I saw this news item on MSNBC, and I thought I would share some of what I read in a NYT piece on now REPUBLICAN NC State Representative Tricia Cotham. She’s infamous for switching party allegiance from Democrat to Republican, and this allowed the now supermajority of Republicans in the legislature to pass a 12 week abortion ban in NC. You may remember this was the same woman who made an impassioned speech about the time she had to obtain an abortion. Her explanation for switching parties was that Democrats are into “group think” and only care about “process.” She also added that Democrats were just “mean to her.”
According to one of the very flawed newspapers we all love to kick around, there is more to Cotham’s betrayel than what she said.
NYT:
When Tricia Cotham, a former Democratic lawmaker, was considering another run for the North Carolina House of Representatives, she turned to a powerful party leader for advice. Then, when she jumped into the Democratic primary, she was encouraged by still other formidable allies.
She won the primary in a redrawn district near Charlotte, and then triumphed in the November general election by 18 percentage points, a victory that helped Democrats lock in enough seats to prevent, by a single vote, a Republican supermajority in the state House.
Except what was unusual — and not publicly known at the time — was that the influential people who had privately encouraged Ms. Cotham to run were Republicans, not Democrats. One was Tim Moore, the redoubtable Republican speaker of the state House. Another was John Bell, the Republican majority leader.
“I encouraged her to run because she was a really good member when she served before,” Mr. Bell recalled in an interview.
Excuse me? Some of the most powerful state Republican leaders were encouraging a Democrat to run in a Democratic state house district? Why the hell would they do that? Supposedly, Bell and Moore knew that Cotham was one to “reach across the aisle” to Republicans. Since her tenure in the state house, Cotham had become more “centrist” and no longer the progressive Democrats knew.
Does this sound like someone we know in D.C.? Let me think. Oh yeah! Kyrsten Sinema! And if there is one thing we all know about Sinema is that she loves the finer things in life. Becoming an “indepedent” for Sinema is leading to lots of campaign donations and other gifts from special interests.
I wonder if Cotham has had the same life experience as Sinema?
In the North Carolina House, Tricia Cotham was re-elected to four full terms and became a progressive force, calling for higher taxes on the state’s wealthiest residents to help close budget gaps. She criticized charter schools. She fought against the so-called bathroom bill that required people to use restrooms in accordance with their birth gender.
She repeatedly railed against waiting periods for abortions, and speaking on the House floor in 2015, invoked her personal experience.
“Legislators, you do not hold shares in my body,” she said in a speech that has now become famous, “so stop trying to manipulate my mind.”
In 2016, Ms. Cotham chose to run for Congress, rather than for another term in the legislature, and was defeated…
The Lobbyist
For a time, Ms. Cotham left elective politics and went into lobbying, with a focus on education. In 2019, she and three partners founded a firm called BCHL. One of the partners was C. Philip Byers, a major donor to state Republicans who was also president of a company that built charter schools.
In office, Ms. Cotham had criticized charter schools, but now her firm supported private investments in the public school system and charter schools. (Ms. Cotham said she had been supportive of public school alternatives “for years.”)
Uh huh. This form of “conversion therapy” on a progressive seems to work really well when money is involved.
Oh, and when she ran for a state house seat in 2022 and won, two of her major donors were the following:
Ms. Cotham’s top campaign donors included the North Carolina Dental Society PAC — which gave almost exclusively to Republican candidates — and the North Carolina Health Care Facilities PAC, which gave mainly to Republicans.
“Those groups have honored me with their support for years,” Ms. Cotham said. “I’ve earned it.”
Now, you may be wondering, were there no other signs that something was not right with Cotham? Yes. Local activists were raising some alarm bells.
Some Democrats welcomed her return, seeing her as a reliable ally on social issues like abortion, but activist Democrats in the Charlotte area said she never responded to their offers of help. Text messages from political allies and friends, wishing her well, were met with silence.
She fumed that Lillian’s List, an abortion rights organization, had “really screwed” her by endorsing another Democrat in the primary, according to a message she sent to a campaign worker, Autumn Alston, that was reviewed by The New York Times.
Ms. Cotham seemed to have embraced a me-versus-them mentality, said Jonathan Coby, her former campaign consultant. “She would say, ‘Oh, I don’t want to talk to that group, they’re out to get me; they don’t like me,’” Mr. Coby recalled.
Ms. Cotham said that Mr. Coby, who worked with her for nearly a decade, including on her most recent campaign, was not a reliable source of information.
Meanwhile, as Ms. Cotham grew leery of activists and groups on the left, she was receiving counsel from prominent Republicans. “I reached out to her and told her good luck, I hope she wins,” said Mr. Moore, the House speaker. “She was somebody I realized we could work with.”
Ms. Cotham said that Mr. Moore and “others” were pleased that she was running. She called their well wishes “pretty common.”
This screams SINEMA to me. Remember how Sinema ran into a woman’s room to avoid her constituents? And how Republicans were soothing her hurt feelings from the treatment the bad old left was giving her? Oh, and about Lillian’s List, to get an endorsement from them a candidate has to at least SHOW UP at one of their gatherings and engage with the group. She refused to go. It’s that simple.
That should have been a three alarm fire call to the Democrats.
And it wasn’t just the back stab on abortion rights that Cotham is guilty of. She has helped the Republicans to loosen gun restrictions and pass anti-LGBTQ laws. Frankly, Cotham was a TROJAN HORSE FOR REPUBLICANS. The NYT won’t say it explicitly, but this whole thing stinks like a cess pool.
And by the way, I lived in NC back in the late 80’s to 2005. And there was a similar stunt pulled by Republicans. They got a few conservative Democrats to vote for a Republican speaker of the house to deny a black Democrat from becoming speaker — a man by the name of Dan Blue. Democrats held the majority, obviously. But Republicans in NC have a long history of rat fucking Democrats.
As for Cotham’s constituents, I hear they are royally pissed. There have been no polls as far as I know, but Cotham has complained about all those nasty texts, emails, and phone calls to her office. And like Sinema, Cotham is NOT meeting with any of her constituents, unless they are Republicans.
Anyway, the NYT in this article is more focused on Cotham’s pettiness as the reason why she switched parties. And I don’t disagree that she took things way too personally. But the NYT won’t make that logical conclusion that Republicans made a rotten deal with Cotham. Republicans knew they wouldn’t win that house seat, so they decided to find a Trojan Horse candidate instead.