staying there, not just when polls tighten, but between the moments that make the news. The goal is not more town halls. The goal is a legislature that governs like the people back home are watching, because they are.

You dance with the one who brought you. That is not a piece of political advice. It is the basic contract between a representative and the people they represent. North Carolina does not have a budget right now, in part because too many legislators have forgotten that compromise is not capitulation, it is the job. March 3 was a reminder that constituents remember the contract even when their legislators forget it. The question for everyone still holding a seat in Raleigh is whether they are willing to do the unglamorous, ongoing work of honoring it.

Ian Shannon is the Executive Director of Majority Rising NC, a social welfare organization dedicated to building prosperity and opportunity for all North Carolinians.

This story was originally published March 19, 2026 at 5:00 AM.