# Art Pope The man who proved you don't need to be a billionaire to buy a state. James Arthur "Art" Pope (b. May 5, 1956) is a North Carolina retail magnate, attorney, and conservative donor who, over three decades, built and bankrolled a vertically integrated political machine — think tanks, advocacy groups, a litigation arm, and a voter-mobilization operation — that helped flip North Carolina from a competitive purple state into a Republican-controlled laboratory for the right. Jane Mayer's 2011 New Yorker profile titled him the subject of a state that was effectively "for sale"; Democracy NC dubbed him "The 40 Million Dollar Man." His personal fortune (estimated in the hundreds of millions, not billions) is dwarfed by the Koch and Mercer families, yet his concentrated, state-level focus arguably bought more durable political control than far larger national checkbooks. ## The Money Behind the Machine Pope's wealth comes from [[Variety Wholesalers]], the privately held discount-retail chain he chairs (Roses, Maxway, Super 10, Roses Express), with stores concentrated in lower-income communities across the South. In 2025 the company acquired and reopened 219 former Big Lots stores out of that chain's bankruptcy, expanding to roughly 370–580 locations across sixteen states. The irony is frequently noted by critics: a fortune built largely on low-income shoppers funds a politics of tax cuts, deregulation, and shrinking the social safety net those same shoppers rely on. The political spending flows through the [[John William Pope Foundation]], the family vehicle Pope founded with his father John W. Pope in 1986. From 1986 through 2024 the foundation distributed more than $244 million in grants. That money built an interlocking set of North Carolina institutions: the [[John Locke Foundation]] (a state-level think tank, of which Pope was founding chairman), the [[John W. Pope Civitas Institute]] (a polling and advocacy shop later merged into Locke), and the [[James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal]] (formerly the Pope Center, targeting higher education). Nationally, Pope money has flowed to the [[Cato Institute]], the [[Heritage Foundation]], and the broader infrastructure. ## The North Carolina Takeover Pope's signature achievement is the 2010 capture of the North Carolina legislature. Working alongside the national networks — and aligned with the [[Koch Network]], on whose [[Americans for Prosperity]] board he served — Pope and allied groups poured money into targeted state legislative races. The result handed Republicans control of both chambers of the General Assembly for the first time since Reconstruction, which positioned them to control the post-2010 census redistricting. The maps drawn afterward entrenched GOP supermajorities and made North Carolina a national flashpoint in litigation over [[Gerrymandering]]. When [[Pat McCrory]] won the governorship in 2012, Pope was named state Budget Director (2013–2014), moving from funding the policy ecosystem to writing the state budget himself — a rare case of a donor occupying the machinery of government he had helped install. The Washington Post observed that he "sits at heart of government he helped transform." His tenure coincided with deep tax cuts, reductions in unemployment benefits, and cuts to education spending. ## The Model: Concentrated, Local, Permanent Pope's strategic insight differentiates him from the national mega-donors. Rather than chase the presidency or the U.S. Senate, he concentrated resources on the cheapest, highest-leverage targets — state legislative seats, judicial elections, and the institutions that shape the terms of debate. A few hundred thousand dollars decisive in a state house race buys far more policy than the same sum lost in a presidential ad buy. This is the [[Dark Money]] playbook executed at the retail level, and it mirrors the logic of the [[Koch Donor Summit Model]] and the [[State Policy Network]] of coordinated state think tanks, of which the John Locke Foundation is a flagship member. In 2017 Pope ascended to the chairmanship of the [[Bradley Foundation]], one of the most important national conservative funders, extending his reach well beyond North Carolina. He has also been a longtime participant in the donor ecosystem that overlaps with [[DonorsTrust]] and the wider [[Dark Money Ecosystem]]. ## Complications and Contradictions Pope does not fit the cartoon of a partisan operator cleanly. He co-founded the Libertarian Party of North Carolina as a college student in 1976, and his motivating ideology is genuinely libertarian-leaning rather than nationalist. He has supported nonpartisan independent redistricting commissions — speaking in 2019 for a bipartisan anti-gerrymandering amendment — even as the maps his political project produced became the country's most litigated. As a UNC freshman in 1975 he filed a student-conduct complaint defending free-speech rights for a Klansman he simultaneously condemned. And in 2025 he broke publicly with the Trump administration over tariffs, calling them "one of the largest tax increases we have ever had in America" — a classic free-trade libertarian position now heterodox within the MAGA-era GOP. He sits on the University of North Carolina Board of Governors, to which the legislature he helped build elected him in 2020. ## Analytical Framework Art Pope is the **state-level archetype** of the donor-as-infrastructure-builder. Where [[Charles Koch]] built a national operating system and [[Jane Mayer]] chronicled the dark-money turn, Pope demonstrated the same architecture could be miniaturized and pointed at a single state with devastating efficiency: build the think tank to generate the ideas, the advocacy group to push them, the litigation center to defend them, the voter operation to win the seats, and then staff the resulting government. North Carolina became the proof of concept that conservative donors have since tried to replicate elsewhere. His libertarian sincerity and his anti-gerrymandering and anti-tariff heterodoxies make him a more interesting figure than his critics allow — but they don't change the structural outcome, which was the most thorough donor-engineered transformation of a U.S. state in the modern era. ## See Also - [[Variety Wholesalers]] — The retail fortune that funds everything - [[John William Pope Foundation]] — The family grantmaking vehicle - [[John Locke Foundation]] — His flagship state think tank - [[John W. Pope Civitas Institute]] — The polling and advocacy arm - [[Bradley Foundation]] — National funder he chairs (since 2017) - [[Pat McCrory]] — The governor whose budget Pope wrote - [[Koch Network]] — National network Pope aligned with - [[State Policy Network]] — The 50-state think-tank federation - [[Gerrymandering]] — The redistricting fight Pope's project triggered - [[Dark Money Ecosystem]] — The architecture this is a node in - [[Jane Mayer]] — Journalist who profiled him ("State for Sale")