Dominoes on the Court

Allison Riggs stood in the Johnston County Democratic Party’s Smithfield office on a Thursday evening and talked about dominoes. 

The state Supreme Court justice wanted to lay out the Democrats’ four-year plan to regain control of the court from the Republicans. Dominoes have to fall in exactly the right way for the player to win. It’s the same for Democrats if they want any chance of a majority in 2028, she told the crowd, which is key to so many other issues that progressives care about. The first domino is her. 

“So we need to keep my seat this year,” she said. “We need to re-elect Justice Anita Earls in 2026, then in 2028, before the next census and the next round of redistricting, we can win back our courts.”

Riggs and Earls, both longtime civil rights attorneys who litigated gerrymandering cases, are the only two Democrats left on the state Supreme Court. Gov. Roy Cooper appointed Riggs in September 2023 to fill the vacancy left when Mike Morgan resigned to run in the Democratic primary race for governor. Now she’s running against Jefferson Griffin, a Republican judge on the North Carolina Court of Appeals, to keep her seat. 

Riggs said she knows it’s a hard sell to get people’s attention on not only her race but the long game. But she thinks it’s worth trying. 

Democrats have to ensure Riggs and Earls survive the next two election cycles if they want to avoid a 7-0 Republican court, and if they want any chance of taking back the majority when Republican Justices Phil Berger Jr. and Tamara Barringer are up for re-election in 2028. Chief Justice Paul Newby’s seat is also up in 2028, and he can run again if he chooses–Republicans raised the mandatory retirement age from 72 to 76 in the latest state budget. (Newby turns 72 in 2027.)  

The state’s highest court has become yet another political battleground ever since Republican legislative leaders eliminated public financing in 2013 and then made judicial races partisan starting in 2018. In 2020, state judicial races broke fundraising records at an estimated $15 million. 

Rulings have become more politicized, too. Last year, the court’s majority decided a trio of voting rights cases—on gerrymandering, voter ID, and felon disenfranchisement—two of which had been previously decided by the old Democratic-majority court. It reversed the rulings on both.

Now the court is reconsidering its ruling in the 30-year-old Leandro school-funding case, after Berger Jr.’s father–the Senate Republican leader–and other GOP leaders asked for a do-over of the previous court’s order to fund two years of a $1.7 billion comprehensive K-12 spending plan. The younger Berger has declined to recuse himself; his Republican colleagues ruled earlier this year that he could participate, prompting stinging dissents from Riggs and Earls. 

By all accounts, the Riggs-Griffin race is close. One poll, from the progressive organization Carolina Forward, showed Riggs in the lead by one point. The conservative Carolina Journal had Griffin with a 3-point lead as of last month. Both polls were within the margin of error. The two candidates are also neck-and-neck in fundraising, with the latest campaign finance reports showing Griffin at $1.36 million to Riggs’ $1.1 million.

Mitch Kokai, senior analyst at the conservative John Locke Foundation, said unlike previous state Supreme Court races, this one likely won’t attract as much attention or money. Republicans will either maintain their majority or gain one more seat, he said. “If I had to guess, we’re not going to be in record-shattering territory,” he said. 

Riggs will have to convince swing voters that her seat is important enough to hang onto, in a year with plenty of important races. Dressed in a bright periwinkle suit with a white blouse, she tried to get that message through on that evening in Johnston County–difficult to do in a room festooned with Kamala Harris posters. For all their consequence, state Supreme Court races seldom grab the headlines.

“Does anyone here care about the quality of the public education their children get?” Riggs said. “If you care about that, you should know that the North Carolina Supreme Court is being called upon to interpret whether or not the North Carolina Constitution requires the legislature to pay for every student in this state to get a quality public education. Now, I can’t talk to you about the actual case, but that’s our job.  

“So I need you, if you care about public education, to care about my race and the fight to win back our courts for justice.” 

Two Paths to the Bench

On paper, Riggs and Griffin have similar stories: Both are 43 and boast humble beginnings. But their paths to becoming judges, and their approach to the bench, show clear differences. 

Riggs leans heavily into her work as a civil rights attorney and values like accountability, environmental protection, public education, and safeguarding reproductive health care. But in North Carolina, she has to be careful; judicial candidates aren’t allowed to speak about how they would rule on specific issues. Griffin avoids the conundrum by emphasizing his conservative credentials as necessary to uphold the state’s constitution and the rule of law. His job, as he says, is to interpret the law and not be an activist on the court. If a law needs to be changed, then that can be done through either legislation or the voting booth, he said. 

“I believe in making sure that the courts remain in their lane and their purpose,” Griffin said. 

Riggs grew up in the mining community of Morgantown, West Virginia, where her political awakening, she said, was centered around labor organizing. 

But her career ambitions didn’t immediately involve the law. She studied microbiology at the University of Florida, and her love of science took her to graduate school, where she studied paradigm shifts in scientific thinking. Her research included topics like the effect of recreational drugs such as MDMA on brain structures. 

But laboratory work didn’t appeal to her—too isolating for an extrovert. She decided to try law school at the University of Florida, and the spark for civil rights work came from helping people regain their voting rights and licenses to become barbers and plumbers. She said she saw how collective action and the law could work together to uplift people. That led her to join Earls at the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, a Durham nonprofit Earls started in 2007. 

For the next 13 years, Riggs worked alongside Earls in challenging gerrymandering and voter ID laws. One of the most high-profile was the 2013 voter ID law Republican legislators passed soon after the U.S. Supreme Court decision, Shelby County v. Holder, which severely weakened the Voting Rights Act. The 4th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals struck down the law, saying it targeted Black people with “almost surgical precision.” 

Riggs took over the nonprofit when Earns won election to the state Supreme Court in 2018.

Cooper appointed Riggs to the Court of Appeals in December 2022, and less than a year later he chose her for a vacant state Supreme Court seat. When accepting the appointment, Riggs embraced her past civil rights work, saying she wanted to “ensure that the phrase ‘equal justice for all’ lives up to its promise in this state.”

Griffin grew up in Red Oak, a small town in Nash County, where he was captain of the Northern Nash High School football team. He graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill in 2003 with a degree in American history and political science, and he worked as a charter fisherman for two years on the North Carolina coast between Brunswick and Carteret counties after obtaining a captain’s license from the U.S. Coast Guard. 

“You gain a lot of respect for people who make their living on the ocean pretty fast because it’s a tough environment,” he said. While he appreciated the hard work, he had aspired to become a lawyer since he was an elementary school student learning about American history and watching the Berlin Wall crumble in 1989. 

Griffin graduated from N.C. Central University School of Law and started practicing civil litigation and criminal defense for a law firm in Kinston. Two years later, he became a prosecutor in the Wake County District Attorney’s Office, where he handled everything from traffic infractions to first-degree murder. 

In 2015, then-Gov. Pat McCrory appointed him to a district court judicial seat in Wake. He successfully ran to keep that seat in 2016 but a year later joined the U.S. Army National Guard as captain and a JAG officer. Griffin doesn’t come from a military family but said he felt called to serve.

In 2019, he was deployed to the Middle East for a year, serving as part of the 30th Armored Brigade Combat Team, where he used his legal background on issues like planning rules of engagement. 

The next year, he won election to a seat on the North Carolina Court of Appeals, defeating Democratic incumbent Chris Brook, a former legal director of the state’s ACLU. Griffin had run for a seat on that state appellate court in 2018 but lost. This win occurred despite Griffin being deployed for much of the campaign; he ran on his experience and as someone committed to upholding the state constitution, regardless of his party affiliation.  

Griffin and fellow Republicans Jeffrey Carpenter, Chris Dillon, April Wood, and Fred Gore swept the races, giving conservatives a majority on the 15-member court. 

The ‘Most Dangerous Branch of Government’

While 2020 was the second officially partisan judicial election since Republicans changed state law, the veneer of neutrality in those races had already faded.  

In 2012, the General Assembly eliminated public financing for all judicial elections. Coming after the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United, that opened the floodgates for spending on judicial races. 

In2016, North Carolina became the first state in nearly 100 years to make nonpartisan Supreme Court races partisan. This move was in response to Democrat Mike Morgan’s surprising win over Republican incumbent Bob Edmunds. 

Political tensions around the court reached a boiling point in 2019, when Cooper picked Cheri Beasley to become the first Black female chief justice in state history. Newby, who had been on the court since 2004, believed his seniority should have granted him the job; Beasley had only been on the court seven years, and her appointment gave Democrats a 6-1 advantage. At a 2019 Wake County event, Newby vented, comparing his Democratic colleagues to U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, a self-described democratic socialist, and calling the judiciary the “most dangerous branch of government.” 

“Imagine seven AOCs on the state Supreme Court,” he said. “I lose sleep at night thinking what would it be like if we had no one to hold accountable those that want to cause social change through our judicial branch.” 

The next year, Newby ran for chief justice and defeated Beasley by 401 votes. He wasted little time flexing his muscle. He now had the power to appoint special superior court judges, and the General Assembly expanded his ability to appoint members of the Judicial Standards Commission, which evaluates ethical complaints against judges. He also has made some unprecedented personnel changes, such as demoting Donna Stroud as chief judge of the Court of Appeals and replacing her with Chris Dillon. While Newby and Stroud are both Republicans, some in the party have charged that Stroud is insufficiently conservative. 

Newby also declined to reappoint Julian Mann as director of the state Office of Administrative Hearings, replacing him with Donald van der Vaart, a Republican who had served under McCrory and on a Science Advisory Board in the Trump administration.

Last year, Earls filed a federal lawsuit against the Judicial Standards Commission regarding its investigation into statements she had made to the legal publication Law360 decrying the lack of diversity within the judiciary, and Newby’s decision to drop some efforts to rectify it. (She dropped the lawsuit after the commission dismissed the complaints.) 

The partisan tension has spilled out in rulings, too. Earls and now Riggs have frequently and sharply dissented and have rarely joined the conservative majority. Last year, the court split on a decision to vacate a Court of Appeals ruling involving a defamation suit against a TV station. Earls dissented, accusing her conservative colleagues of “injecting yet more confusion, arbitrariness, and partisanship into North Carolina’s legal system.”

Justice Richard Dietz accused Earls’ dissent of being “hyperbolic” and “exaggerated.” Those same words were used in Berger Jr.’s recent opinion in State v. Daw, a case in which Earls accused her conservative colleagues of closing the door on any habeas corpus petition from a prisoner.  

Last week, Riggs and Earls castigated their conservative colleagues in a 4-3 ruling to remove former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s name from the November ballot, causing at least a two-week delay in sending more than 130,000 mail-in absentee ballots. Dietz also dissented, but he shared the majority’s concern that keeping Kennedy’s name on the ballot would cause voter confusion. 

“Today, any public aspersions cast on the impartiality, independence, and dignity of our state courts are well-earned,” Riggs wrote. “I despair of this Court’s current failure to engage in plain reading of the law and its failure to forcefully defend the rights of the people, particularly when it comes to participation in the political process.” 

The 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which sent abortion decisions back to the states, has sharpened the political edge of state judicial races across the country. Questions about in vitro fertilization and access to specific types of birth control are also going before high courts in other states. 

“It’s raised the stakes around judicial elections,” said Alicia Bannon, director of the judiciary program at the Brennan Center for Justice, “because who sits on those courts is going to matter quite a bit in how they are ultimately ruling in those cases.”

The Big Questions

Abortion hasn’t gotten to the Supreme Court of North Carolina–at least not yet.

But it has become a central theme of this race, particularly when it comes to Griffin’s past decisions. 

In October 2023, Griffin concurred with a now-withdrawn opinion written by fellow Republican Court of Appeals Judge Hunter Murphy, which stated that “life begins at conception.” The ruling affirmed the decision of a trial court judge to terminate the parental rights of a Durham County woman and whether her then-unborn child should be considered a member of a household. 

“In North Carolina, it has been long held that ‘the life of a human being begins at the moment of conception in the mother’s womb,’” Murphy wrote, citing a 1949 Supreme Court decision that an unborn child had inheritance rights. 

Legal experts decried the ruling, calling it an example of conservative judicial activism. Many pointed out that the decision is rooted in the idea of fetal personhood–often used by anti-abortion advocates—and could be used as precedent to punish pregnant women who miscarry or take aspirin. 

The ruling was later withdrawn, and the court didn’t explain why. In a new decision issued in March, it still upheld the trial judge’s termination of the mother’s parental rights but eliminated any mention that “life begins at conception.” 

Last month, a group of self-described pro-democracy advocates held a news conference launching an online effort called Why Judges Matter, using that opinion to paint Griffin as a far-right extremist. 

“It was a shocking and controversial ruling that had more to do with advancing an anti-abortion personhood argument than with the facts at hand,” Tara Romano, executive director of Pro-Choice North Carolina, said. 

In an interview, Griffin declined to say much about the decision. “I can’t talk about deliberations or how that all works,” he said. Nor would he talk about his position on the underlying claims about fetal rights. “I can’t talk about that out of respect for my colleagues,” he said. 

Griffin has said he admires U.S. Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch. 

He is proud of certain decisions he has made while on the Court of Appeals, including one overturning a trial judge’s decision to transfer $1.7 billion to public schools as part of the Leandro case, which is now pending before the state Supreme Court. 

“This is clearly a legislative function to appropriate money, and you can’t order that,” he told the News & Observer. “You can make up 100 different reasons why that’s bad—think about a judge being able to appropriate money.”

Griffin did weigh in on one thing: judicial activism. “We need jurists who are committed to the rule of law, who are committed to judicial restraint, who are committed to interpreting the law, not making the law from the bench,” he said. 

Riggs, he said, is part of the problem. 

“My opponent on the other side spent 15 years with the Southern Coalition for Social Justice before being appointed to the bench,” he said. “There’s a clear distinction between our experiences here in North Carolina. I mean, she’s filed a lot of political lawsuits, and now she’s reviewing those laws made by the General Assembly that they continuously challenged.”

Riggs has been more specific about the issues before the court. But she says her positions are not about politics; they’re about values. While on the campaign trail, she said she tries to educate people about the role the state Supreme Court plays in questions that affect their daily lives, such as making sure corporations that spill toxic waste into rivers and lakes don’t pass those costs on to consumers. 

And some of those questions are personal for her, she said in an interview. 

“I’m a 43-year-old woman who has been married only three years,” said Riggs, who has been endorsed by Planned Parenthood and Emily’s List. “I didn’t meet my husband until I was nearly 40. We hope to start a family someday, but given my age, I’m going to need some kind of medical assistance. … Extremists right now are making decisions about reproductive health care that could impede my ability to build a family in safety and peace without having to risk my life.” 

Eye on the Ball

Anderson Clayton, chair of the North Carolina Democrats, is blunt about the fact that the past several election cycles have not gone well for her party, particularly at the judicial level.

“Democrats have just taken their eye off the ball,” she said. “And that’s because we haven’t had someone at the table that’s been fighting for those races.” 

That’s changing this year, she said. The state party has a coordinated campaign fund for judicial races and a director devoted to those races. The party also has invested in communications, digital advertising, and media strategies as well as boots-on-the ground organizing for judicial races, she said. 

Part of that effort is making sure they have an organizing presence in all 100 counties talking about judicial races specifically: “What they do, how they impact people’s lives, and holding sort of informational town halls about them, too,” she said. 

At the Johnston County event, Riggs told the crowd that judicial candidates are not operating in silos anymore. Whenever she campaigns, she mentions the Democratic candidates for three seats on the Court of Appeals—incumbent Carolyn Thompson, who is running against Republican Tom Murry; Ed Eldred, who is challenging incumbent Valerie Zachary; and Martin Moore, who is going up against Chris Freeman, a district court judge who defeated Murphy in the GOP primary. She said that the acronym to remember is TEAM–for Thompson, Eldred, Allison, and Moore–her last name didn’t fit the mnemonic device. 

A relatively new effort has also stepped into the fray. Briana Brough and Amy Cox started FLIP NC, a volunteer grassroots organization focused on winning back the courts, in late 2017 as a response to Donald Trump’s election. 

“We woke up the next morning, and we’re just, you know, like a lot of people, just incredibly upset about Trump’s election, and we’re trying to figure out what we could do,” Brough said. 

The organization is focused on the state Supreme Court race this year, particularly “deep canvassing” on key issues like public school funding and gerrymandering. On a July evening, the group screened “Slay The Dragon,” a film about gerrymandering, at Carolina Theatre in downtown Durham. In a Q&A after the event, Kate Barr, the Democrat running for state Senate in District 37, told the crowd the most important vote she casts this year will be for Riggs.

But the North Carolina Republican Party isn’t ceding ground, said chairman Jason Simmons. They are also prioritizing grassroots outreach on statewide judicial races–and thanks to former state party chairman Michael Whatley, that infrastructure is already in place, Simmons said. (Whatley is now the co-chair of the Republican National Committee.)

Whatley helped establish the Judicial Victory Fund in 2019 to pour money and other resources into judicial races. In 2020 and 2022, Republicans swept the statewide judicial races. And Simmons believes Republicans can continue their wins this year. 

“All of our polling and research and modeling suggest that voters across North Carolina want someone that brings a conservative temperament to the bench,” he said. 

Both parties agree that not much will change this year, even if it sets the tone for the next few races. 

Bob Orr, a former state Supreme Court justice who switched from Republican to unaffiliated, said he hasn’t seen too much excitement about the race. Unlike previous state Supreme Court races, this one isn’t as high-stakes, he added. 

“Whether Judge Griffin wins or not, it’s still going to be a conservative court.”

Vibhav Nandagiri contributed reporting.

Disclosure: Brent Barringer, a lawyer at Barringer Sasser and the husband of Tamara Barringer, is a financial supporter of The Assembly.

Correction: The names of the founders of FLIP NC have been corrected.

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.