TRC Nexus Highlights NCFREE

The business leaders who understand the forces shaping North Carolina are the ones best positioned to lead their organizations through whatever comes next.

Informing business leaders about who holds power, how they got there, what they believe, and how they wield the authority given to them by voters has been NCFREE’s mission since 1983, when four of North Carolina’s most consequential business leaders (Bill Lee of Duke Power, Roger Gant of Glen Raven Mills, Paul Broyhill of Broyhill Furniture, and David Stedman of Stedman Corporation) founded this organization as a trusted, independent source of intelligence that business leaders could rely on regardless of which party held power in Raleigh.

We were pleased to see that mission recognized recently by TRC Nexus, a daily news briefing for North Carolina’s senior business executives published by The Results Company, an NCFREE member company. In addition to weekday morning news updates, each Saturday, TRC Nexus publishes original thought pieces for its audience of North Carolina senior business leaders.

In one recent column, TRC Nexus traced NCFREE’s founding, subsequent evolution over four decades, and our work currently underway to build the next generation of analytical tools for NC’s business community.

The piece highlighted NCFREE’s flagship products: the Legislative Business Ratings, which have measured how state lawmakers approach free enterprise; the 2026 Partisan District Scores, our most sophisticated district-level analysis to date; the District Profiles, which give members deep situational awareness on every state legislative district; and our Campaign Finance Dashboard, which enables NCFREE members to track the flow of money shaping North Carolina campaigns and elections.

TRC Nexus’s column also described something much more important than the tools themselves: the bipartisan track record of trust NCFREE has built across four decades. As former Senate President Pro Tempore Marc Basnight, one of the most powerful Democratic legislators in North Carolina history, put it: NCFREE is “North Carolina’s best non-partisan information source on the General Assembly from the business perspective.”

With 170 state legislative races on the ballot this fall and a U.S. Senate contest drawing national attention, the environment our members are navigating at this moment is as consequential as any in recent memory. That is exactly the environment NCFREE was built for.

You can read the full TRC Nexus Saturday piece here.

Alex Baltzegar, Executive Director