North Carolina Representative Tricia Cotham ran for office as a Democrat. She pledged to oppose vouchers and restrictions on abortion. In April, she unexpectedly switched from Democrat to Republican. Her party switch gave the Republicans a supermajority in both houses of the General Assembly, the state legislature. This meant that the legislature now has the votes to override Democratic Governor Roy Cooper’s veto.
When the General Assembly recently passed a 12-week restriction on abortion, Governor Cooper vetoed the bill. With the vote of Rep. Cotham, the General Assembly overrode his veto. When she was a Democrat, she strongly supported women’s reproductive rights.
A few days ago, the General Assembly passed a universal voucher bill that provides vouchers to all students, rich and poor. Rep. Tricia Cotham sponsored the bill. The public schools of North Carolina will lose hundreds of millions of dollars. Every student currently enrolled in private and religious schools will get taxpayer dollars to subsidize their tuition.
Before her election, Cotham was a public school teacher, then a charter school lobbyist. After switching parties, she wasted no time in supporting a bill that removed oversight of charter schools from the State Board of Education, which is appointed by the Governor, and transferring it to a board appointed by the General Assembly.
The Washington Post reported:
Cotham, who represents part of Mecklenburg County, beat her Republican opponent by nearly 20 percentage points last year after a crowded Democratic primary. She ran on raising the minimum wage to at least $15 per hour, championing LGBTQ rights and expanding access to Medicaid, voting and affordable housing, according to her campaign website.
She switched parties, she said, because her fellow Democrats were mean to her and Planned Parenthood didn’t endorse her, despite her strong support for abortion rights.
Cotham’s mother Pat Cotham is a leading member of the North Carolina Democratic Party. She is on the executive council of the state party and a member of the Democratic National Committee.
As reported by Susan Runkunas in Jezebel, Cotham’s dejected staff members were baffled and disappointed. In the past, she was known as a passionate supporter of abortion rights. But then she supplied the one vote that Republicans needed to override the Governor’s veto. She supported gun control, but managed to be absent (along with two other Democrats) when her vote was needed to sustain his veto of a bill to eliminate the requirement of a permit to buy a handgun. .
Imagine campaigning for a Democratic politician—a thankless, low-paying job, especially at the state level—because you believe in what they stand for. The candidate gives powerful speeches about abortion rights that make you proud. You’re in a purple state, where every single seat in the legislature is critical to protecting abortion access. So you join the fight, help them win, and continue working for them in the legislature. Then inexplicably, in the middle of their term, that politician does an about-face, switches parties, and votes in favor of an extreme abortion ban, delivering Republicans the one vote they needed to override a veto and actually shutter clinics in the state.
Two (now former) aides to North Carolina State Rep. Tricia Cotham found themselves in that position earlier this month. Cotham, a Democrat until recently who was endorsed by EMILY’s List, had given speeches for years about abortion rights, sworn over and over to defend them, and even talked about her own medically necessary abortion. “My womb and my uterus is not up for your political grab,” she said in one particularly passionate 2015 speech.
Emily’s List has, of course, withdrawn its endorsement of the turncoat.
WRAL in North Carolina fact-checked her claims.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This fraud will end up being more damaging than the exploits of George Santos. Many Democrats in North Carolina have been leery of Cotham and her mother for over a decade. She has frequently played both sides of the fence aka Kyrsten Sinema. Cotham lied to her constituents in a progressive district to get elected. Diane, you mention the fact that state representatives are poorly paid, but their access to power frequently leads to financial booty. I just hope someone is following the money.
Exactly, follow the money.
Sinema is so envious. Cotham makes it looks so easy.
“Everyone has a price, the important thing is to find out what it is.” – Pablo Escobar
That price may not always be money. What did she do, that she doesn’t want the public to know? Blackmail, maybe?
I hope some savvy journalists are investigating this situation. This woman has been bought. Who is buying her? Also, someone or some team is identifying legislators who may be $ubject to per$uation and wooing them. I hope someone gets to the bottom of this.
So Cotham’s defection was not so mysterious after all. Her work as a charter school lobbyist when she was out of the legislator showed that she was a sellout willing to completely switch positions if the price was right.
Found the money. Out of the $54K Cotham raised for her primary campaign (second place finisher raised a mere $14.6K), nearly 2/3 of campaign contributions (around $36K) came from mostly Republican-aligned PACs. According to this source, “most state-level corporate PACs do not normally get heavily involved in primaries. Yet for Tricia Cotham, state PACs – most of them strongly Republican-aligned – mobilized, and wound up funding more than two-thirds of her primary.”
https://carolinaforward.org/blog/defrauding-voters-mecklenburg/
That’s fascinating! Why would Republican PACs fund a candidate in the Democratic primary. She must have made an agreement to switch parties before the election in which she ran as a Democrat in a liberal district. Devious.
The same reason Dems would support MAGA republicans in their primaries?
I don’t understand this post.
I have read so often here that there is NO DIFFERENCE between Dems and Republicans in their fealty to corporate and Wall Street interests, especially when it comes to education.
So can someone please explain why this politician had to switch parties? Why didn’t she just remain a Democrat and support and do the same thing, since we all know that there is no difference between the parties? She would still get the same money, right?
Our side makes truths “debatable” — “no one can ever know” whether it is true that Dems and Republicans are the same. “No one can ever know” whether Dems are corrupt lackeys of the billionaire overlords. We debate it and treat the people who say it is absolutely true as if they have credibility.
The Republicans spread lies in one voice, but we can never strongly counter those lies because our side says those lies are “debatable” and gives credibility to any voice that professes not to be a right wing Republican but defends their lies as “truths”.
And then we cluelessly wonder why we just can’t convince more people to vote for Democrats, just because we have told them it is definitely very possible that Dems are just like the Republicans and here are some very credible people who say it and they are definitely truth tellers and not liars.
I hope this post finally puts that blatant lie to rest, and that anyone who says it FINALLY be treated as not credible.
I dislike many Dem education policies and we need to fight them. But fighting them by telling voters there is no difference between the parties gets us exactly what we have in so many states today.
One of the issues in Southern red states has to do with the incompetence of state Democratic Parties. I have served in the Democratic Party in Charlotte and it is a mess. Alabama’s Democratic Party participates in constant infighting. Rick Wilson of the Lincoln Project regularly comments on the ineptitude of the Florida Democratic Party. While Cotham was being wooed by Republican operatives in NC she simply parroted progressive talking points to get elected. I’m not sure why her constituents believed her, but there was no one to let the electorate know that she is a fraud.
The only people who should vote Republican are those who think they would have been winners during Ireland’s great hunger and sleeper cells of Russians who have become American citizens.
Degrees of separation?
Koch …Corey DeAngelis (Director of School Choice at Koch- funded Reason Foundation)…Christian/Catholic religious schools i.e. conservative segregation academies)…Tricia Cotham
Internet search of Cotham and Corey DeAngelis – a number of tweets in April 2023.
Koch’s Americans for Prosperity N.C. on Facebook (5-18) -“A HUGE shoutout to N.C. Rep. Cotham. Your leadership in sponsoring, “choose your school, choose your future…”
I guess they conveniently left out that you don’t choose your school, the school chooses you…
Yes. Libertarians, long term, want to prevent taxpayers from funding schools. The joke will be on those religious school parents who will be getting no assist with ed dollars and will have no alternative to the authoritarians charging them tuition.
Th losers will be the students and society as a whole.
What happened to this woman … did she have a lobotomy??? People don’t change their core values overnight like that … I’m highly suspicious.
It’s a rare but spreading disease. Sinemaoma.
Ahhhhh … good point!
Follow the money.