Mike Causey Under Fire

Mike Causey has no shortage of enemies in his own party. 

The two-term insurance commissioner brought down a major North Carolina Republican donor for bribery in an FBI sting in 2019 that also entangled the head of the state GOP, a former congressman who’d once been the party’s nominee for governor. The scandal thrust Causey and the state Department of Insurance into national headlines. 

In the last year, Causey again has repeatedly made news ahead of an election, including challenging the largest health care insurer in the state. But this time he has the lower hand. 

Ten Republican state senators sponsored a bill in March 2023 to strip the insurance commissioner of his role as state fire marshal, a public humiliation for the first Republican ever elected to the job. 

After lawmakers yanked the fire marshal responsibilities from him, Causey fired three top fire officials before they could head the newly independent agency; he said they had undermined his authority. But the General Assembly won the power struggle by requiring him to reinstate the employees.

His hiring practices also made statewide news when the Raleigh News & Observer reported Causey paid a friend as much as $84,000 a year in state money to drive him from his home in Greensboro to Raleigh and across the country to meetings and conferences. He employed a political ally in a “make work” job. He created regional districts and hired directors who had no bona fides in insurance but were owed political favors. 

His role in the FBI sting gave him a reputation as a crusader against good old boy politics—a fading reputation given the revelations of the past year. 

“I don’t think he’s qualified to do any part of his job,” said state Sen. Danny Britt, a Republican from Robeson County who has tangled with Causey. “I’m not saying that to throw stones. He’s a nice enough fella. But just because he’s a nice fella doesn’t mean that he’s going to do a good job.”

Now Causey faces a challenge in the March 5 primary from Robert Brawley, a former legislator and a onetime speech writer for Causey, and Andrew Marcus, an attorney and insurance regulator who has the support of some GOP legislators. 

The winner of the Republican primary will face the Democratic nominee, either state Sen. Natasha Marcus (no relation to Andrew Marcus) or small business owner David Wheeler.

Brawley and Andrew Marcus want more transparency within the Department of Insurance and say the commissioner needs to work effectively with the legislature. “I think our current commissioner is too concerned with petty, divisive, unproductive politics,” Marcus said.

Causey sees the legislature undermining his authority as part of the “silly season” of politics that comes with election years.

“I don’t mind taking a stand even if it rubs some in the legislature the wrong way,” Causey said. “I’m not trying to create an enemy with anybody. But my job is to protect consumers and to stand up for the policyholders regardless of who those people are.”

Caught in the Crosshairs

Causey, 73, didn’t plan on going into insurance or politics. The trombone-playing Guilford County native got an associate degree from Wake Tech Community College in civil engineering. His life changed course when his name was called during the last round of the Vietnam draft. 

“I took my final exam one day and the next day had to report to active duty,” Causey said. After serving in the Army as a military police officer, he found himself in Charlotte reading blueprints as a field engineer in the mid-1970s, before being recruited as an insurance salesman for Metropolitan Life, then the biggest nationwide carrier. 

Causey said he did well in sales in his first year and was promoted into management. At MetLife, he was encouraged to get involved in the community and in politics. He joined the Kiwanis Club and volunteered on Ed Peacock Jr.’s failed 1983 campaign for mayor of Charlotte, splitting from his staunchly Democratic family. “My grandfather hated Republicans,” he said.

“When I first went to Raleigh, almost everybody was Democrats—there were very few Republicans,” Causey said, referring to the late 1960s, when he went for his associate degree. “And I thought something’s not right when you got a one-sided system; you need a two-party system for checks and balances.”

Democrats dominated the Council of State, the group of 10 officials elected statewide, for a century, but Republicans began making inroads when Cherie Berry was elected labor commissioner in 2000 and Steve Troxler won the agriculture commissioner race in 2004. Causey ran unsuccessfully for insurance commissioner four times before winning in 2016. He won reelection four years later. 

Within a few months of Causey taking office, insurance mogul and billionaire Greg Lindberg offered to contribute $10,000 to his next campaign, which Causey said he wouldn’t accept for an election four years away. 

But Causey and Lindberg continued their dialogue, with Lindberg complaining that one of Causey’s regulators was treating him unfairly. Causey mentioned concerns about Lindberg to an FBI agent.  

Eventually, Causey wore a wire and body cam and recorded Lindberg agreeing to send money to the state GOP, where chairman Robin Hayes would divert money to Causey’s campaign without disclosing the earmark, a violation of state law. The case is now set for retrial in May after an appeals court threw out Lindberg’s conviction in 2022. Hayes was among 74 people pardoned by then-President Donald Trump shortly before he left office.

Causey sees himself as a clean operator and said fighting fraud “is a big part of what we do.” He has more than tripled the number of agents investigating fraud, which he said has helped bring in more than $900 million to the state’s general fund. 

The department also identified fire departments that had not recently been assessed a score to measure responsiveness. These scores, which include factors like water supply, training, deployment, and communications, can lower homeowners’ insurance costs, said Joe Stewart, the vice president of governmental affairs of the Independent Insurance Agents of North Carolina.

Since Causey took office in January 2017, responsiveness ratings have improved at 80 percent of the state’s more than 1,300 fire departments.

Causey’s agency heavily publicized his focus on firefighters. He’s visited volunteer departments and delivered oversize checks funded by the state legislature, an act that irritated state Sen. Vickie Sawyer, an insurance agent from Iredell County.

“I’m not a big-check girl. As a Republican, it just makes me feel like I’m admitting that we didn’t lower your taxes enough,” Sawyer said. It politicizes volunteer fire departments, she said.

Sawyer was one of the senators who sponsored the bill to separate the role of the state fire marshal from the insurance commissioner. She said it came about in part because Causey wasn’t standing up to insurance companies on behalf of firefighters who were trying to get occupationally caused cancer covered by their workers’ compensation. 

“That should have been, and could have been, really easily fixed by the insurance commissioner,” Sawyer said. “There’s a conflict of interest there, because he has two masters”—the insurance companies and the firefighters.

Britt said the state needs an official “fully devoted to fire” to seek out grants and help with recruitment and retention, especially in the state’s rural volunteer departments.  

The state senator said that Causey “showed his true colors” when he asked Gov. Roy Cooper to veto a bill to reinstate the three employees he’d dismissed. “It was not about the people of North Carolina, it was about his power,” Britt said.

He said Causey has been “asleep at the wheel” and has not been effective in setting rates and holding carriers accountable, nor in working with the legislature.

Nationally, homeowners’ premiums have risen quickly in recent years as carriers have complained about labor and materials’ rising costs. In October, Nationwide declined to renew 10,500 insurance policies and pulled out of a swath of Eastern North Carolina. 

Causey believes Republican lawmakers are working to put him in his place, a rare move to siphon power from an elected member of their own party. “The primary purpose of that bill [to strip his fire marshal responsibilities] was to teach me a lesson,” Causey said. 

When Congress passed the McCarran-Ferguson Act in the 1940s, states were given the authority to regulate insurance, with a few exceptions. But North Carolina is among only 11 states that elect an insurance commissioner. 

While the Council of State is elected by the people, its power is ultimately distributed by the legislature, said June Atkinson, the former superintendent of the Department of Public Instruction.

Atkinson, a Democrat, noted that the legislature has both given and taken power away from Democrats and Republicans. Such was the case in 2013 when it increased the investment authority of the state treasurer under Democrat Janet Cowell, and in 2017 when Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein had his budget cut by $10 million. 

“The authority of the General Assembly has been used—and I’m sure it will continue to be used—for punishing or rewarding a Council of State member, just by changing the law and the authority,” Atkinson said. “It depends on the year and what the person has done or not done.”

Causey said the day the bill for an independent state fire marshal’s office was filed he called Sen. Jim Perry, who was one of the bill’s primary sponsors, along with Britt and Sen. Dave Craven. Causey said he asked why the bill was filed without public discussion or input from the department or firefighters. “I was told I need to focus on insurance and regulation of insurance. And don’t worry so much about these fire departments,” Causey said. 

Perry said the state fire marshal shouldn’t be entangled in politics. He added that the state’s population has roughly tripled since the insurance commissioner and fire marshal positions were combined, and that each should be full-time positions.

Causey also fought with legislators about a bipartisan bill to restructure the nonprofit health insurance behemoth Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina, which Causey said was “about corporate greed.” 

Britt said that the Blue Cross bill and the measure to strip Causey’s fire marshal responsibilities had nothing to do with each other. Causey sees the two actions as joined at the hip.

“There was a huge connection; the three primary sponsors were Perry, Craven, and Britt,” Causey said about the bill for an independent state fire marshal. “Those three for whatever reason wanted that Blue Cross bill to pass, and they didn’t like the fact that I was speaking out against it.”

Two GOP Challengers

In January 2023, Andrew Marcus stepped into the White Cross volunteer fire department in Orange County to begin training as a volunteer. A Florida native whose family ties to North Carolina go back 11 generations, Marcus moved to Chapel Hill with his wife and kids in 2021. The 38-year-old said he had long wanted to be a volunteer firefighter but had always lived in communities where it was a professional occupation.

Marcus was a lawyer and deputy director for Florida’s Office of Insurance Regulation from 2013 to 2016. He’s owned a law practice, served as a prosecutor, and worked for the multinational firm Holland & Knight on insurance regulatory matters. 

He’s never run for elected office and had not been thinking of running for the state’s insurance commissioner, although he found Causey to be an ineffective and reactive regulator.

It wasn’t until October when Causey wanted the governor to veto the bill to create an independent office of the state fire marshal that Marcus, who is still completing firefighter training, considered running.

“He started using those career fire service members in his game and political pettiness against the legislature in their back-and-forth,” Marcus said. “He used them as pawns.”

In Marcus’ view, an insurance commissioner should have an open door policy to consumers, companies, and agents. He said that he’s spoken with legislators, agents, firefighters, and insurance companies, and the only group that didn’t want to see a change at the department were the insurance companies. “That to me says that if you are unanimously favored by the insurance industry and nobody else, then you may not be as effective a regulator as you should be.”

In December, Perry tweeted an image of Andrew Marcus and his campaign logo, calling him a “unicorn.” The newcomer also has the support of Sen. Britt and Sen. Sawyer.

Nationally, Republican insurance commissioners typically have favored the industry and Democratic commissioners have leaned toward consumer groups backed by trial lawyers, said Brenda Wells, chair of the department of finance and insurance at Eastern Carolina University. But in states with elected commissioners, the individual in charge has to appeal to consumers.

“Some people feel like that position should not be elected,” Wells said. “You’re going to get someone who raised money to run a campaign and who made promises.”

The three Republican candidates have starkly different campaign finance reports. Current reports filed with the state board of elections only include data up until December 31, 2023, two weeks after the filing deadline.

Marcus’ filing includes a few small donations from Florida and North Carolina and a $25,000 personal loan. His first quarter filing will include a $6,400 contribution from Perry.

Causey’s 2023 contributions total over $115,000, with nearly 6 percent coming from recent employees. A large number come from insurance agents and company owners, employees of mobile and manufactured home companies, attorneys, CPAs, a bail bondsman, a health care resource CEO, and a pharmacist. He received $6,000 from Allstate, the state’s largest insurance company, $6,400 from the NC Farm Bureau PAC, and close to $13,000 from Republican donors Maria and Bob Luddy.

Brawley, whose campaign has not submitted the year-end report, said he has done little fundraising and is largely self-financed with a few small contributions and one $6,000 donation.

Brawley, 79, who served 20 years in the state House from 1981 to 1999 and 2013 to 2015, previously ran for insurance commissioner and governor. He’s a former insurance agent and thinks Causey is “talking out of both sides of his mouth.”

He said Causey championed a legislative loophole called “Consent to Rate” that allows companies to charge for homeowners’ insurance up to 250 percent above the state’s maximum rate. 

North Carolina’s insurance rates are set by the insurance commissioner and are informed by the state’s rate bureau, a nonprofit that represents insurance companies and was created by the General Assembly in 1977.  

This year the rate bureau asked for a 42 percent increase in homeowners’ premiums in part to bring the state’s rates in line with what many North Carolinians already pay. Two in five homeowners in the state already pay insurance above the usual maximum rate. While CTR policies exist in many states, “usage in other states is virtually nil,” a 2020 report found.

Causey rejected the proposed 42 percent increase, and a hearing has been scheduled for October, though the parties can reach a settlement before then. 

Brawley said that he’s reported instances of potential large-scale fraud to the Department of Insurance that have gone untouched. The department’s website contains press releases for individuals arrested for fraud; a review by The Assembly found that the typical individual arrested in 2023 was alleged to have committed a fraud of less than $10,000. 

“The dichotomy is there—there’s a big difference in what they go after and what’s taking place,” Brawley said.

At the Durham Regional Association of Realtors’ legislative meeting in February, Brawley told the crowd he’s known Causey since the 1990s but hasn’t heard from him in years. 

When Causey first ran for insurance commissioner in 1992, “he came to me and asked me to write his campaign speech because he didn’t know anything about insurance,” Brawley said. “I’m running because I agree with him.”

Ren Larson is a staff reporter at The Assembly. She previously worked for The Texas Tribune and ProPublica’s investigative team, and as a data reporter with The Arizona Republic. She holds a master’s of public policy and an M.A. in international and area studies from the University of California, Berkeley.