In recent years, North Carolina Democrats have helplessly watched their numbers plummet amid a string of crushing defeats that have rendered the party nearly powerless.

 

Tied to a national platform that doesn’t always resonate with voters in the rural South, a president with low approval ratings going into his reelection campaign and little support in the state’s legislative or judicial institutions, North Carolina’s Democratic Party now looks to a new generation of leaders to plant the seeds of victory at the federal, state and local level.

They failed to stop Donald Trump from winning North Carolina in 2016 and 2020.

They failed to win U.S. Senate seats in 2020 and 2022.

They failed to maintain control of the state Supreme Court after losing three seats since 2020, flipping the court to Republican control with a 5-2 majority.

They failed to prevent General Assembly Republicans from regaining a supermajority in 2022, drastically reducing the power of Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper — one of just six statewide elected Democrats.

More trouble is on the horizon for North Carolina Democrats; the state’s congressional delegation swung to a 7-7 tie in 2022 after racially gerrymandered districts were struck down; however, the new Republican Supreme Court recently reversed two decisions handed down by the previous court that will allow the Republican-dominated General Assembly, unchecked, to reinstitute something like the previously struck-down racial and/or partisan gerrymanders.

Dems will be lucky to send three candidates to Congress in 2024.

Perhaps the biggest blow for Democrats, not just in North Carolina but nationally, was the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson. The ruling eliminated the underpinnings of Roe v. Wade and led to abortion restrictions passing, over Cooper’s veto, in May.  

“I don’t think they’re going to stop with this,” said Anderson Clayton, North Carolina Democratic Party chair. “I think what should be on anyone’s mind right now is that the Republican Party has really taken the approach of, ‘we have to have a regression of rights to maintain power in this state and in this country.’ When you look at that, you have to sit there and think, ‘well, they’re not just coming for women, they’re coming for the LGBTQ community, they’re coming for people of color, they’re coming for anyone that doesn’t fit within the boxes that we all are supposed to check so neatly.’”

Elected in February, the 25-year-old Clayton ousted incumbent Bobbie Richardson, in office since February 2021. Although Clayton served as chair of the Democratic Party in Person County, she’s not seen as the kind of party insider that usually gets leadership roles in the NCDP.

The Supreme Court’s ruling overturning Roe was unpopular with nearly two-thirds of U.S. voters, and Clayton says the party should organize around it in 2024.

“I think that in North Carolina, one of the things that we didn’t lean into hard enough in 2022 was that issue. I think that we actually spent a lot of time running from it in some ways, especially in rural North Carolina. There’s this whole assumption that talking about choice in a rural area, and other in places in our state, is not worthwhile,” she said. “I’m talking about the freedom to own your own body as an issue that can win in rural North Carolina.”

Statewide, the number of registered Democrats has decreased from 2.6 million on Jan. 1, 2016 to 2.4 million on June 3, 2023. Keeping Democrats engaged with the party and its candidates has proven difficult and adds to the challenges faced by Clayton’s Democrats in 2024.

“Our party has really gotten far away from, I think, being the party of going out and trying to find our folks and trying to register voters and trying to call more people into our party, rather than really just trying to galvanize our base every three months before an election cycle,” she said. “I want to be out and active now.”

Her plan also involves direct voter contact and pre-election education based around the Affordable Connectivity Program and Biden’s $35 insulin price cap.

Clayton said that the Biden campaign has given her the indication that it will spend heavily in North Carolina. Nobody quite knows what that will look like for now. It may be all television ad buys. It may be all-in on presumptive 2024 Dem governor nominee, Attorney General Josh Stein. It may be something else.

The Biden campaign, Clayton said, also told her that it will have boots on the round early, but nobody quite knows what that will look like, either. It may be offices full of staffers in urban Democratic strongholds. It may be field operatives in rural or swing districts. It may be none of the above, and none of it may matter if Democrats — a minority party in North Carolina with dwindling membership — don’t have the mechanisms to spread their message.

“Infrastructure takes time,” Clayton said. “And that’s not the answer that I know a lot of people want to hear from me right now, but I think that if we don’t take the time to build this infrastructure now, we’re not going to be in a good place come 2024.”

In some places, building infrastructure becomes much more difficult for Democrats, to the detriment of the state party and statewide candidates.

North Carolina’s 11th Congressional District is one of those places. Nonpartisan redistricting website davesredistricting.org puts the 11th at 53.6% Republican, based on composite voter performance from 2016 though 2020.

But some of those counties consistently perform above 70% for Republicans, ensuring GOP strangleholds on local governments and contributing excess Republican votes — estimated to be on the order of 30,000 or 40,000 — to statewide candidates.

Macon County Republican Sen. Kevin Corbin’s district is 62.2% red. Fellow Macon County Republican Rep. Karl Gillespie’s is 71.5%. Haywood County Republican Rep. Mark Pless’ is 59.9%. Swain County Republican Rep. Mike Clampitt’s is 54.5%.

Although the 11th Congressional District has been redrawn several times in the past decade, no Democrat has been able to come close to their Republican competitor since Democratic Rep. Heath Shuler retired before the 2012 election that vaulted Mark Meadows into the national spotlight.

Most recently, three-term Hendersonville Sen. Chuck Edwards defeated Buncombe County Commissioner Jasmine Beach-Ferrara by 9.5%, a recent high-water mark for western Dems but still disappointingly distant.

Swannanoa Democrat Katie Dean was a candidate in that Primary Election, placing second to Beach-Ferrara with 26% of the vote. Dean was seen as more moderate than Beach-Ferrara and has used her strong 2022 performance to become the NC-11 Democrats’ new district chair.

When she was elected unopposed on May 20, Dean said she’d work hard to ensure that the party’s darkest days had passed.

As she begins her term, Dean faces substantial erosion in every single one of her NC-11 counties — the party infrastructure Clayton needs to spread the party’s message.

The counties that currently comprise the 11th have lost almost 30,000 registered Democrats from Jan. 1, 2017, through Jan. 1, 2023 — more than 15% of the Democratic base in the district. Certainly, some of those people are now unaffiliated voters who still support Democratic candidates, but some of them aren’t.

“From 2010 on, we have had a really profound impact from extreme gerrymandering that disenfranchises voters across the board, and that has ramifications up and down the ballot,” Dean said. “That has a serious impact when it comes to fundraising and candidate recruitment for competitive ballots, particularly in the rural counties.”

Accordingly, Dean hasn’t yet heard of any Democrats jumping up to run in the 11th, although that’s also a function of potential gerrymandering at the hands of the General Assembly because nobody knows for certain what the 11th District will look like in the 2024 elections.

Despite the uphill battle, Dean thinks the key to solving the problem of declining interest is building competitive tickets that will draw unaffiliated voters back into the fold.

As with Clayton’s plan, that’s going to require effective messaging, and it’s going to require infrastructure — county level infrastructure.

“Geographically, this is a very large district. We have a lot of county chairs. That’s a lot of cooks in the kitchen,” Dean said. “The biggest thing that I would like to build, cultivate and see is coordination and shared resources, from county to county, so that when we objectively look at what’s working and what’s not working, we’re being open-minded and flexible, to organize in every way possible.”

Haywood County is the largest rural county in NC-11 by population, and the third-largest overall, behind Buncombe and Henderson. It’s also one of those NC-11 counties that has felt the impact of declining Democratic support over the past decade, on the order of 27%.

In 2022, the party lost the state’s only elected tax collector, Democrat Greg West, in favor of a 21-year-old Republican who hadn’t yet graduated from college and had no real-world job experience.

By all accounts, West had done a stellar job over the previous four years, and his only flaw was the “D” next to his name.

Haywood’s Democrats could field only two candidates for the three county commission seats up for election in 2022 and failed to stop a three-time loser who hadn’t paid his taxes for nearly 15 years — Republican Terry Ramey — from winning a seat.

In 2016, the commission had a 3-2 Democrat majority. Now, there’s not a single Democrat on the commission.

“At this point in time, we have a large number of Republican office holders and a smaller number of Democratic office holders, which poses a challenge for the Democratic Party to present its message and to be a presence in local and state government decisions,” said Sybil Mann, newly-elected chair of the HCDP.

Mann, who is married to Democratic Waynesville Town Council Member Chuck Dickson, said that among other things, her party is currently working on plans to recruit Democratic candidates for 2024 county commission and school board races.

Training and supporting those candidates is as important as recruiting them, Mann said.

“I think the Democratic Party can help candidates by offering campaign training, how to campaign door-to-door, how to use volunteers, how to target voters with a message,” she said.

That involves digital literacy, but it also involves maintaining a more active presence in local government affairs; over the past few years, public comment sessions have become the hottest ticket in town, with a constant barrage of misinformation presented by speakers — overwhelmingly Republicans.

Democrats have utterly failed to compete in this arena by advancing their values and countering misinformation with facts.

“We need to be an opposition party that promotes accountability,” Mann said.  

Still, many of Mann’s local challenges come full circle to the national party’s disconnect with voters in the rural South.

“I don’t want to focus on the national party,” she said. “To the extent that there is a state party and a national party, that’s important, because Democrats fight for people, we protect people, we’re there for the underdog,” she said. “That’s important. But right now, we’ve got a lot of needs in Haywood County that I think would benefit from Democratic solutions. We really need to concentrate on those.”