Supreme Court Race Likely to Head to Recount

Democrat Allison Riggs and Republican Jefferson Griffin are in a tight race for a state Supreme Court seat that may head to a recount.

With all precincts reporting early Wednesday, Griffin had a little more than a 10,000 vote lead over Riggs. Under state law, candidates have the right to request a recount if the difference is either 0.5 percent of the total votes cast or 10,000 votes, whichever is less.

Her campaign said Wednesday afternoon that she is not conceding. “Every voice and every vote matters in this election,” said Embry Owen, Riggs’ campaign manager, said. “We are monitoring the counting of all votes across the state, including absentee ballots and provisional ballots, and we will know more about our next steps in the days ahead.” 

Riggs said she was grateful “to the more than two million North Carolinians who have placed their trust in me and voted for me to keep my seat on our state Supreme Court.”

Griffin, who left the campaign trail after his National Guard unit was deployed to Western North Carolina for hurricane relief work, had not made any public statements about the results as of Wednesday afternoon.

A win for Griffin would give Republicans a 6-1 majority on the state Supreme Court.

As Riggs put it earlier this year, control of the court is a game of dominoes. If Democrats hope to eventually win back the majority they lost in 2022, they needed to hold on to Riggs’s seat this year and that of Justice Anita Earls, the only other Democrat, in 2026. Three seats will be up for grabs in 2028.

With Griffin’s apparent win, the game of political dominoes has become a bit more challenging. Earls has already announced she is running for re-election, but no Republican challenger has emerged for that race.

The state’s highest court has become yet another political battleground over the last decade, after Republican lawmakers eliminated public financing in 2013 and then made statewide judicial races partisan in 2018. In 2020, state judicial races broke fundraising records at an estimated $15 million. 

Rulings have become more partisan, too. Last year, the court’s conservative majority decided a trio of voting rights cases, and in two of them, it reversed rulings the court had issued when it was controlled by Democrats. In dissents, Earls and Riggs have accused their colleagues of putting politics above the law. And sometimes, things have gotten personal. Justice Richard Dietz, writing for the majority, characterized Earls’ dissent in one case as “unhinged,” “hyperbolic,” and “exaggerated.” 

Anderson Clayton, chair of the state Democratic Party, told The Assembly earlier this year that Democrats had dropped the ball on statewide judicial races. The state party has sought to change that, creating a coordinated campaign fund for judicial races and hiring a director devoted to those races. Clayton said the party has invested in communications, digital advertising, and media strategies as well as boots-on-the-ground organizing. 

Riggs previously worked as a civil rights attorney at Southern Coalition for Social Justice, the Durham-based nonprofit that Earls founded in 2007. Gov. Roy Cooper appointed her to the Court of Appeals in 2022 and then appointed her to the state Supreme Court last year after Mike Morgan resigned to run in the gubernatorial primary. 

While she didn’t discuss specific cases in her campaign, Riggs did talk about issues like reproductive rights and the environment on the stump. Last month, Republican state Sen. Buck Newton filed an ethics complaint with the Judicial Standards Commission against Riggs, accusing her of violating the code of judicial conduct by running ads on reproductive rights. Riggs said in a post on X that she did nothing wrong. Complaints with the Judicial Standards Commission are confidential, as well as any potential investigations. A complaint only becomes public if the state Supreme Court issues disciplinary action. 

Griffin, a former prosecutor and district court judge who won his Court of Appeals seat in 2020, has not been as explicit on issues, choosing instead to emphasize his conservative credentials as an originalist who says he will not let politics influence how he interprets the law. However, Griffin got some backlash when he concurred with a now-withdrawn opinion from fellow Republican Court of Appeals Judge Hunter Murphy, which stated “life begins at conception.” Griffin has declined to comment about why he concurred with the opinion or why it was withdrawn. 

Democrats were also banking on narrowing the majority Republicans have on the Court of Appeals, where conservatives currently hold an 11-4 majority. Republicans widened their margin to 13-2, with incumbent Valerie Zachary keeping her seat and Democrat Carolyn Thompson losing hers to Republican Tom Murry. Republican Chris Freeman won an open third seat, defeating Democrat Martin Moore.  

Michael Hewlett is a staff reporter at The Assembly. He was previously the legal affairs reporter at the Winston-Salem Journal. You can reach him at michael@theassemblync.com.