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In flipping from Democrat to Republican in April last year, state Rep. Tricia Cotham gave GOP leaders a prize they’d long coveted: a supermajority in the state House.
Now the party was nearly certain to override any veto Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper laid in their way. They moved quickly on issues like changing election laws, expanding the subsidy for private school tuition, and banning abortion in most cases after 12 weeks of gestation. They jettisoned 27 vetoes with Cotham, whose last name once signaled a place among Charlotte’s Democratic royalty, voting with her new party every time.
In the few public statements Cotham has made since those votes commenced, she has insisted she is the same person she always was—independent-minded and guided by prayer, conscience, and a devotion to public service.
Rather than using the intense media interest to promote a new policy agenda or further elevate her personal brand, she has seemed to hunker down. “After she switched parties, she basically went underground,” said Jason Windett, a political science professor at UNC-Charlotte.
Cotham announced she was running for state House again last November, rather than choosing to run for higher office, as many party switchers do. There was good reason to think she might: She’d previously flirted with the idea of running for state superintendent of public instruction, and once ran for Congress.
This time, though, Cotham is running in House District 105. She currently represents House District 112, a majority-minority part of Mecklenburg County that has historically voted decisively Democratic.
Legislative Republicans drew Cotham’s Mint Hill home into a new district with a slight GOP tilt—a challenge to design in increasingly Democratic Mecklenburg County. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump won the district by 2 points in 2020; Republican U.S. Senator Ted Budd won it by a single point in 2022.
But those past election results could disguise the race’s difficulty for Cotham. Party switchers tend to face an electoral penalty. Their one-time partymates are furious, and their new allies are distrustful, said Christian Grose, a professor of political science and public policy at the University of Southern California who is originally from Concord.
“We find that when people switch, they do worse in their next general elections, all else equal,” said Grose, who jointly produced an analysis of more than 50 years of Congressional party switching. They found the penalty amounted to about 7 points.
The math has left some wondering why Cotham made the change. She could have continued to vote with Republicans when she wanted while commanding a price for each vote, avoiding electoral consequences, and continuing to benefit from her family name, incumbency, and home county demographics.
“People don’t switch parties, especially when it’s so consequential, without getting something in return,” said Windett, who lives in Cotham’s district. “She may have underestimated what she could have gotten.”
A High Price
Cotham, 45, has already paid a high personal price for her decision. Former allies branded her #TraitorTricia on X, longtime supporters rescinded endorsements and demanded refunds on donations, and her phone, email, and social media accounts were reportedly flooded by threatening messages.
A previously undisclosed police report provides a glimpse into formerly close relationships now torched.
On August 15, 2023, Cotham called Mint Hill police to report a breaking-and-entering incident. Gone, she reported, were a safe, $3,500 in cash, a Belk gift card, a passport, birth certificates, immunization records, a school class ring, and a wedding ring.
The police report names Cotham’s longtime campaign adviser Jonathan Coby as a suspect and several others involved in Democratic politics as “involved.”
“People don’t switch parties, especially when it’s so consequential, without getting something in return. She may have underestimated what she could have gotten.”
Jason Windett, UNC-Charlotte political science professor
In a breaking-and-entering case, police develop information about possible suspects largely from the complainant’s answers to questions about who had been in their home recently or knew about their schedule, said Lt. Karen McGrath, who handled the case. She said that she could not provide many details because the investigation technically remains open, but all leads were exhausted by the end of 2023. No one has been arrested.
Coby provided The Assembly with documents showing he was out of state performing military duties when the alleged theft occurred. He declined to comment.
Cotham had reason to be angry with Coby. In the days after her defection, he offered some of the harshest commentary on her personality and motivations, telling multiple news outlets that he thought Cotham’s decision to switch parties was driven by pique.
He told The New York Times that she developed an “us-versus-them” mentality with fellow Democrats upon arriving back in the General Assembly in 2023. She had previously served four House terms, then left to make a run for Congress. She was put off, Coby said, by being invited to a freshman orientation and offered a mentor, then angered by criticism for missing a key vote on gun control.
Coby told The News & Observer that he had learned that “ego and admiration are Cotham’s driving forces.”
“I wish I could say that she took a giant bag of cash at an IHOP, and that’s why she did this—but it’s so much dumber than that,” he told Jezebel, referencing a corruption scandal that paved the way for Cotham’s entry into the General Assembly as a 28-year-old, making her the legislature’s youngest member.
In 2007, Gov. Mike Easley appointed her to fill the seat vacated by House Speaker Jim Black, who had, among other things, bribed another legislator to switch parties. The price was $50,000 in cash and campaign donations, delivered in an IHOP restroom, plus a job for that legislator’s son.
Coby said he concluded Cotham’s motivation to defect was “just a deeply petty, personal thing.”
Before he resigned as campaign treasurer, Coby gave refunds to donors who wanted their money back to the tune of more than $8,000, The Charlotte Observer reported. That wasn’t required by state law, according to the Charlotte Ledger’s reporting. Two of the people named in the police report as “involved” received refunds.
Cotham had become increasingly isolated in the years leading up to her party switch. She suffered three severe bouts of COVID, with lingering symptoms; her work as a charter school administrator ended in public fiasco; and she divorced her husband, Jerry Meek, a former state Democratic Party chairman, with whom she had two children.
In a March 2022 interview with Charlotte TV station WCNC, Cotham explained her decision to run for the state House again as partly motivated by isolation. “When you’re sick with COVID, you’re pretty isolated, you’re alone, you really don’t have that much to do, and I just started reflecting on well, where do I go from here?” she said.
She decided to double down on public service, and some people mentioned that her home was in a new district favorable to Democrats. “I really just thought about it, prayed about it, told my mom about it, and didn’t tell anybody else,” she said.
Jane Whitley, then the county Democratic Party chair, said she was surprised when Cotham filed for the seat at the last minute. Whitley hadn’t recruited Cotham because of her very public struggle with long COVID. Less than two months before, Cotham had posted a photo to X in which she appeared to be in a hospital bed. In a separate post, she expressed gratitude for in-home nursing care and IVs. Around the same time, her mother, a longtime member of the Mecklenburg Board of County Commissioners, wrote on Facebook and X that she was worried and asked for prayers.
Cotham later blamed a medical appointment for why she missed the gun control vote that prompted so much criticism.
Her symptoms may also have impacted the shape of her current campaign. John Steward, chairman of the N.C. GOP’s 9th District, said in July, when Cotham’s campaign seemed dormant, that she had been having health issues. When she signed an oversized check for the Mint Hill Athletic Association the following month, she appeared gaunt. In September, her campaign schedule appeared to pick up, with several fundraisers, and in October, she posted on X that she was visiting polling places and knocking on doors.
Cotham has not responded to The Assembly’s multiple interview requests over the past year. Stephen Wiley, the House Republican Caucus director, is now effectively her public voice. He handles inquiries from reporters, writes the text on her campaign website, and designs the ads that now constitute her primary mode of communication with potential voters. He did not respond to questions about the police report or Cotham’s health.
Wiley dismissed the idea that Cotham had been offered some kind of perk to switch parties.
Instead, he says her defection shows the other party’s leaders are catastrophically bad at their jobs.
“I really just thought about it, prayed about it, told my mom about it, and didn’t tell anybody else.”
State Rep. Tricia Cotham
House Democratic Leader Robert Reives “could have done a better job to make sure that his caucus members were all OK, everyone was fine, and he clearly didn’t,” Wiley said. He called Reives “arguably the most incompetent House Democratic leader in legislative history.”
In a written statement, Amanda Eubanks, director of the House Democratic Party Caucus, dismissed Wiley’s comments as “unfortunate, but not surprising.” Reives is “recognized across party lines as an effective and principled leader,” she wrote. Cotham’s actions “reflect a complete abandonment of the principles she once claimed to stand for, proving she was never fully committed to serving the needs of her constituents.”
So far, Cotham’s campaign messaging has been pretty standard Republican fare. Facebook ads portray her as “cracking down on crime.” She “helped fight back against inflation by cutting taxes,” a new batch of fliers say, citing the most recent state budget, which she voted for alongside other Republicans and five Democrats who are commonly swing votes.
The caucus also paid for some direct mail attacking her opponent, Nicole Sidman, as “backed by radicals that want to legalize prostitution and hard drugs like heroin and meth,” citing the N.C. Democratic Party platform. (The platform promotes decriminalization rather than legalization.) An almost identical flier was sent in a neighboring district. Cotham’s campaign produced video versions.
In Wiley’s view, Cotham’s chances for reelection have more to do with the national political environment than anything else. He said the $1 million the House Republican Caucus has invested in her race is about the same as it has in other competitive contests in expensive media markets. And he dismissed the idea that anyone other than the most ardent Democrats will penalize Cotham for switching parties.
“The indications are that swing voters don’t care,” Wiley said, referring to internal polls and modeling. He thinks that group is big enough to secure Cotham a victory.
A Relative Unknown
Democrats are not treating this as a run-of-the mill race.
They’ve canvassed the district relentlessly. Democrats’ state party chairman, Anderson Clayton, has participated at least twice. Even James Taylor showed up to a recent canvass.
Sidman, a first-time candidate, has been knocking on doors at least two nights a week. The 52-year-old director of congregational life at Temple Beth El, a large Reform synagogue, got her start in local politics in 2018, when she ran Christy Clark’s successful campaign for a highly contested state House seat in North Mecklenburg. She had previously been a real estate attorney and teacher.
One Thursday evening in early August, Sidman double-checked the laces on her sneakers then closed the door to her SUV. She was parked among the million-dollar houses that line the curvy, wooded streets of south Charlotte’s Providence Plantation.
Ed Rosenblatt, who was chatting with a neighbor on the sidewalk, noticed Sidman’s name emblazoned on her T-shirt. “You get to run against the infamous Tricia Cotham!” he exclaimed.
While Rosenblatt explained to Sidman that they had a mutual friend who had been talking her up, Sidman’s campaign manager, Anna Fiore, signed up the neighbor to become the newest of the campaign’s 400-plus volunteers.
Then Sidman and Fiore began working through their list of “middle of the road, maybe not as well informed” voters whom they hoped to motivate. One challenge, they said, was building up name recognition, which Cotham—the daughter of Pat Cotham, the county commissioner, and John Cotham, a former county Democratic Party chairman—has in spades.
Sidman figured voters are more likely to cast a ballot if they have someone in mind to vote for, not just someone to vote against. And despite her attempts to ask people what issues matter most to them, Cotham’s defection just about always came up, along with questions about what district they are actually in now.
Sidman usually brought along a map showing the lines snaking from Mint Hill through Matthews and into south Charlotte, where the district makes a jagged northward hook. “I always say it looks like Cape Cod,” Sidman, a transplant from New York, told Joel Rutledge, an unaffiliated voter. “What they did was, they basically picked up anyone they could find to make it a more favorable district for her.”
Rutledge stood on a porch decorated with American flag throw pillows. He told Sidman he disapproved of gerrymandering and asked how to find out more about the history of legislative district lines.
Sidman said to Google “surgical precision”—a phrase a panel of judges used in their 2019 decision striking down North Carolina’s legislative maps as unconstitutional.
The most recent district lines have not been subject to the same kind of court-ordered revision as in past years because Republicans now hold a majority on the state Supreme Court, which overturned a previous ruling prohibiting partisan gerrymandering.
Still, many Democrats believe the momentum is on their side in the Sidman-Cotham race. Both enthusiasm and volunteers have risen dramatically since Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden on the presidential ticket, and high-profile Democrats like Gov. Roy Cooper have been helping Sidman raise money. The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee helped to bring in funds from outside the state. And the last publicly available fundraising report showed Sidman outraising Cotham 4 to 1.
“That is not a race I am really worried about,” said Blair Reeves, executive director of Carolina Forward, a progressive group that has endorsed Sidman among other Democrats in competitive races.
Part of Democrats’ confidence in Sidman’s position stems from their belief that the abortion restrictions that followed the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision will motivate voters. As the newest member of the Republican supermajority, Cotham had a pivotal role in North Carolina’s new abortion law.
Before she switched parties, she campaigned as a pro-choice candidate. In May 2022, she tweeted, “Now, more than ever we need leaders who will be unwavering and unapologetic in their support of abortion rights.” Her campaign paid for a Facebook ad including video of testimony she gave in 2015 on the House floor about her own “induced physician-assisted miscarriage” and she sought Planned Parenthood’s endorsement. In defending her subsequent vote in favor of new abortion restrictions, Cotham told reporters, “It was never an issue I was out there for at all.”
Sidman’s campaign has seized on the reversal. “For a decade, Tricia Cotham promised to protect abortion access,” a voice intones in a Facebook ad that began running October 13. “But then she betrayed us and became the deciding vote to ban abortion. She broke our trust, and that’s why we should never trust her again.” Her campaign has run other ads linking Cotham to the scandal-plagued Republican gubernatorial candidate, Mark Robinson, who it claims would put “IVF and even birth control at risk.”
Planned Parenthood is running similar messages. One ad claims that Cotham “played us, betrayed us, and cast the deciding vote to pass an extreme abortion ban, sacrificing our right to control our own bodies for her own political gain.” A N.C. League of Conservation Voters ad largely hits the same points.
Wiley doubts abortion will be as potent an issue with voters as Democrats hoped. In the 2022 election cycle, “it was pretty much the only issue they ran on, so it’s already been litigated,” he said.
Both campaigns have run ads on TV, though it’s difficult to know at this point precisely how much has been spent or who saw the ads. House Democrats say they have invested about $1 million, roughly the same as Republicans, across a variety of platforms.
Fiore, Sidman’s campaign manager, says their polling suggests that Cotham’s relatively high name recognition could hurt her. There’s already been one electoral referendum since the switch: Pat Cotham decisively lost in the Democratic primary for the county’s three at-large county commission seats in March.
She had been on the commission since 2012 and had easily won reelection in the past. In 2022, she got the most votes in the county and beat her nearest challenger by 10,000 votes. But this year she came in fourth, running more than 13,000 votes behind the third-place finisher and failing to advance to the general election.
“People were sending out fliers that said, ‘Can’t trust a Cotham, doesn’t matter which one,’” said Windett, the UNC-Charlotte professor.
Sidman’s campaign sees the negative name recognition as an opportunity.
“Of the people who know about her, three to four times as many people strongly dislike her as like her,” Fiore said of the younger Cotham, citing the internal polls. “If you have a disapproval rating of like 60 percent, you can’t really recover from that.”
What’s In It for Party Switchers?
Standing before a banquet hall full of GOP activists last summer, Cotham said she felt giddy to be in their company.
In a red-trimmed dress with an elephant pendant necklace, she delivered a speech brimming with attacks on Democrats, some tailored for laughs.
“I was called an ammo-sexual because of my love of the Second Amendment,” she said, pausing while the crowd chuckled. “You can’t have a Dem who wears camo, goes hunting, and their Earth was rattled when they learned I am a competitive barrel racer.”
The explanation Cotham offered of her party switch was partly about values—she bucked the idea that offering a prayer on the House floor violated the separation of church and state—and partly about symbols. She said she was criticized for having an American flag on her car and wearing one in her office.
Cotham contrasted Republicans’ warm reception with Democrats’ reaction. “They went to my home, spray painted words on my driveway in my cul-de-sac, busted out my windows, keyed my car, sent bombs to my house, personally messaged my children, tried to cancel me at my children’s school, and have harassed me tremendously,” she said.
While Democratic women sent coat hangers to her office with “vile disgusting messages,” Cotham said, Republican women sent her flowers.
(The Assembly was not able to substantiate these claims. Mint Hill police said they had no reports of bombs or vandalism at Cotham’s home, and were providing no extra security. Requests sent to Charlotte-Mecklenburg, Matthews, and Raleigh police returned no related reports, and the chief of the General Assembly Police Department did not respond.)
“Of the people who know about her, three to four times as many people strongly dislike her as like her. If you have a disapproval rating of like 60 percent, you can’t really recover from that.”
Anna Fiore, Sidman’s campaign manager
Cotham told the N.C. GOP convention audience she felt God had steered her toward the party switch. He spoke to her, she said, through her 12-year-old son, who asked one night, while practicing basketball, why she didn’t switch parties.
“He said, ‘Mom, all my friends are Republican at my school, and they’re really nice and they really like you,’” she recalled. “And he said, ‘The Democrats are so mean to you.’”
Cotham said she told her son she would make the change and asked if he would support her. He laid out his terms: an elephant bowtie.
Cotham’s own demands of her negotiating partners remain enigmatic.
It’s typical for a party switcher to receive a reward from their new party, said Grose, the USC professor. That benefit would have to outweigh the high cost of defecting, but could come in many forms, depending on what that particular politician valued.
Like Windett, Grose doubts the highly competitive House district Cotham was drawn into in the recent redistricting process would be enough.
Some party switchers covet status within their institution, he said.
That category might apply to Cotham. Before joining the GOP, she held the title of co-chair of the Education Committee, a rare distinction for a member of the minority party. She has complained that the chairmanship sparked a sense of wariness among her fellow Democrats, who she thought were insufficiently concerned with influencing actual policy. And after her switch, she also became chair of Education Appropriations.
Another possible motivation, Grose said, is a clear path to advancing a particular policy, even if it means hurting their reelection effort.
Cotham may view the expansion of private school vouchers to families of all incomes in that way. At the N.C. GOP convention, she proudly referred to the legislation dramatically expanding North Carolina’s Opportunity Scholarship program as “my bill.”
She has described school choice policy as deeply personal to her, part of a long evolution. A former public school teacher and assistant principal, she entered the legislature hostile to the school choice movement’s ideas, but over conversations with Marcus Brandon, a former Democratic legislator, her views started to shift, both Cotham and Brandon said separately.
When it came time to send her own child to school, Cotham toured the local private schools and was “blown away.” Rather than enrolling her eldest son in the “excellent” public schools in her area, Cotham opted for one of Charlotte’s most exclusive private schools, Charlotte Latin. (One of Sidman’s children goes there, too.)
In 2011, as the Obama administration was putting pressure on Democrats to support the expansion of charter schools, Cotham voted with fellow Democrats to lift the state’s cap. Five years later, she was one of five Democrats to join Republicans in approving a much more controversial bill—which Brandon was promoting as a lobbyist—that allowed for-profit charter school companies to take over low-performing public schools.
When she left the legislature, her involvement in the movement deepened. She worked as a lobbyist for McGuireWoods, where one of her clients was Project L.I.F.T., an unusual public-private partnership to improve Charlotte schools, then at BHCL, a lobbying and consulting firm in Forest City, where she represented an organization that helped finance charter schools, among other clients.
BHCL shared an address with a constellation of organizations founded and largely funded by John Bryan, an ultra-wealthy libertarian promoter of school choice who saw vouchers as the movement’s natural end goal. He publicly took credit for the passage of the school-takeover bill Cotham supported.
One of the entities Bryan helped found, Achievement for All Children, subsequently won the state contract to run the first school drafted into the program, despite questions about its qualifications and political conflicts of interest. In 2019, Cotham was named that organization’s president.
Two years later, the State Board of Education announced that it had reached a settlement with Achievement for All Children to terminate their contract early. A confidential letter obtained by NC Newsline said the organization failed to meet deadlines on a budget, audit, and other required reports. Bryan had died in 2020, and the organizations he founded went through a major upheaval.
Cotham’s connections in the movement endured, even as her work dissolved. She had a running interaction on Twitter with one of the movement’s highest profile boosters and political attack dogs, Corey DeAngelis. He repeatedly trumpeted her involvement in North Carolina’s expansion of school vouchers to his more than 160,000 followers on X.
There is some evidence cutting against the idea that heavy policy work in this area is a central driver for Cotham. Republican leadership had hashed out most of the recent voucher policy before she joined the party, Rep. Donnie Loftis and former Sen. Deanna Ballard said. Party leaders invited Cotham to be the public face of the expansion legislation once she made the switch, Loftis said.
Another theory: Cotham could be angling for opportunities outside of the legislature—a job that only pays about $14,000 a year in North Carolina.
“We assume, most times, that legislators want to stay in the legislature, but sometimes they’re fine with other careers that pay better,” Grose said.
Though Cotham has campaigned as a small business owner, she has reported no income over $5,000 from any source other than the General Assembly in her last two financial disclosures to the North Carolina State Ethics Commission.
There are no currently operating businesses registered with the Secretary of State in her name. A daycare business Cotham owned was administratively dissolved in 2017, and a firm she co-owned with her ex-husband that helped British businesses enter U.S. markets dissolved the same year, filings show.
Cotham’s campaign website shows a photo of her next to a truck bed, with forklifts in the background, alongside the text about being a small business owner. Her father, John, is CEO of Carolina Industrial Trucks, which sells and services forklifts. He did not respond to The Assembly’s call to his office by press time. Wiley said he would check on why he had written on Cotham’s campaign materials that she was a business owner, but didn’t follow up.
Sidman recently zinged Cotham on X about other questions she had left unanswered.
In its candidate questionnaire, the Charlotte Observer asked, “What would you say is the biggest issue facing your constituents and what would you do to address it if elected?”
Cotham did not reply, the newspaper noted when it published her response to its other questions. Also unanswered: “Is there any policy by your party that you disagree with?”
After an outcry, Cotham submitted responses.
She identified crime and inflation as major issues, and listed past legislation she supported, but specified no future actions. One bill she mentioned, to require more cooperation between sheriffs and immigration officials, has been teed up for an override vote.
In answering the question about discord, Cotham offered an image of herself as someone who embraces—and transcends—strife. “There is common ground to be found,” she wrote.
Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated Marcus Brandon’s name. It has been corrected.
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.