North Carolina State Rep. Tricia Cotham made national news earlier this year when she announced that she was switching parties from Democrat to Republican, giving Republicans a veto-proof supermajority in the State House. The fanfare was disgusting, the speech was disgusting, it was all disgusting. But I will get to that later.
I know Tricia Cotham. I know her personally and have for almost 20 years. I first met her when she was my middle school basketball coach. What a world! As time progressed, we both flourished in the political sphere. I worked on campaigns mostly, and she ran for office. She was first elected to the NC State House in 2008 and served until she decided not to run again in 2016. Instead, she sought the open Democratic Congressional Seat in the 12th district. She put up a good fight, coming in third, with current Congresswoman Alma Adams winning. That was the first campaign of hers that I worked on.
Tricia Cotham made quite a name for herself in Raleigh, where she fought for a number of progressive issues. She believed in raising taxes on wealthier residents, and as a public school teacher and administrator, she made key arguments against charter schools. She also fought against HB2, NC’s infamous “bathroom bill” that targeted the LGBTQ+ community. But perhaps nothing garnered her more love and admiration than her speech on the House floor in 2015, where Cotham discussed her own personal experiences with health care and privacy. She railed against waiting periods for abortion, telling Republicans, “You do not hold shares in my body.” This gained viewership on YouTube and praise from myself and other local activists and leaders at the time.
Fast forward to 2022. Tricia Cotham announced she was running for the State House again. As someone who has stood by her and helped her for years, I wanted to get involved! I had worked on a variety of campaigns, so I was excited to join her. Knowing my experience, she was eager to bring me on, mostly by doing poll work. This consisted of talking to hundreds of voters at key polling places about why she was the best person for that office.
I wore her campaign t-shirt, I held yard signs, I gave out literature, and I engaged in real conversations with voters about Tricia Cotham. I discussed her passion for the public school system, and how I knew from personal experience that she would always fight for better public schools in NC. I vividly remember many voters coming out of the polling location and flagging me down to tell me that they had voted for her. I really felt like I was making a difference. On May 17, 2022, Tricia Cotham won the Democratic Primary with 47.8% of the vote. I was so happy for her. With District 112 being mostly Democratic, we knew that she was most likely going to win the general election. On November 8, 2022, she beat her Republican challenger with 59.2% to his 40.8%. She was headed back to Raleigh.
On April 4, 2023, I received a direct message from a political friend and fellow activist in Charlotte. He sent me an article breaking the news that Tricia Cotham was expected to change parties. I was dumbfounded. My first reply was, “I am going to cuss her out.” But that was the relationship we had. I texted and messaged her about all kinds of things, some political, some not. But I couldn’t believe it. And soon after that message, the news officially broke. I felt angry, confused, and mostly hurt. How could she do this to us?
I remember watching her press conference live. She invited some of the most vile Republicans, like state Speaker of the House Tim Moore and Congressman Dan Bishop, to stand with her on stage. She railed against wokeism and said she didn’t recognize the Democratic party anymore. This was a woman who, just months prior, had sent me messages about how crucial certain polling sites were because they had a ton of Democratic voters and we needed all of them. This was a woman who told me personally that she would always stand for LGBT people. She wanted endorsements from the likes of Planned Parenthood and Lillian’s List. She told me this privately. She asked me to tweet her speech on abortion to show others that she is a fighter for women’s rights. And I had done what she asked because I believed in her.
But everything had changed. She cast a deciding vote for the Republicans’ bill to override Democratic Governor Roy Cooper, which banned abortions at 12 weeks in the state. I could not reconcile her betrayal with the same woman who made that impassioned speech about women’s rights in 2015. North Carolina has had a Republican majority in the state legislature for some time, but Cotham’s defection from the Democrats changed everything.
Tricia Cotham singlehandedly CHOSE to give Republicans a supermajority. She has shown no remorse and almost no empathy at all. She has ghosted most of her former friends, allies, and campaign supporters. She has done no town halls for her district, remote or in-person. I have texted and called her personally, with no response. I even emailed her official legislative email, hoping to at least get some generic response, but nothing.
It is still unclear to me why she switched. I know that some Republicans in NC (like Dan Bishop) had been urging her to do it. She had once called him “nasty” to me in Twitter messages. So what changed? Tricia could be playing the long game. She might think that there is a brighter future for her in politics as a Republican. Maybe she was promised some future position of influence or a lucrative payday. Or she could just be a fraud. Maybe she had planned this betrayal all along and ran as a Democrat since she knew she could win.
Whatever the case may be, her betrayal shows that politics is still a dirty, dirty sport. Most illuminating to me, though, is how warmly the Republicans have embraced her. This furthers my view that they do not care about a person’s character or integrity. And what’s more, they do not care about duping her constituency. And it’s unlikely they care about her beyond the power she has bestowed on them. Time will tell whether Cotham will ever regret her actions. She has lost her voters, her integrity, and her reputation in one fell swoop. I hope it was worth it.
(featured image: screenshot/MSNBC)
