A new generation of leaders rises from the grassroots

In North Carolina, a disappointing November gives way to a bottom-up rebuild

Welcome to a Monday evening edition of Progress Report.

It’s not often that you can feel the weight of history as it’s being written, so if you had some kind of nagging feeling that you couldn’t quite explain yesterday, congratulations on your keen sense of perception. March 5, 2023 will forever be known as the day that Liverpool Football Club absolutely wrecked arch-nemesis Manchester United by a score of 7-0, the largest demolition in the 130 year history of their rivalry.

I know this is a political newsletter, but seriously, just watch these highlights. In uncertain times, it’s absolutely essential to find joy and reason for optimism.

In fact, the same ethos applies to tonight’s big story. Every lost election is a chance for a reinvention, and in North Carolina, Democrats are embarking on a bottom-up renewal that could become a model for state parties everywhere.

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North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper delivered his fourth and final State of the State address on Monday night, during which he laid out a list of priorities straight from the core Democratic agenda, including funding for public education, child care, and clean energy. All poll-tested, all popular, except perhaps with Cooper’s immediate audience, which was again dominated by Republicans.

That’s been the dynamic throughout Cooper’s entire tenure as governor, and he’s navigated it deftly enough to secure a fair number of bipartisan successes, including the impending expansion of the state’s Medicaid program. But a new political reality loomed over Monday night’s proceedings. The partisan parity that had marked the past six years of North Carolina politics met its demise last November when Republicans flipped the state Supreme Court and came within just one House of a legislative supermajority.

The imbalance is such that Cooper also used his speech Monday to urge Republicans to lay off the culture war obsessions that have consumed GOP trifectas, knowing that any compliance may just temporary; the GOP judicial majority is already working to ensure that Republicans are likely to hold the legislature through the end of the decade.

Demographics will help keep Democrats competitive in statewide elections, but last fall’s losses largely signifies the end an era of ascendency that began when Barack Obama won North Carolina’s electoral votes in 2008.

Anderson Clayton was nine years old when Democrats made that breakthrough, and now, at 25, Clayton is stepping in to rebuild the party and finish the job of turning North Carolina blue. Eventually.

“It's not a two-year build back that we're talking about, it's a 10-year rebuild of our party,” Clayton, who was elected chair of the North Carolina Democratic Party in mid-February, tells Progress Report. “I don't see it as just us looking at 2024, because this is going to be an education that's going to have to take a long time.”

Politics is often about immediate satisfaction, so the appeal Clayton’s long term-pitch underscores just how little the status quo was delivering for local Democrats. Clayton’s victory over Bonnie Richardson, the 73-year-old incumbent, qualifies as an upset — Richardson had the backing of the party’s highest ranking state officials, including Gov. Cooper and Attorney General Josh Stein — but it was not at all a fluke. Two of three incumbent state party vice chairs were also unseated by much younger activists in November.

The new NC Democratic Party leadership

It was as tension-free an insurgency as it can get, and Clayton and the new executive board were quick to display party unity the elected officials that had not endorsed them. Making peace was mutually beneficial, because the new team represents the generational sea change that supporters hope can breathe new life into the party in places where it has all but withered and died.

While the age gap between the outgoing and incoming leadership slate is significant, it was the differences in their political and tactical philosophies that won over NCDP voters. After serving this past cycle as chair of both the rural Person County Democratic Party and the entire state party chairs’ association, Clayton saw up close the consequential deficiencies that have sabotaged efforts at building power. 

“I was just tired of seeing people on the ground not get the resources and time and attention that they deserve,” Anderson tells Progress Report. “I wanted to make sure that folks on the ground had what they needed in order to organize their communities and had the backing of the state party to really show up.”

Democrats nationwide have spent the past two decades increasingly locked in on the suburban and liberal professional voter from metropolitan areas, a targeted strategy that has paid off in states such as Colorado and Virginia. In North Carolina, the strategy has meant placing much of the focus on the Research Triangle, a high-tech metro area that has grown substantially, but not enough to overcome the state’s geography and deliver a lasting government realignment. 

The math is stark: 78 of North Carolina’s 100 counties are in rural parts of the state, and with Democrats struggling in the major metro suburbs, the more urban counties just don’t have the population density or liberal hegemony to make up for the geographic disparity. A vast majority of North Carolina’s rural counties shifted further to the right in November, an alarming trend that Republicans will seek to further exploit when drawing new legislative and Congressional maps later this year. 

Clayton is clear-eyed about the new structural and political obstacles that Democrats now face. Instead of pouring money into TV ads and consultants, she envisions a community-driven, button-up rebuild that focuses on improving lives in tangible ways. Clayton plans to hire organizers to work in each of North Carolina’s 100 counties, and while that may not sound too dissimilar from promises made by national Democratic leaders and other state parties, the aim is more holistic than improving name recognition and winning votes.

“I’m against the idea that we have to always be so extractive rather than proactively trying to help communities,” she says. “I want people to understand the Democratic Party right now, with the investments that they're making in rural areas, they’re not just saying, ‘rural areas, figure it out on your own.’ They're saying, ‘we see a future for you, and we're investing in that right now.’”

In this case, the investments come from the federal government’s huge American Rescue Plan, infrastructure law, and Inflation Reduction Act, and Clayton envisions going far beyond simply taking credit for the new projects and programs that those laws wind up funding, as national Democrats often urge in messaging memos.

The vision is as much about building power for working people as it is about building power for the Democratic Party, so Clayton wants county chairs and organizers holding town hall meetings, soliciting ideas, and accompanying people to hearings to advocate for spending on projects that would benefit the entire community. 

This is where Clayton’s on-the-ground experience is a boon. In Person County, she worked with residents from across the political spectrum to lobby the government on quality of life issues that generated community-oriented solutions. The issues can seem small and parochial, but that’s the point; when Clayton helped local residents in Person County organize a proposal to turn vacant county-owned land into a public park, they attended city council meetings and met with elected officials, which helped to demystify the process.

When the park was built, “it showed people what government is and what it's supposed to be, and that's people-oriented,” she says.

The strategy, it should be noted, isn’t just aimed at rural communities. Democrats also slumped a bit with voters of color and young voters last fall, an alarming development that demands the same micro-local engagement from results-driven organizers. Clayton wants organizers on campus at each of North Carolina’s 16 public colleges. Those sort of intimate connections will also encourage local residents to run for local office, alleviating an ongoing challenge that Democrats face in a state with a part-time legislature and even lower-paid local officials.

“I want working people in these positions, folks that have the lived experiences to understand the issues,” she says. “Right now in North Carolina, that's hard to do because you have a citizen legislature that only makes $13,000 a year. The majority of the people that make up our party are working people: teachers, nurses, folks that care about their service workers like my city council member, Shaina Outlaw, who works at McDonald's full time. She’s somebody who has a lived experience of what it's like to be working in the service industry right now.”

Anderson Clayton☀️ @abreezeclayton

Shaina just called me to say she got health insurance for the first time in her life today, because she’s going to be an elected official. Shaina works at McDonald’s full time without health insurance. That’s why we fight for universal health care. EVERYONE deserves it. ✊

The bigger things will follow; North Carolina Republicans were finally pressured into expanding Medicaid after years of refusing to do so, which will provide insurance and care to up to 600,000 people. Activism around housing, broadband, and other critical investments will likely be aimed at local governments over the next several years, given the GOP’s priorities. 

After Democrats left around 40 legislative seats uncontested in 2022, Clayton’s first major goal is to run legitimate candidates in every single district in 2024. Generating the enthusiasm required to contest gerrymandered districts may be difficult, but at least they’ll have a decent idea of the map this time around after several cycles of uncertainty. 

Every contested district means more boots on the ground for the statewide races, which will go a long way to deciding the fate of abortion rights in both the state and the southeastern United States. The presumptive GOP candidate, noted homophobe and sexist Lt. Governor Mark Robinson, would take advantage of a potential Republican supermajority to send a purple state careening to the very far right.  

With a gerrymander in place, it will be even more critical for Clayton and the new-look North Carolina Democratic Party  — they’re in the market for a new executive director, if you’re interested — to break through in every part of the state. From down at the grassroots level, the party’s new chair sees a long road with plenty of opportunity.

“Rural North Carolina is extremely diverse; that’s not something people think about the rural South, but 51% of my city [Roxboro] is Black, and that’s what helped us win council elections — people wanted to see themselves in representation for the first time,” Clayton says. “That could be possible all over North Carolina right now, with indigenous people, the AAPI population, and Hispanic population. We just need to reach out again.”

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