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Few noticed when the state House passed a bill to “Restore Flounder/Red Snapper Season” in May. It wasn’t the kind of legislation that generates headlines, let alone draws angry protesters to Raleigh.
But one sentence inserted into the Senate version on June 17 changed all that. The amendment, by Sen. David Craven, banned shrimp trawling within a half-mile of the shoreline, which threatened a $14-million-a-year industry in an effort to protect juvenile fish habitats.
For Sen. Bobby Hanig, a Currituck County Republican who favors bow ties and flamboyant sports coats, the issue wasn’t just what the amendment did, but how it came to be. He wasn’t told about it beforehand, he says. Neither were most Republican senators, including others who represent coastal communities.
Instead, Hanig believed that Craven—a third-term Republican from Randolph County, about 200 miles from the coast—had done the bidding of Senate leader Phil Berger and his top lieutenant, Sen. Bill Rabon.
“You know as well as I do that you don’t scrape a pimple off a gnat’s ass without Bill Rabon and Phil Berger’s permission in the North Carolina Senate,” Hanig told The Assembly.
In response, Hanig did what almost no Republican has done since Berger became the Senate’s president pro tempore in 2011: He fought back, publicly and aggressively, lashing out at what he called “sleazy politics at its worst.”
When Hanig failed to derail the legislation on the Senate floor, he used a parliamentary tactic to delay its passage for several days. After the Senate finally approved it—only Hanig and three other coastal Republicans opposed the bill—he helped rally hundreds of shrimpers and their supporters at the legislature. The show of force convinced House Republicans to kill the Senate’s bill.
Hanig’s brazenness stunned many observers.
Under Berger, the Senate GOP has been a disciplined political machine. Few leaks emerged from closed-door meetings. Disagreements remained private. And almost no one openly defied leadership—let alone attack them personally.
This spring, however, a few small cracks began to form. Hanig cast a lone Republican vote against the Senate’s budget after his amendment to preserve free ferry rides failed. Another Republican senator criticized Berger’s allies for their hardball tactics. House Republicans, meanwhile, refused Berger’s budget demands, leading to an acrimonious standoff.
Hanig’s rebellion brought to the surface a question that had been the subject of furtive whispers: Is Berger, now in his 15th year as the state’s most powerful politician, losing his grip on the legislature?
“I hope that my colleagues see now that they’re not invincible,” Hanig said.
In an interview last week, Berger argued that these “isolated” incidents didn’t signify anything larger. The fact that a few disagreements spilled out into the open doesn’t mean he’s lost support.
Hanig’s comments say “more about Sen. Hanig than about anything else,” Berger added.
This article is based on conversations with more than two dozen legislators, lobbyists, and political operatives over the last three months. Most were granted anonymity to speak candidly.
Many insiders said it’s no coincidence that Berger’s difficulties arose as he gears up for the first real test of his electoral power in decades. Next March, he’ll face a primary challenge for his state Senate seat from Sam Page, Rockingham County’s MAGA-aligned seven-term sheriff. Page has sought to capitalize on Berger’s failed push to legalize commercial casinos in 2023, a rare political misstep.
The 72-year-old Berger is arguably the state’s most influential Republican since Jesse Helms. But as the General Assembly reconvenes this week from a summer recess, he finds himself at a crossroads, fighting for political survival against an opponent who says his long record of conservative accomplishments isn’t conservative enough. His long tenure leading the Senate is, for the first time, showing signs of strain.
How Berger handles the next few months could define his legacy.
The Boss
Berger lost his first bid to become the leader of the Senate Republicans.
In April 2004, Sen. Patrick Ballantine, then the minority leader, resigned to run for governor. (He lost that fall to Democrat Mike Easley.) Berger, a lawyer from Eden, sought to replace him.
Though only in his second term, Berger said he’d quickly realized he couldn’t accomplish much with Democrats in control. “I looked at it, and I said, ‘Well, you know, I can do that job, and I’ve got some ideas on how we can build on where we are and hopefully get to a majority,’” he told The Assembly.
The caucus instead chose Sen. Jim Forrester, a social conservative best known for his opposition to gay marriage. (Forrester died in 2011.)
President George W. Bush won the state that fall, but Democrats gained seats in the General Assembly. Berger was frustrated.
“We should have been able to get to a majority at that point,” he said. “I just felt like we didn’t put our best foot forward.”
“I hope that my colleagues see now that they’re not invincible.”
Sen. Bobby Hanig
After the election, Berger again ran for minority leader. This time, he prevailed. But his victory generated few headlines; at that point, the Senate GOP had been in the minority for more than a century. Still, Berger’s colleagues saw potential.
“Phil was just seen as a natural leader, well-liked by the caucus, respected by the Democrats,” said Richard Stevens, a Wake County Republican who served in the Senate from 2003 to 2012.
Berger wanted the GOP to improve its political fundamentals, especially fundraising. Senate Democrats had long taken advantage of a state law that allowed them to pool their resources more effectively; before Berger, Republicans hadn’t. Better fundraising made it easier to recruit quality candidates.
Over the next few years, Berger hammered Democrats for taxing too much and spending frivolously, and he accused them of being soft on criminals and unauthorized immigrants. He also promised that, if given power, Republicans would govern transparently, a contrast with Democrats then mired in corruption scandals.
Weighed down by Bush’s unpopularity, state Republicans had little success in 2006 and 2008. But in 2010, a Tea Party wave swept them into the majority, and Berger was elected president pro tempore. He’s held the position ever since. (His Democratic predecessor, Marc Basnight, led the Senate for 18 years, a state record.)
Few modern politicians have wielded power as effectively. Berger guided the statehouse from a Democratic stronghold into a conservative laboratory. Republicans cut taxes, regulations, and unemployment benefits, which they argued was necessary to pay off debt.
Their reforms have led to economic growth and a better business environment, Berger says.
Republicans also passed a far-reaching school voucher program and curtailed abortion rights. They stripped authority from Democratic governors, seized control of the UNC System, and aggressively redistricted to entrench Republican power.
“What Republicans saw as an opportunity in 2011 was to fundamentally shift the dynamics of a state that they did not have control over for over 100 years,” said Michael Bitzer, a professor of political science at Catawba College. “I think [Berger], serving as the leader in the Senate, was the true gatekeeper.”
Many moves were controversial. Republicans faced widespread backlash over the “bathroom bill,” which the legislature eventually repealed, and cuts to public school funding. They fought in court over gerrymandering and voter ID. Their political appointees occasionally embarrassed the state’s higher education system. In 2023, they acquiesced to then-Gov. Roy Cooper’s calls to expand Medicaid after years of dogged resistance.
(With President Donald Trump’s recent Medicaid cuts threatening that expansion, which has provided health insurance to about 600,000 residents, Berger argues his skepticism was justified: “I think the decision I made, each decision was the right decision at that time.”)
Time and time again, Berger emerged from these battles unscathed. But his push to bring commercial casinos to North Carolina has been a different story.
The Casino
As minority leader, Berger opposed establishing a lottery to fund education. He also voted to ban video poker machines and Internet sweepstakes games.
But in 2023, Berger embraced gambling. The General Assembly legalized sports betting, and Republicans proposed legislation to bring back video gaming machines. Most controversially, Berger backed legislation to let one company open three casinos on nontribal land in rural Anson, Nash, and Rockingham counties.
Berger said the difference was that 20 years ago, North Carolina had no gaming. Since then, three casinos have opened on tribal land, and two more just across the Virginia state line—including one in Danville, a half-hour’s drive northeast of his hometown. He figured the horse had left the barn.
Proponents pitched the casinos as economic stimuli for struggling areas. But there was another possible motivation. Some economic forecasts have suggested that scheduled tax cuts—a cornerstone of Berger’s agenda—could lead to billion-dollar deficits by the end of the decade.
Berger has downplayed those claims, insisting that the state’s growth will more than make up for any shortfalls. But if there is a hole, gaming revenues could help patch it.
Legislators unveiled the casino legislation in July 2023. By then, the wheels were already in motion.
In 2022 and 2023, executives at the Maryland-based Cordish Gaming Group donated to the campaigns of Berger and other key Republicans and hired lobbyists linked to Berger and his former chief of staff. A politically connected nonprofit commissioned a report that estimated that gambling could produce as much as $1.4 billion a year in new tax revenue.
In March 2023, Rockingham County officials—including Commissioner Kevin Berger, the Senate leader’s son—flew to Maryland for a symposium the casino company hosted. That June, a Cordish-linked company asked Rockingham County to rezone 192 acres of agricultural land to a designation called highway commercial. Less than a week later, the county planning board voted to allow casinos in highway commercial zones—if state lawmakers legalized them.
County officials “kept denying they knew what [the land] was going to be,” said Doug Isley, a former Rockingham School Board member who led the anti-casino effort. He said he learned of the officials’ meeting with Cordish through a public records request.
In September 2023, Rockingham County commissioners approved Cordish’s rezoning despite opposition from an overflow crowd of hundreds of residents. Eighteen speakers pleaded with them not to allow casinos in their community.
One of them was Page, the longtime sheriff. “The people of Rockingham County want, need, and deserve to be heard on this matter,” he said. “We’ve been left in the dark far too long.”
The legislative deal to legalize casinos soon collapsed because it lacked Republican support in the House. But the fallout continued to dominate Rockingham County politics.
“The people of Rockingham County want, need, and deserve to be heard on this matter. We’ve been left in the dark far too long.”
Sam Page, Rockingham County sheriff
One of the three county commissioners up for re-election in the March 2024 Republican primary lost to a casino opponent. The other two incumbents, including Kevin Berger, narrowly escaped the same fate.
Weeks before the election, GOPAC—a national organization that seeks to elect “a new generation of Republican leaders”—paid $25,000 for mailers attacking candidate Craig Travis, according to a defamation lawsuit Travis filed after the election. (It was dismissed in May 2025.) According to the lawsuit, the money was passed through a nonprofit run by a GOP donor and sent to one of Phil Berger’s political advisers, who printed the mailers. Berger sits on a GOPAC advisory board.
Kevin Berger, who’d easily won his first three campaigns, won by just three votes.
The Sheriff
In December 2023, a group calling itself the North Carolina Conservative Project released a poll that sent shockwaves through political circles. It found that if Page challenged Phil Berger in the 2024 primary, the sheriff would win by 30 points.
There were reasons to be skeptical of the poll. The group behind it wasn’t registered with the secretary of state, the IRS, or the State Board of Elections, making it impossible to tell who conducted or paid for the survey.
State Supreme Court Justice Phil Berger Jr., another of Phil Berger’s sons, blamed Patrick Sebastian, a political operative and partner in the polling company Opinion Diagnostics. Berger Jr. told Axios Raleigh at the time that he had recently fired Sebastian as a consultant to him for being part of an effort to recruit a challenger to his father.
Sebastian, a nephew of former Gov. Pat McCrory, declined to tell Axios Raleigh whether he’d been involved. (He denied that he was Berger Jr.’s employee, or that Berger Jr. fired him.) But two sources familiar with the recruitment told The Assembly that Sebastian and other GOP politicos, including former U.S. Rep. Mark Walker, approached a Greensboro business executive in 2023 about challenging Berger. (The executive, who declined to comment, didn’t live in Berger’s district.)
Page also confirmed that “there was interest” in him running against Berger in 2024. But he said he’d already decided to run for lieutenant governor. He placed fifth in that primary.
Unchallenged in his own primary, Berger was re-elected by a 13-point margin over Democrat Steve Luking, a Reidsville physician. It was a comfortable win, but also Berger’s weakest showing since he took office in 2001; he ran 18 points behind Trump in Rockingham.
Just three months later, Page announced he would run against Berger in 2026.
Page will be a formidable opponent, especially in Rockingham. Since being elected in 1998, he’s never lost a precinct in a primary or general election. Page is also optimistic about his chances in Guilford County, where Senate District 26 wraps around Greensboro. He easily won the most votes in the lieutenant governor primary there.
Page has spent years bolstering his law-and-order bona fides and projecting toughness on immigration. Often photographed in a cowboy hat, Page has taken frequent trips to the southern border and appeared in conservative media. He also tied himself to Trump, leading the group Sheriffs for Trump in 2016 and serving as Trump’s North Carolina campaign chair in 2020.
Page casts himself as a plainspoken conservative who hasn’t forgotten his roots, while arguing that Berger has sold out to lobbyists. Page said Berger’s handling of casinos was revealing.
“A lot of this is about corporate instead of the people,” Page said. “And we need to be thinking about the people that we serve, and not just corporate interests and the big dollar.”
Berger said that, as far as he’s concerned, casinos are “in the past.”
“I saw that proposal, vetted the proposal,” he said. “Turns out, folks didn’t want to do that.” He added, “The only person that’s really talking about gambling at this time is Sam Page.”
Berger speaks of Page in a tone like an audible eye roll.
“Sam Page is someone who is trying to get out of the sheriff’s office because that office has been mismanaged for so many years,” he said. “So, he ran for lieutenant governor. He spent a lot of time going to political rallies to try to ingratiate himself with political candidates in the hopes of getting an appointment to something. He spent a lot of time, not in Rockingham County dealing with the crime problem, but down at the border getting his picture made with his hat on.”
The Stalemate
Even so, Berger has treated Page like a threat.
This spring, Berger began rolling out high-profile endorsements from law enforcement and some of the state’s best-known Republicans, including U.S. Sen. Ted Budd. He also became the lead sponsor of seven bills, an unusual display for a typically behind-the-scenes operator.
Several addressed red-meat issues like immigration, DEI, and gun rights.
“I don’t think there’s any question that people that have known me for a long time will tell you that I’ve never sought the limelight,” Berger told The Assembly. But with the primary looming, “it was important for me to make sure that folks understood what it meant for me to be in the position I’m in.”
That marked an important shift in Berger’s focus, said longtime lobbyist Brian Lewis, who co-hosts the Do Politics Better podcast. He’s “recognized that there’s a populist movement in North Carolina,” Lewis said. “Sam Page is riding that populist train right now, and, of course, it’s going to have an effect on Sen. Berger.”
Berger has long prioritized maintaining the Senate’s Republican majority, which has sometimes meant looking out for vulnerable members instead of ideological interests.
“He spent a lot of time, not in Rockingham County dealing with the crime problem, but down at the border getting his picture made with his hat on.”
Sen. Phil Berger
Berger is the only sitting Republican senator who served in the minority. He watched Democrats squander their majority and learned from their mistakes. (Berger said he thinks Democrats’ failure to budget for economic downturns caught up with them after the Great Recession.)
But his long incumbency also presents challenges. Some top enforcers—both staffers and trusted legislators—have left, while the next generation of lawmakers includes ambitious climbers. And as Berger acknowledged, Republicans have prevailed on many of the overarching issues that unite the caucus. Splits over how far to push, and how to go about it, are almost inevitable.
Berger faced other complications this year. Federal cuts and economic uncertainty created an unfamiliar environment for lawmakers accustomed to boom times. And an emboldened state House wanted to assert itself under new speaker Destin Hall.
The result was a tense, escalating budget stalemate.
The House’s proposal directed funding to Hurricane Helene relief instead of a planned children’s hospital that some House members viewed skeptically as a Berger legacy project. It raised pay for teachers by 8.7 percent and state employees by 2.5 percent over two years, compared with the Senate’s respective 3.3 percent and 1.5 percent increases.
More importantly, it could cancel scheduled tax cuts. In 2023, the General Assembly locked in three income tax reductions over the next decade, each conditioned on the state bringing in enough revenue. Despite potential shortfalls, the Senate budget eliminates the next two so-called revenue triggers. The House’s budget, on the other hand, increases the trigger amounts.
Senate leaders viewed that as a betrayal.
Senators perceived the House approach “as tantamount to a tax increase,” Berger said. “And, you know, there’s certain things that Republicans don’t do.”
The Club for Growth, a national conservative organization, lashed out, threatening that any Republican who voted for the House budget “should expect to be held accountable” and could “kiss their political future goodbye.”
House Republicans were furious at what many viewed as intimidation on the Senate’s behalf. (Political consultant Jim Blaine, Berger’s former chief of staff, has previously worked with Club for Growth.)
The threat backfired. House Republicans unanimously approved their budget. (So did most Democrats, with the tacit blessing of Gov. Josh Stein.) They then struck back at Berger, stripping his name from a key energy bill he sponsored. The legislature recessed at the end of June with no deal in sight.
“When someone bullies another person, especially at the elected level, openly like that, it does nothing more than solidify that House caucus together through a united enemy, which is the Senate leadership,” state Sen. Vickie Sawyer, a Mooresville Republican, said on her May 23 podcast.
Her comments caught insiders’ attention. As one put it, the problem wasn’t what she said. It was that she aired the caucus’ dirty laundry.
Sawyer did not respond to requests for comment for this article.
For his part, Berger admitted that negotiations this year have been “different.” But when asked how, he said, “I don’t know that I can speak to that.”
The Money
Since Page announced his campaign, rumors have swirled that big-money donors with grievances against Berger will invest in the primary. A long list of names has been floated.
One is Raleigh businessman and Republican donor Robert Luddy, who wrote in an email to prominent conservatives in September 2023 that, following the casino debacle, “Berger needs to be out of leadership. His time has passed.”
A month before sending that email, Luddy donated $6,400 to Berger’s campaign committee, according to state records; he hasn’t given to Berger since. In 2024, he gave $6,000 to Travis, the Rockingham County candidate who challenged Kevin Berger. Luddy did not respond to requests for comment.
But no name has surfaced more often—especially among Berger’s allies—than Harry Smith, a former Berger appointee to the UNC System Board of Governors. The two fell out after Smith left the board in 2020. According to a source with direct knowledge of the effort, Smith participated in the 2023 call with Walker aiming to recruit a Greensboro executive to challenge Berger.
“When someone bullies another person, especially at the elected level, openly like that, it does nothing more than solidify that House caucus together through a united enemy, which is the Senate leadership.”
Sen. Vickie Sawyer
Smith has denied funding Page or being involved with his campaign, and no direct evidence indicates otherwise. But the suspicions of some around Berger might have already had repercussions.
Smith’s private equity firm, Rise Capital, owns the hemp company Asterra Labs, whose president is state Rep. John Bell, the chairman of the powerful House Rules Committee. Legislative sources say Smith’s employment of Bell has contributed to distrust between the state House and Senate this year.
As of the end of June, Page’s campaign had raised only about $17,100, according to campaign finance records. But Page and his allies will likely have plenty of cash to make their case over the next seven months.
“I know for a fact that there are a bunch of major donors who are going to write checks for Sam Page,” said Jim Womack, chair of the Lee County Republican Party and a Page supporter. “I’m not at liberty to [name] them, and I’m not sure if they’re going to do it through a PAC or do it directly to his campaign, but there’s a bunch of major donors that are interested in seeing Sam win that seat.”
Womack, who is best known as an “election integrity” activist, said that one donor had approached his dormant political action committee, the Conservative Coalition of NC, about relaunching to support Page. (He said this person was not Smith or Luddy.) “We said, ‘Well, we can’t coordinate with the Page campaign if we’re going to do that, but we certainly are interested in seeing Sam Page elected.’”
The PAC did not raise money from 2021 to 2024. Its donations for the first half of 2025 had not been posted to the State Board of Elections’ website at the time of publication.
“The question is, are they supporting him because they think he’s the best candidate, or because they think he’s not me?” Berger said. “If you’re in a position to either make decisions or influence decisions, there are folks who are perceived as not-winners. They tend not to be fans of the person who was influential in making the decisions.”
Berger will have millions of dollars at his disposal, too. As of June 30, his campaign had more than $1.8 million on hand. The N.C. Senate Majority Fund, which helps Republican candidates, raised almost $10 million in 2024. While most of that money is typically allocated to vulnerable candidates in swing seats, it could aid Berger, too. In addition, Citizens for a Better North Carolina, an independent expenditure committee aligned with Berger, raised almost $7 million last year.
“It feels like it’s two titans at the local level setting up to do the equivalent of the Battle of the Bulge,” said Bitzer, the political scientist. “When you have an incumbent-versus-incumbent dynamic—meaning, both are extremely well-known in the community—money could be a major factor and will likely be highly negative in nature.”
Berger has potential avenues of attack against Page. Last year, for example, the insurance company Travelers dropped the Rockingham County Sheriff’s Office following 11 deaths in the county jail, including five suicides and three drug overdoses. The sheriff’s office also fired one detention officer for allegedly having sex with inmates and another who was arrested for sexual battery.
County commissioners, including Kevin Berger, criticized Page for what they described as a lack of transparency.
In May, the county settled a federal lawsuit from Disability Rights NC, which monitors how jails accommodate people with mental health issues. The group said officials had illegally refused it access to the jail and inmates for more than a year.
Berger has also criticized Page for supporting restrictions on the state’s voucher program, which Page has argued is necessary to increase the pay of public school teachers. Berger “has increased teacher pay consistently for 15 years and supports the Trump School Choice Plan,” Berger’s campaign posted on X.
Page, meanwhile, likely will paint Berger as out of step with the party’s base on casinos and other issues. Page said Berger caved to corporate pressure when the General Assembly repealed HB2 and hadn’t pushed hard enough to expand gun rights. He criticized a law the legislature passed in 2013 that allowed temporary farmworkers to stay employed longer without undergoing a background check.
Page also pointed to the public records exemption that lawmakers carved out for themselves in 2023, which he said showed disdain for accountability.
More than anything else, voters’ perception of the candidates’ loyalty to President Trump has proven decisive in primaries like this, Bitzer said. Page is likely to highlight Berger’s decision not to endorse Trump (or any other Republican) in the 2024 presidential primary.
A recent poll, first reported by The Assembly and Axios Raleigh in June, showed that Berger could be vulnerable to that line of attack. That survey, conducted by Sebastian—the pollster said to have conducted the 2023 poll that showed Page 30 points ahead—found Page with an 18-point lead.
“Berger’s unwillingness to endorse President Trump when it mattered costs him with primary voters,” Sebastian wrote in a memo describing the poll.
Sebastian said he had not coordinated with Page’s campaign, and Page told The Assembly he had not previously seen the poll. It was unclear who commissioned it.
The Grants
On April 29, a Senate committee amended a technical corrections bill that the House had passed in March, adding a $3.2 million grant to the Stokesdale Fire Department for a new building and allocating $700,000 to Rockingham County for fire department grants. (The town of Stokesdale, in northwest Guilford County, lies in Berger’s Senate district.)
The same section of the bill, which Gov. Josh Stein signed into law in May, doled out $100,000 to the Alamance County Sheriff’s Office for “equipment.” Three weeks earlier, Alamance County Sheriff Terry Johnson had endorsed Berger.
If there was any doubt about who orchestrated those payouts, it was resolved at a Rockingham County commissioners meeting on June 2.
“There was $4 million that was not spent elsewhere in the state of North Carolina,” Kevin Berger told his fellow commissioners. “There’s only two people in the state that really have the ability to move that money where they want it to go. One is the speaker of the House, and the second is the president pro tem of the Senate. It’s not a position you are able to just walk into. It’s something that, lucky for us, my father’s been in that position for a number of years.”
The implication wasn’t subtle. The commissioners voted 5-0 to call the funds the “Phil Berger Volunteer Fire Grant.”
Berger told The Assembly that whatever tension exists between his role as Senate leader and representing District 26 is dwarfed by the benefits. That’s a key part of his re-election pitch, in fact.
“For the longest time, the Triad area has been the redheaded stepchild, if you can say that nowadays, of the state,” he said. “Having the leader of the state Senate represent that area has brought a focus to that part of the state. And I dare say that a freshman senator who can’t do his current job would be nowhere near as effective on any of those issues as I have been.”
With reporting by Lucille Sherman and Joe Killian.
This article was updated to include Patrick Sebastian’s denial that he was fired by Phil Berger Jr.
Editor’s Note: Richard Stevens was previously a member of The Assembly’s board of directors.
Jeffrey Billman reports on politics and the law for The Assembly. Email him at jeffrey@theassemblync.com.