Candidate profile: Jeff Hyde

“You hear this at Tea Party events,” Jeff Hyde is saying. “We the people want our representatives to represent us. The reason people are going to get voted out this fall is the majority of people don’t think our representatives really represent us.”

We’re sitting in the front room at Aesthetic Images Photography, the studio and gallery Hyde co-owns and co-manages with his wife on State Street. The Republican candidate for NC Senate District 27, Hyde says it’s the first interview of his campaign. He has a digital camera mounted on a tripod to capture some of the conversation for possible use on his website.

Removing the Democratic incumbent from the seat is likely to be a tough proposition. Registered Democrats outnumber their Republican counterparts two one in the district, which covers much of Greensboro. The seat’s current occupant, Don Vaughan, enjoys strong name recognition, having served on city council for 14 years. Incumbency, name recognition, networking skills and a pro-business governing philosophy translate into a $77,009 war chest for Vaughan, while Hyde has so far reported raising no money.

And yet Hyde sees reasons for optimism. Republicans and conservatives — entities that overlap most but not all of the time — are energized, angry and motivated this year, and many Democrats are feeling demoralized. The entry of the Tea Party movement onto the electoral scene has prompted some internecine warfare within the Republican Party, but Hyde predicts its message of limited government, strict constitutionalism and fiscal conservatism will resonate with voters in November.

Hyde has an organizational base within the movement thanks to his role as a founding member of Conservatives for Guilford County, which hosted the Tax Day Tea Party at Governmental Plaza in Greensboro on April 15. As Hyde explained from the stage that day, the group was born out of an informal weekly fellowship gathering at Lawndale Baptist Church. Described by Hyde as “a loose affiliation of like-minded people,” the organization assesses no dues and has no elected officers. But with responsibilities delegated to a handful of action teams, including people engaged in recruiting precinct organizers, researchers and events organizers, the group is mobilizing to connect conservative voters with simpatico candidates this fall.

“We had a meeting recently with about 60 people in the room,” Hyde says. “I said, ‘Raise your hand if you’re a Republican.’ All but one person raised their hand. I said, ‘Raise your hand if you’ve ever been to a Republican event.’ Five people raised their hands. These are people like me who have voted all along, but we’ve never been politicians and we’ve never been active. Two things are going to bring them to the polls in November: Anxiety for the future, and they’re more interested in the process. They’re aroused by the threat of socialism.”

Armed with volumes of reports and articles from the conservative John W. Pope Civitas Institute, Hyde reels off a series of statistics to support the notion that North Carolina has an economic climate that is unfavorable to business, assails the state political culture of the long-dominant Democratic Party and dismisses the conventional view of Vaughan as a moderate and friend of business.

“Once a very sound state and a leader in the Southeast, we’re now on the cusp of falling over the brink,” Hyde says. “Democrats have had control of the state Senate for 112 years and the House for all but a session in ’94. What has happened is that the progressive-liberal leadership of the Democratic Party here in North Carolina has run the show. Sen. Vaughan presents himself as a moderate — and he’s a very likable fellow in Guilford County — but he continues to vote along with that very progressive, very liberal Democratic leadership in the Senate.”

Local and state governments in general and Democrats in particular are in the habit of using a deceptive tactic, Hyde contends, to maintain current spending levels and avoid cutting taxes: Around budget time, they warn of the necessity of cutting popular programs such as education and roads with no intention of doing so but knowing it will whip up alarm. Meanwhile, the areas of truly wasteful spending go untouched. Asked to provide an example of wasteful state government spending, Hyde instead cites a Civitas study that found that if the lowest amount in each line item of the House and Senate budgets were incorporated into the final budget the state could save $300 million. Instead, he says, the final budget often includes the highest of the two numbers.

Hyde faults the federal stimulus program embraced by Democrats as an ineffective means of job creation, and says state Democrats don’t have a plan to put people to work. The solution, he contends, is to cut taxes and regulations. Reducing North Carolina’s personal income tax rate by 2 percent would return $1,000 to the average household in Guilford County, Hyde says. Considering Guilford’s population, Hyde says that would pump about $400 million into the county’s economy.

“What would people do with an extra thousand dollars?” Hyde asks. “They might redo the bathroom. They might eat out more. They’d probably pay off some bills. There would be an increase in pizza deliveries. What do they do? They have to hire people.”

Citing North Carolina’s unemployment rate — 10.8 percent in April — Hyde says, “That threatens the prosperity of everybody. The Democratic leadership, their strategy for tackling unemployment and jobs in North Carolina seems to be wait it out. What we know is that North Carolina has a business climate that is the worst in the Southeast…. You probably read an article in the Business Journal about North Carolina [ranking] the fifteenth worst in pro-business atmosphere of all the states in the United States; we’re the worst in the Southeast. That climate is because we have the highest personal income tax rate. We have the highest corporate income tax rate.”

Hyde suggests that high taxation rates are correlated with high unemployment rates, and posits that North Carolina is at a structural disadvantage compared to its neighbors in other parts of the Southeast.

“The number-one problem in North Carolina is unemployment and job creation,” he says. “Half a million people are unemployed in North Carolina. That number should be frightening. In Virginia, the unemployment rate is significantly lower; it’s about 7 percent. Virginia happens to house a lot of federal government employees.”

High levels of taxation and regulation are discouraging businesses from relocating to North Carolina and discouraging residents from starting new businesses, Hyde says.

“If you’re starting a new business, where would you locate?” he asks. “You would locate where you have the opportunity to make the most money. North Carolina is driving business away. All of our best and brightest, we may as well put them on a bus and drop them off in Tennessee because we’re telling them we don’t want them to set up shop in North Carolina.”

The difference between unemployment rates in North Carolina and Tennessee, which imposes no income tax, is actually less than 1 percentile, according to the most recent comparative data published by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Likewise, unemployment in Florida, which also does not have an income tax, exceeds North Carolina’s rate. Three other Southern states — Alabama, Mississippi and South Carolina — suffer higher unemployment rates than does North Carolina.

In addition to Virginia, seven other Southern states — ranging from Louisiana with a low rate of 6.7 percent to Kentucky with a high rate of 10.6 percent — fare better than North Carolina.

Hyde savages the strategy of using economic incentives to create jobs — a model embraced by many Democrats and some Republicans.

“Our current business strategy seems to be that we should bribe a glamorous company to come here so that we get that great press coverage and we look like rock stars,” he says. “To me, that’s unfair to the other companies that end up footing the bill. And generally it doesn’t work out because they leave once the bribe is paid out.”

On education, Hyde favors removing the cap on charter schools, offering tax credits to parents who home-school their children and making tuition to private schools a non-taxed benefit if companies are willing to pay it for their employees. Like Vaughan’s family, the Hydes send their children to a private school. Hyde faults the Democratic leadership in Raleigh for refusing to allow bills introducing educational competition to be considered.

“Republicans have filed a bill to raise the cap to 106,” Hyde says. “It never got out of committee. I imagine the motives are the [teachers union] wanting to control learning. And they want to control the dollars that are attached to each student. The dollars that leave the system for every student that is home-schooled or goes to a private school are dollars that they no longer control.”

Having volunteered with Lutheran Family Services to help a refugee family from Bosnia, Hyde says, “I’m a friend and a fan of the immigrant. And I understand their plight.”

Hyde notes that a recent Civitas poll indicates that a solid majority of North Carolinians favor recent legislation passed in Arizona allowing local law enforcement to arrest people for being in the state illegally. As long as unemployment remains high here, Hyde says he favors maintaining restrictions on the number of people who can legally emigrate to the United States. He stops short of expressing unqualified support for the Arizona law, but suggests it deserves consideration.

“I believe in a state being able to set its own destiny,” he says. “The great thing about federalism is every state can do its own thing. If the law in Arizona is effective in a positive way for Arizona, then certainly it’s something that North Carolina should look at.”

Hyde considers himself an everyman — “just like you,” as his campaign website describes him.

“The people who represent us live in a closed world where they only hear people who are around them and what they read in the newspaper,” he says. “People in Washington inside the beltway or who hang around the legislature in Raleigh think that’s the real world; it’s not. The real world is out at a community center or in the aisle of Food Lion.”

NOTE: This story has been updated to reflect a corrected estimate of the economic impact of a hypothetical tax decrease on Guilford County.