When Marjorie Burnside moved to the North Carolina coast several years ago after retiring as a New York City police officer, she did not know much about the candidates running for the obscure statewide offices that oversee agriculture, labor and insurance. So Ms. Burnside, a lifelong Republican, voted along party lines.
She now considers many of her area’s elected Republicans responsible for rubber-stamping too many development projects. And she is furious that they have failed to tame home insurance premiums, which have soared by 75 percent. That was why she accepted an invitation to a friend’s recent beach house party for State Senator Natasha Marcus, a Democrat who is challenging the state’s Republican insurance commissioner.
“She just gave me lots to think about,” Ms. Burnside, 59, said after listening to Ms. Marcus’s warnings about loopholes that hurt policyholders and rates in coastal areas that are likely to see a significant rise. “More people, more claims, more raises — it’s all connected.”
Eleven states elect their insurance commissioners, an obscure but powerful job that affects virtually every resident through regulations and the ability to challenge or reject rate hikes on home, car and other policies.
The contest has typically been treated as a down-ballot afterthought involving little-known candidates, with hundreds of thousands of voters leaving their ballots blank. But as housing and insurance costs have skyrocketed, particularly in areas experiencing whiplash from climate change and extreme weather, these races are becoming proxies for public frustration over pocketbook anxieties.
“Voters are starting to experience climate change as an economic threat, and are realizing that insurance commissioners are now climate policymakers,” said Jordan Haedtler, a climate finance strategist for Climate Cabinet, which supports candidates in competitive races nationally.
Insurance angst has already factored into local elections this year: In Honolulu, State Representative Scott Saiki, Hawaii’s House Speaker since 2017, lost his Democratic primary amid criticism that he had failed to rein in condo insurance rates. In Orlando, a Democrat won a special election for a state House seat by highlighting property insurance, flipping a district that Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida easily won in 2022.
Now comes the biggest statewide test, where recent polls in North Carolina — the most competitive of the four states voting for insurance commissioner in November — predict a tossup between Ms. Marcus and the two-term incumbent, Mike Causey.
The timing also could not be more relevant, given the devastation wrought by Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina and Tropical Storm Debby. Claims totaling billions of dollars are likely to be filed.
“In general, it feels as though the incumbent has a bit of a challenge or a hurdle to get over in that rates have steadily gone up, and right, wrong or indifferent, a consumer can point to an incumbent and say you’re not doing enough to fix that,” said Landon T. Bentham, director of sales and marketing for Callahan & Rice, a longtime independent insurance agency in Fayetteville, N.C.
North Carolina has been long regarded as one of the more stable states for insurance, for both policyholders and carriers. Auto insurance rates are among the nation’s lowest.
The state’s nonprofit insurer of last resort — a tax-exempt association of insurance companies that are required by law to insure properties and spread the risk — had enough cash to pay $1.5 billion in wind and hail claims after Hurricane Florence ravaged the state in 2018.
But in 2023, Nationwide decided not to renew 10,000 homeowners’ insurance policies in eastern North Carolina, citing climate and other reasons. Overall, the average home insurance premium in the United States climbed by 33 percent from 2020 to 2023, far exceeding inflation, according to a new study, and some insurers are no longer writing policies in Florida, California and Louisiana.
So far, at least, “no big insurer has left the state,” said Donald T. Hornstein, a law professor at the University of North Carolina School of Law, who has lectured on coastal insurance concerns. But while insurers have seen profits in 10 out of the last 11 years in North Carolina, they lost money in 18 other states in 2023, up from eight in 2013, according to an analysis by The New York Times.
Against that backdrop, the North Carolina Rate Bureau, a nonprofit consortium of insurers empowered by the State Legislature to calculate adjustments in premiums, requested a 42 percent increase in January — including 99 percent in some coastal areas — citing inflation and increased costs for materials and labor. Since then, 40,000 emails, phone calls and letters have inundated the Department of Insurance, which, as the state’s regulator, must approve any increases.
Mr. Causey, a former health insurance executive, has preferred to negotiate the policies affecting the state’s housing stock. In May, he negotiated an 8 percent increase in the rate that applies primarily to rental properties, down from an original request of more than 50 percent.
In 2020, the last time homeowners’ insurance rates were increased, a 24.5 percent request was whittled down to 7.9 percent.
But Mr. Causey rejected this year’s proposal to increase homeowners’ insurance rates by 42 percent, setting the stage for his first public judicial hearing on rate hikes on Oct. 7.
“I very much understand where the people are coming from because we’re all paying higher insurance rates, and inflation is the driving factor that’s hurting all Americans,” Mr. Causey, 74, said in an interview a few weeks before the hearing.
But Ms. Marcus has been on the attack, accusing Mr. Causey of approving too many rate increases without holding public hearings. She talks about a little-understood Consent to Rate law — which was amended by the Legislature in 2018, with Mr. Causey’s input — being used increasingly by insurers in North Carolina to charge homeowners more than the rates approved by the state.
While Mr. Causey has often worked closely with his fellow Republicans who have long dominated the Legislature, he sided with Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, on energy efficiency and resiliency in homes, and opposed a bill backed by Republicans to prohibit any updates to building codes until 2031.
In the wake of Helene, Mr. Causey has renewed his calls for a statewide expansion of the last-resort insurer for vulnerable coastal properties. Ms. Marcus says that the state needs to invest more in hardening homes, and that flood maps are woefully outdated.
Much of Helene’s damage was caused by flooding, and few people in western North Carolina had taken out federal flood insurance, which is not within the purview of the state insurance commissioner. Still, the storm was clearly on the candidates’ minds on Monday, when Mr. Causey and Ms. Marcus held separate news conferences before the rate increase hearing.
The proposed rate hikes, which were requested at the beginning of the year, were much lower in western North Carolina than along the coast. So when asked whether Helene would be a factor in future insurance-rate increases, Mr. Causey said, “It very well could be.” But he also cautioned that it was too early to know.
“We’re just now seeing impacts from Hurricane Florence, and that was back in 2018, so we have to wait and see how it shakes out,” he said.
Part of an insurance commissioner’s job is to visit storm-hit areas and set up victim assistance centers to help residents with insurance claims and other needs. A few weeks before Helene, Mr. Causey visited North Carolina’s southeastern coast — on the opposite end of the state from where Helene hit — after a storm unexpectedly dumped as much as 18 inches of rain there.
In the fast-growing but risk-prone counties of Brunswick, New Hanover and Pender on the southeastern coast, homeowners now pay an average of roughly $3,100 a year on insurance, or up to 67 percent more than other counties in risk-prone areas.
Paul Cafasso, a retired I.T. executive from the Danbury, Conn., area, is part of a wave of retirees from the Northeast who have moved to a sprawling development in Brunswick County, where the number of people aged 65 or over more than doubled between 2010 and 2020.
A political independent, Mr. Cafasso, 81, said his community’s condo association had seen its insurance costs double in the last two years, forcing the association to switch to another carrier. So he intended to research each candidate’s plans.
“On a bell curve, we’re on the upward part of the bell curve — who knows where it’s going to end?” he said.
During a tour of his farm, Jimmy Tate, a former Pender County commissioner and community college president, said more people, crushed by escalating premiums, are agonizing over whether even to take out insurance.
A former Democrat who is now a Republican, Mr. Tate, 46, wants the two candidates to hold corporate interests accountable, and to visit rural and underserved communities.
“If they really want to care, they can come on my farm and I can hold a meeting in my event barn center,” he said. “I can guarantee them I can pack the room with farmers, all over this region, who want to hear what they have to say about their rate increases.”
Known for uncorking fiery speeches on the Senate floor, Ms. Marcus, 55, was gerrymandered out of her district by Republicans, who hold the supermajority. She opted to run for commissioner rather than move to another area to run again.
In an interview, she said her experience as a lawyer would enable her to adopt a more adversarial posture when dealing with the insurance establishment.
“I’m a former litigation attorney — very comfortable in a court-like setting, eager to do that kind of cross-examination,” she said.
Refusing to take campaign contributions from the insurance industry, in contrast to Mr. Causey, Ms. Marcus has raised more than $427,000, nearly double her opponent’s haul.
Mr. Causey has been a visible presence all over the storm-ravaged state, warning about the future.
At a meeting with insurance agents in the Outer Banks, where homes have been collapsing into the ocean as a result of rising sea levels, Mr. Causey voiced his frustration with the state’s building codes.
“In 2017, we were the fifth best in the nation in building codes,” he said. “We’ve dropped to number eight. We’re going the wrong way.”
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