Welcome to a Saturday edition of Progress Report.
Anderson Clayton wouldn’t just be forgiven for gloating after Election Night, any reasonable person would expect the North Carolina Democratic chair to be in party mode given what her party pulled off on Tuesday.
The numbers are almost hard to believe:
Going into Election Day, Republicans held a 24-seat majority in the state House. Democrats flipped 22 seats and now hold a 24-seat advantage.
Republicans held 10-seat supermajority in the state Senate. They didn’t just break the supermajority, but are one good recount away from flipping that chamber too.
After Republicans gerrymandered the Congressional map to give themselves a 11-3 advantage, Democrats still won 10 out of 14 seats.
Add in the financial mismatch, the prominence of the incumbents that cash-strapped Democrats took down, and the satisfaction of seeing every GOP plan backfire, and celebrations are surely in order. But as much as Clayton is excited about the epic turnaround, the 28-year-old state chair isn’t satisfied.
“What I was looking at on Tuesday night is how many races that we we didn’t win that we could have,” she told Progress Report this week (watch the entire conversation above). “I think that if we had had more money in the South, if we had been able to do more, we would see North Carolina not just chasing a Democratic trifecta, [but winning one].”
Ruing near-misses after a historic election sweep speaks to Clayton’s ambition and just how far the party has come since 2023, when she upset an insider to become the nation’s youngest state chair. NC Dems had just failed to run candidates in 44 of the 170 legislative districts and lost their majority on the state Supreme Court.
Clayton came into office just as the GOP legislature was passing one of the most extreme gerrymanders in the country, cracking and packing urban areas to take away their power. The only way the party would have any chance of making a comeback was to rebuild a non-existent infrastructure in the rural parts of the state.
I asked Clayton how she rebuilt that infrastructure, starting with recruiting candidates who were willing to run races they very, very likely wouldn’t win in 2024:
The top-notch recruitment continued this cycle, as Clayton drove through rural North Carolina, where she grew up, to look for candidates who weren’t so much politicians as normal working people who understood intimately what it’s like to struggle in this stratified economy.
That included LaKesha Womack, an ordained minister and business coach who just a few years ago was broke after health struggles and living in a motel. Womack ran for Congress in the state’s 14th district, raising just $56,000 to compete in a seat that Donald Trump won by 15 points back in 2024.
Nothing about the paragraph suggests any hope of winning a federal election, and that’s before factoring in her opponent, Republican Rep. Tim Moore, a former NC state House speaker who had $2 million in his bank account.
And yet Womack, running as grassroots a campaign for Congress as is possible, beat Moore by more than two points. It was one of several massive upsets in the state’s Congressional races, alongside the defeat of NRCC chair Richard Hudson in NC-8.
There were a few building blocks to the success, including running candidates who were already deeply enmeshed in their communities and willing to go even further still, which helps combats the deluge of negative advertisements that were way out of their price range.
“I think we negate sometimes how much retail politics actually still matter,” she says. “If you’ve shaken the hand and you know somebody, it’s a whole heck of a lot harder to believe an ad that you’re getting in your mailbox, or on your television screen or your phone screen, because you’re able to say, ‘No, that’s not how they approached me. That’s not how they actually appeared to me. And I’m gonna believe what I’ve actually seen versus what I’m hearing online.’”
The environment was obviously incredibly conducive to Democratic gains, but it took more than a national backlash to overcome the hideous gerrymanders and regular blowout margins in rural North Carolina. Incredible volunteers help a lot, and for Clayton, permanent party infrastructure also made a huge difference. The philosophy is simple: “I want to be a party that gives, not a party that takes.”
That starts with VoteBuilder, the ultra-valuable voter file database that the DNC gives to every state party. Many of them charge candidates for access to the file, but Clayton is all too happy to provide it for free. The party even provided a how-to training guide for any staffer or candidate who wanted to use it.
“If a candidate comes to me and they say, ‘I want to run for office,’ I’m like, ‘Great, I want to introduce you to my digital team that can help you build a website, that’ll take your headshot, that’ll make you look professional, and that will engage in a way to make you seem like you have a platform,’” she says. “I've got a training department and a data department that's geared up and ready to help you figure out how do you go out and target the doors to use that data source that we've got.
Tuesday was a generational victory for the party, but not every year is going to be this conducive to Democrats, and barring an unexpected state Senate victory or GOP defection, North Carolina will almost certainly remain gerrymandered next cycle. So as remarkable as it was for them to win this year, it’ll be almost as difficult for Democrats to hold on to many of the seats they flipped next cycle, while taking back the state Supreme Court — a key to ending the gerrymandering down the line — will also be an existential challenge.
This is already at the forefront of Clayton’s mind, and she’s not taking any time off before kickstarting the defense plan. There will be more retail politics and ground-level organizing, starting with Thanksgiving food banks to help communities struggling with the price of groceries. A legislature pushing for a minimum wage increase, the end to “right to work” laws, and municipal broadband… it’s all on the table as the party focuses on helping working people. It’s the only way they’ll stay in power.
That and a national party and donor class that takes the South more seriously. They’ve seen what can be done on a shoestring budget; donations will help cement the progress and drive it forward.
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