After string of losses, some NC Democrats are seeking a new direction | Opinion

Like most North Carolina Democrats, Anderson Clayton was disheartened after the 2022 midterms.

In her native Person County, where she serves as the county party chair, too many rural voters just couldn’t see a Democrat they were willing to vote for, even at the local level.

Seeing the North Carolina Democratic Party struggle once again to make inroads with rural communities is what cemented her decision to run for state party chair.

“I was like, wow, I have a lot of work to do. We all have so much work to do in rural communities,” Clayton told me. “And the fact that people don’t want to start that work tomorrow is why I decided I need to be in this race.”

Clayton, 25, is arguably the most formidable challenger to Bobbie Richardson, a former state representative who became the party’s first Black chair in 2021. The race is a clash between old and new, between the party establishment and the folks on the ground.



But it’s also a clash about who the party wants to reach and who it should reach out to — questions that will determine whether the party will change or stagnate.

Feeling left behind

In many parts of North Carolina, the presence of the state party is not exactly felt.

Katherine Jeanes, who works alongside the Young Democrats of North Carolina, is from Cabarrus County and worked to flip a state House seat that ended up saving the governor’s veto power. The margin of victory in that race was only about 600 votes.

The problem was that organizers in Cabarrus felt like they were doing it all alone.

“There was no state-level investment in organizing capacity, and it was incumbent upon the local party to pick up that slack,” Jeanes told me. “That’s been a point of contention — how we had a desperate need in Cabarrus for institutional support, and we didn’t get it, despite that race being incredibly important and the margin being so narrow.”

Others feel left behind, too. As a county party chair in western North Carolina, Sam Edney feels like there isn’t enough transparency or communication from the state party, and he doesn’t know if there’s a vision, either. He knows that the 2024 election is important, but what about after that?

“North Carolina Democrats got into this circumstance that we face over a long period of time, and we’re not going to get out of it in one cycle,” Edney said. “We need a long-range plan, and I don’t know if we have that plan. If we do, I don’t know what it is.”

The state party has not offered enough support for candidates in more conservative districts, says Edney, who chairs the Transylvania County Democratic Party. In some cases, they don’t run candidates in those districts at all. Democrats left more than 40 state legislative races uncontested in 2022.

In early 2021, under Richardson’s leadership, the party launched Building Blue, its first-ever year-round organizing and training program. In an email, the party told me that “building sustainable long-term Democratic infrastructure takes time,” but said that one lesson learned is the need to better mobilize voters in areas where Democrats underperformed.

Clayton knows what it’s like to organize — successfully — in red, rural counties, and she knows the needs of the people on the ground. Her home of Person County is one of just 26 counties in North Carolina where Democrats picked up more votes in 2022 than they did in 2020. The remaining 74 counties slid to the right, in some cases by nearly 10 points.

“I believe that we should be organizing in rural areas. I believe that it is worth it,” Clayton said. “We can organize in uptown Charlotte and also in rural Edgecombe County, which are both places where Democrats lost advantage this year because we lost our own voters. The lack of investment has hit everywhere.”

Resistance to change?

Pundits, strategists and political observers have spent a lot of time dissecting what went wrong for Democrats in 2022.

But among the party establishment, there doesn’t seem to be enough of an appetite to acknowledge that the way the North Carolina Democratic Party operates is simply not working, and it hasn’t been for a long time. Organizers say there seems to be an “unreasonable” amount of resistance to change coming from the party’s central leadership.

“The same thing is only going to keep providing the same thing,” Clayton said. She hopes to bring fresh ideas and fresh perspectives to the table, most of all as a young organizer from rural North Carolina.

It’s ironic, perhaps, that a party that prides itself on standing for progress is so stuck in its ways. Organizers are tired of losing, but most of all, they are tired of losing the same way every time, especially when they feel like their needs, ideas and suggestions are going unheard.

Richardson announced three days after the election that she would run for chair again. In a December op-ed in INDY Week, Richardson reflected on the midterm election results, celebrating the many wins for Democrats and democracy nationwide. She did not mention the poor turnout across much of the state, nor the fact that Democrats underperformed in North Carolina relative to the rest of the country.

Richardson has the endorsement of Gov. Roy Cooper, Attorney General Josh Stein and congressional Democrats, while Clayton has garnered support from elected officials and organizers across North Carolina.

“We spend a lot of time talking about intraparty factionalism in the Republican Party, right?” Western Carolina University political science professor Chris Cooper said. “And so I think it’s important to look at similar kinds of questions in the Democratic Party.”

‘Unprecedented amounts of hope’

Frustrations within the party are palpable, and it’s clear that Democrats have arrived at some sort of inflection point. Whoever becomes the next chair of the North Carolina Democratic Party is the person who will chart its path forward — not just for the 2024 election, but for what comes after that as well.

Since the race began, Clayton has traveled from county to county across the state, just to listen and talk to people. Many Democrats tell her that they don’t believe in the party anymore, and they don’t know where it’s going.

Her biggest goal is to change the status quo in a way that makes people feel like they have a place in the party again, that makes them feel like the party hasn’t left them behind after all.

“I want to make sure that every person has a way to say they are proud to call themselves a Democrat, particularly in rural North Carolina right now,” Clayton said. “I don’t know, I really want our party to be a place for anybody.”

Jeanes said that what they have seen from Clayton during the race has inspired them, and they have seen their peers re-energized by Clayton’s campaign. Young Democrats, rural Democrats and field organizers see themselves in Clayton, but they haven’t always seen themselves reflected in party leadership.

“Despite the very real lack of hope that I think Democrats across the state feel at this demoralizing losing streak, there is unprecedented amounts of hope behind what we can accomplish with a new vision, different leadership,” Jeanes said. “I certainly am the most hopeful I have been in several years at this moment.”

Paige Masten is a Charlotte-based opinion writer and member of the Editorial Board.