The American flag cake was about half eaten by the time Phil Berger, North Carolina’s most powerful legislator, stepped to the podium on Tuesday at his election night party.
The leader of the State Senate did not appear in a good mood. He and his allies had pumped a staggering $10 million into his surprisingly tight primary race against Sam Page, a popular small-town sheriff. He had enlisted allies from Raleigh to campaign for him. He had even secured a coveted endorsement from President Trump, who is beloved in this rural stretch of northern North Carolina.
But as of Wednesday, his opponent was clinging to a two-vote lead, with provisional, military and overseas ballots still waiting to be counted. The extremely tight margin underscored the main takeaway for state legislative races across politically purple North Carolina on Tuesday night: This was a primary season about punishing incumbents on both sides of the aisle.
Three veteran Democrats in safe seats who tended to vote with the G.O.P. all lost their primaries by as much as 48 points, as their challengers promised to push back harder against Republicans’ steamrolling approach to legislating.
Five Republican incumbents, and possibly Mr. Berger, were also swept from the State Legislature.
The results were a political earthquake that shook the North Carolina statehouse. They could also be an early sign of a broader anti-incumbent mood taking hold across the country as the midterms begin. There were hints of that voter restlessness in Texas, too, where veteran members of Congress faced their own tough primaries on Tuesday.
“I wish I could tell you that we have certainty over what the result is, but we just don’t know that at this point,” Mr. Berger said at his Tuesday party at The Penn House in Reidsville, N.C., before declaring that a city policy would force them to wrap the event at 10 p.m. “It looks like it’s going to be close.”
Among the Democratic incumbent losers in North Carolina were Carla Cunningham, who received fierce blowback for an anti-immigrant speech she delivered before voting to support an immigration bill; Nasif Majeed, who voted to override a veto of a bill that targeted transgender people; and Shelly Willingham, who cast the tiebreaking vote allowing private schools to arm teachers.
“We’ve known that voters have sorted themselves into partisan camps, but what they’re doing now is enforcing that partisan loyalty on elected officials,” said Michael Bitzer, a scholar of North Carolina politics at Catawba College in Salisbury, N.C. “When those elected officials decide to buck the party, the party is going to kick back pretty hard.”
The results will very likely help Gov. Josh Stein, a first-term Democrat whose power has been undermined by some fellow Democrats who have helped Republicans in the majority override some of his vetoes and beat him on major policy fights.
Mr. Stein, who endorsed Ms. Cunningham’s challenger, the Rev. Dr. Rodney S. Sadler Jr., said in a statement on Wednesday that “North Carolinians want representatives who champion the issues that matter to them — from bringing costs down and supporting public schools to keeping communities safe and protecting people’s fundamental freedoms.”
In 2023, a Republican supermajority in the legislature had allowed them to override vetoes, but Democrats broke that supermajority in 2024, giving them the power to sustain Mr. Stein’s vetoes. Since then, though, moderate Democrats like the three who lost on Tuesday have helped Republicans override eight of Mr. Stein’s 15 vetoes, including on issues such as immigration, education vouchers and gun rights.
That upset liberal activists, who increasingly viewed those veteran Democrats as unreliable votes, especially at a time when the left has grown increasingly angry with President Trump and his policies on immigration and tariffs.
“This is a massive first step toward ensuring our representatives in state houses actually answer to the people who elected them, not special interests,” said Mandara Meyers, executive director of The States Project, a well-funded national group that helped the three challengers who defeated Democratic incumbents: Dr. Sadler; Veleria Levy, who beat Mr. Majeed; and Patricia Smith, who beat Mr. Willingham.
“These results signal voters in November are prepared to place a powerful, long-overdue check on right-wing overreach in state capitals from coast to coast,” Ms. Meyers said.
Overall turnout for the primaries increased by 5 percent compared with the 2022 midterm elections, according to the North Carolina State Board of Elections.
In one of the most closely watched races, in northeast Charlotte, Dr. Sadler, a professor at Union Presbyterian Seminary, trounced Ms. Cunningham, who voted with the Republican majority 84 percent of the time in the 2025-26 session — the highest among State House Democrats.
Democrats were most angered by Ms. Cunningham’s vote joining Republicans to mandate that North Carolina’s local law enforcement officials cooperate with federal immigration agents. During the vote, she said in a speech on the House floor that “all cultures are not equal.”
Maria Hernandez, 64, who works at the Shake Shack in Charlotte’s airport, said she was disgusted with that comment and it had motivated her to knock on doors to support Dr. Sadler.
With Dr. Sadler’s victory, “I feel like things are going to start turning around for the positive,” she said.
In one Democratic primary, a progressive incumbent beat back a challenge from the right: State Representative Rodney Pierce easily defeated Michael Wray. Mr. Wray, a former legislator, had urged Republicans to temporarily change their party affiliation in order to vote for his attempted comeback to represent a northern district.
As for the moderate Democratic incumbents who fell, Chris Cooper, a political science professor at Western Carolina University, noted that all three had been “a thorn in the Democratic Party side for multiple terms.”
“It’s been coming for a while,” he said. “It’s sort of like pushing over a Coke machine. You’re not going to knock everybody out the first time. It’s going to take you a couple of times to rock it back and forth before you get it where you want to go.”
The through line in the Republican primary seemed to be a little more complicated, Mr. Cooper said, with local issues and personalities appearing to have tipped the balance.
Most of the attention remains on Mr. Berger’s race, which has stunned residents across the state because of its tight margins, and the possible fallout that could ensue through prolonged legal challenges or, if Mr. Page is victorious, a potential changing of the Republican guard in the legislature.
There had been elation on Tuesday night at the sheriff’s party, where several of his supporters mirrored his fashion sense by wearing a cowboy hat.
“To everybody that helped us here tonight, who helped us all along the way for the past year, I love you, and I appreciate you,” Sheriff Page told a rollicking crowd that chanted: “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!”
But inside The Penn House, Mr. Berger’s team wrapped a tense party after citing the 10 p.m. city policy.
Asked about whether such a policy existed, Montana Brown, the city’s director of marketing and economic development, said in an email that there was a city noise ordinance that takes effect at 10 p.m., so “most booked events tend to end” at that time.
It is unclear if Mr. Berger’s party would have broken the ordinance. The room was quiet that night.
Eduardo Medina is a Times reporter covering the South. An Alabama native, he is now based in Durham, N.C.
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