Why Trump’s Favorite N.C. Sheriff Wants to Oust Phil Berger

Sheriff Sam Page has never seen the Rockingham County line as a limit to his influence or ambition. 

From his hometown of Eden in the largely rural county north of Greensboro, he has cultivated a national profile as a commentator on the intersection of immigration and law enforcement. 

Even before he was first elected sheriff back in 1998, Page was making statewide headlines, positioning himself among the toughest of tough-on-crime lawmen. And over the past 15 years, he helped popularize some of the hardline immigration positions that helped President Donald Trump win a second term in the White House. Page led the group Sheriffs for Trump in 2016 and was Trump’s N.C. campaign chair in 2020; Trump has called him a “fantastic guy.” 

Page tested the waters for higher office with a run for lieutenant governor last year and says he saw encouraging signs in the results despite finishing fifth in the 11-way Republican primary. In Rockingham and five other nearby counties, including Guilford, he was unquestionably the winner.

Now Page is preparing to square off against Phil Berger, arguably the state’s most powerful politician. Berger has served as the state Senate’s leader since Republicans gained a legislative majority in 2011, breaking the Democrats’ century-long hold. Berger is widely regarded as a main architect of North Carolina’s dramatic rightward shift in policy. And he, too, calls Eden home.

But despite the media blitz over the announcement of his intention to run, Page has given his signature issue curiously little air time. Other than noting that he has served on the National Sheriffs’ Association’s border committee, he seems to have hardly mentioned immigration at all, let alone identified it as a future top priority.

Many states with majority GOP legislatures have been debating anti-immigration bills in the wake of Trump’s reelection. Florida, for example, rushed to pass legislation making it a crime to enter the state without authorization to be in the U.S., stepping up other criminal penalties and creating a State Board of Immigration Enforcement. But few similar measures have been introduced so far in North Carolina’s General Assembly. 

In an interview with The Assembly, Page repeatedly sidestepped questions about whether North Carolina should pursue new state-level initiatives to deter or punish illegal immigration. He noted that he had worked for five years on the last major legislative effort—Senate Bill 10, which forced more cooperation between his fellow sheriffs and federal immigration agents. That bill passed over Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto last fall and took effect in December.

Page called the law, which has been controversial in part because sheriffs may be stuck with additional uncompensated costs, “one of the best legislative moves or pieces of legislation to come out in a long time.” “But, like I told you,” he added, “it took five years, about five years, to get it done.”

Page is well acquainted with the history of state-level immigration legislation through his extensive networking with other sheriffs, particularly in Arizona and Texas. He took the first of his many trips to the U.S.-Mexico border in 2010, when an Arizona bill that tested the limits of state authority in immigration matters was being hotly debated. Page said he met with local sheriffs as well as the bill’s chief sponsor and the governor. 

Since announcing his campaign against Berger earlier this month, Page has been talking less about policy goals and more about process. His critique centers on how the longtime Senate leader wields his power.

“Sometimes you stay too long in those positions,” he said. “You listen less to people.”

Page has argued that without term limits, Senate decision making has become too concentrated, leaving the people affected by a given policy without a meaningful voice. His chief example: Berger’s attempt to expand casinos through the 2023 budget, a bill that runs hundreds of pages and is subject only to an up-or-down vote. One of the proposed casino locations was in Rockingham County. 

Page spoke out against the idea repeatedly, predicting an increase in crime and arguing that the business was predatory. He and some allies pushed for the idea to be put to a local referendum. Voters never got a direct say, but Berger did eventually announce that the casino proposal would be stripped from the budget. 

Not long after that rare defeat for Berger, some of Page’s supporters commissioned a poll of 300 people that floated the idea of the sheriff running for Berger’s Senate seat. The results showed Page 30 points ahead, according to The News & Observer, which reviewed the results and published them on the condition they wouldn’t name the pollster. 

Around the same time, Page told The Assembly that he was getting calls from legislators saying they had been mistreated and sidelined by the Senate’s leadership. They asked him to jump into the Senate race rather than seeking the lieutenant governor’s position, he said. 

Though the filing period was a few days away, he told the callers his mind was already made up to stay the course in the lieutenant governor’s race, Page said. He wanted to keep his commitments, and he liked the idea of traveling the state and bringing the messages he gathered to the legislature. Berger invited him to a meeting, Page said, and he recalled telling the Senate leader the same.

Some locals, including Jeff Webster, the chair of the Rockingham County Democratic Party, were surprised that Page didn’t move forward with a challenge to Berger then. The casino issue was extremely divisive, prompting other intra-GOP feuding that included one Republican candidate for county commissioner being left off the party’s sample ballot, Webster said.

While Page ultimately didn’t throw his hat into that ring, he also didn’t stop considering the opportunity in an electoral faceoff with one of North Carolina’s historic powerhouses. 

The two have a history of friction, dating at least to Page’s decision not to back one of Berger’s sons in a 2005 campaign for district attorney. But Page wouldn’t comment on whether the rift had deepened during or since his lieutenant governor run. (Another candidate for that office was an Eden attorney whose firm had merged with Berger’s.)

Even without that history, it’s easy to see how the prospect of a win against Berger might appeal to someone who says he supports Trump’s agenda “100 percent.” Ousting a longtime leader opens the possibility of a less controlled landscape for state policymaking. 

Berger may appear less vulnerable to a challenge by the time the 2026 primary election rolls around, with the casino conflict years in the past. But in announcing his candidacy more than a year before voters cast a ballot, Page has given himself lots of time to make his case.

Webster expects the contest to get “pretty nasty, because both of them will have well-funded campaigns.” Page has yet to form a Senate campaign committee. In his run for lieutenant governor, he raised $87,000 and spent the balance down, according to his most recent campaign finance disclosure. Berger, meanwhile, raised $3.2 million in the last election cycle, (though much of it was passed on to other Republicans) and had more than $200,000 left over at the end of last year.

Carli Brosseau is a reporter at The Assembly. She joined us  from The News & Observer, where she was an investigative reporter. Her work has been honored by the Online News Association and Investigative Reporters and Editors, and published by ProPublica and The New York Times.