Policy: North Carolina Democrats Have a Choice
A rural Democrat suggests how Democrats can resist North Carolina's Red Tide.
North Carolina Democrats have a choice to make: how do you win back a state that is turning red?
That begins on Saturday when the state Democratic Party elects its chair. That’s coming down to Bobbie Richardson, the current chair who is endorsed by establishment figures like Governor Roy Cooper; and Anderson Clayton, a 25-year-old grassroots organizer and rural advocate.
Author’s note: you can learn more about that election in this article from The Assembly, “Tangled Up In Blue: North Carolina Democrats are tired of losing, and some blame Gov. Roy Cooper’s hand-picked party leader. Will they risk their future on an untested 25-year-old, or hope that staying the course yields better results?”
The choice facing Tar Heel State Democrats, however, is bigger than fundraising, organizing, and who serves as chair. It’s about what the party stands for, what issues are promoted, who gets to be included, and who receives support.
In this age of social media and Super PACs the parties themselves can only do so much. They can’t control the message its activists post every day on Twitter, and it can’t control what candidates and causes they donate to online. They control the infrastructure but not the brand.
In a way, everyone is party chair now. Democratic values and direction become a law of averages. That’s small “d” democratic.
With power comes responsibility. That’s why the future of the Democratic Party, and whether it can take back the General Assembly, won’t only be decided on Saturday by the State Executive Committee, but also by choices outside the room.
There are some important ones to make.
North Carolina is a purple state with a popular Democratic governor in Roy Cooper, but Democrats haven’t won a presidential or U.S. Senate race in North Carolina since 2008. Republicans are one State House seat away from supermajorities that could override the governor’s veto, they hold a majority on the Council of State and the state Supreme Court, and the trends are ominous: since 2010 Democrats have been losing ground in North Carolina. Out of 100 counties, in 2022, Cheri Beasley won only 21.
That wasn’t about Beasley. She was a great candidate. While the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee could have done a better job of investing in the race and the campaign could have built more of an infrastructure throughout the state, the issues were bigger than that. They’re about why North Carolina is different from other battlegrounds and what that’s going to require going forward.
Midterms are usually bad for the party in the White House, but 2022 defied history. Democrats won big races in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, New Hampshire, and Georgia (the other presidential swing states). Democrats picked up a U.S. Senate seat, added governors, and flipped more state legislative races.
North Carolina was an outlier to that story. Why?
That’s a longer story. That’s a story about changing demographics alongside an Old South that won’t go away; the election of Barack Obama and the backlash; a Big Tent getting smaller and Democrats losing their registration advantage; NAFTA, CAFTA, and the Clinton years; Republicans becoming more protectionist and Donald Trump’s appeal; and Bible Belt voters who are culturally conservative.
It’s about redistricting and voting rights, but also about blue voters consolidating, and North Carolina having the second largest rural population in the country. It’s about the evolving nature of the Democratic Party’s coalition in North Carolina and figuring out how that can win.
The Democratic Party in North Carolina goes back to the Antebellum South, the Confederacy, white supremacy, the Redshirts and the Wilmington Massacre, but then it moved on to a more progressive era. Democrats in North Carolina started electing more progressive governors who invested in roads and public education (a legacy that continued with W. Kerr Scott, Terry Sanford, Jim Hunt, and today Roy Cooper).
That brand of pro-civil rights, pro-education, and pro-business politics has helped North Carolina’s Democratic governors as most of the south has gone red.
National races are different. Democrats dominated those until the Voting Rights Act. Since then, Democratic presidential nominees have won North Carolina twice (Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Barack Obama in 2008), and Jesse Helms and Republicans started winning about 75-80% of the U.S. Senate races (with Helms beating Hunt and Harvey Gantt twice).
That’s the challenge for Democrats now. On national races and social issues North Carolina tends to be conservative. North Carolina didn’t vote for the Equal Rights Amendment. It voted for Amendment One by a 20-point margin, becoming the last state to pass a same-sex marriage ban before the Supreme Court intervened.
To win more elections in North Carolina, Democrats will need to excite their base (women and minorities) while slowing their decline in counties like Haywood, Jackson, Swain, Yancey, Madison, Alleghany, Robeson, Scotland, and Nash - if those voters haven’t left already.
They’ll need to improve the margins in GOP leaning counties to 60-40 instead of 70-30 while appealing to younger, college educated, more liberal voters in Mecklenburg and Wake Counties. They’ll need to persuade more Trump/Cooper voters to support the rest of the ticket while still running on an agenda of change. They can no longer ignore rural voters of color.
That means focusing not just on turnout but on persuasion, which would subsequently give more voters a reason to turn out. That means getting out of the bubble, spreading out, and bridging the urban-rural divide in our politics. That means fewer staged candidate forums and more retail campaigning. That means more yard signs and not relying on digital technology to find out what people think. That means contesting every race by recruiting candidates who fit the profile of their district. That means addressing the cultural war not to win an argument with someone but to win them over.
That means being cognizant about how you talk about issues in-person and online. That means social justice framing that doesn’t sound like a grad school seminar. That means speaking in human terms. Medicaid expansion is about seeing a doctor when you’re sick and not going broke (it’s about keeping hospitals open too), broadband is not going to McDonald’s to get internet, Leandro is about poor kids getting their chance too, climate change is about recent flooding and why it’s getting harder to go skiing. That means focusing on issues affecting people’s lives like the opioid crisis, something Attorney General Josh Stein is really good at.
That means offering a vision of North Carolina that is about optimism and opportunity, and that includes everyone, from towns built around textile mills and furniture factories - places that feel left out - to urban and rural minority communities, many of which feel taken for granted and in 2022 didn’t turnout.
That means running on an agenda that can win and building a brand that can win in every corner of the state.
That’s all easier said than done, but the work begins now.
2024 is an important election. So is 2030. If Democrats don’t win back the General Assembly by then they’ll risk being out of power for another generation. That’s a Census year, and Republicans will keep drawing the maps.
Those are the stakes. Democrats know what they’re up against.
Donald Trump won North Carolina twice. He’s running again and could be at the top of the ticket in 2024. Even if he’s not, the party will likely run on his politics, and so will Mark Robinson when he runs for governor. Democrats in North Carolina will have to do something they’ve never done before: beat Trump and the MAGA Republicans.
How they do it is a choice.
Part of that choice comes on Saturday by electing a party chair. Other ones will come in the weeks and months ahead, and more people will have a voice than ever.
As the saying goes, the party decides.