Why I’m voting Republican this year

I’ll say this for extreme partisanship – it makes voting a snap.

In a year when “I’ll seek compromise and work across the aisle” is the biggest lie in politics, when every vote that matters comes down to the party line, we are not faced with granular choices between individual candidates but broad judgments on the direction of our state and our nation.

That’s why I’m voting Republican. The Democrats are not an option because they have allowed the left to take over their party — and no liberal has shown the spine to challenge them. They offer government by slogan, by divisive identity politics that brands all who differ with them as racists and sexists to push gauzy policies (“free” college! “free” health care!) that they have no idea how to implement or pay for.

Demonstrating breathtaking chutzpah, they now rail against deficits, without acknowledging that they are driven by the programs they created and refuse to reform, Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security. They also pretend that their return to national power would focus on anything other than starting a second civil war over impeachment.

No thank you.

The Republicans, despite their stupid power grabs and embarrassing Tweets, have been decent stewards of government.

That’s why the allegedly purple state of North Carolina has turned a deeper shade of red in the last decade. It’s why Mitt Romney and Donald Trump carried our state and why voters broke our split-the-difference tradition by sending two Republicans to the U.S. Senate. Gerrymandering is a problem, but Republicans consistently win more votes across the state.

Simply put, Democrats remain the party of high taxes and broad regulation. This is at odds with day-to-day experiences of voters and mountains of peer-reviewed research which show that low taxes and regulation are keys to growth and opportunity. Just compare the Reagan and Trump booms to Obama’s sluggish growth. Supply side works.

The numbers show that North Carolina’s economy outperformed the nation and the Southeast in most important measures since GOP legislature’s cuts in corporate and personal income taxes kicked in. Our state GDP, employment rate and median household income have all grown faster than the nation’s in recent years.

As our economy has grown, our state government balance sheet has improved dramatically.

Before the Republicans took over the Democrats practiced boom and bust budgeting — slow or negative growth during downturns and accelerated spending during good times. From 2004 to 2008, Democrats increased spending more than 8 percent per year — much faster than the growth in population and inflation.

That left the state completely unprepared for the Great Recession — the budget was cut by 11.2 percent in 2009-10 and then another 0.3 percent in 2010-11, necessitating the teacher pay cut and freezes the Democrats have tried to blame on Republicans.

The government the GOP inherited had a budget shortfall of $2.5 billion; the state owed the feds another $2.83 billion for unemployment compensation; today we have a $3 billion reserve. Our rainy day fund had $150 million; now it is close to $2 billion.

While shoring up our finances, the GOP legislature has improved education by giving parents more choice. Last year, charter school enrollment in North Carolina topped 100,000 for the first time, with tens of thousands more on waiting lists.

If you think Democrats have a better plan for education, look at Chapel Hill and Asheville. As UNC-Chapel Hill’s Michael Jacobs has shown, these liberal bastions spend the most per capita on public education and have the state’s highest achievement gap between blacks and whites.

The 2018 midterms are a time for choosing between two approaches to government and civil society. If you care more about results than rhetoric, the answer is obvious.

This story was originally published October 23, 2018 at 9:20 AM.