Winning in North Carolina
If Democrats are going to save democracy and preserve freedom, they’ve got to win elections where it’s hard; where the margins are close and turnout is everything. Places like North Carolina, which Gov. Roy Cooper calls “the swingiest of swing states, the purplest of purple states.”
North Carolina has been hotly contested since at least 2008, when Barack Obama momentarily turned the state blue. There have been struggles over redistricting, voting rights and Medicaid expansion, and culture war skirmishes like the infamous “House Bill 2,” which cracked down on bathrooms used by trans kids. Cooper, a Democrat in his second term, has been constantly at odds with a gerrymandered legislature that’s just a few votes short of a Republican super-majority.
Whatever happens in North Carolina Nov. 3 will be felt far beyond the Tarheel State. In its Senate race, Democrat Cheri Beasley is in a tight race for the seat of a retiring Republican, Richard Burr. Beasley, the first Black elected chief justice of the state Supreme Court, is facing Ted Budd, a gunstore-owning election-denier endorsed by Trump, in a race that could decide control of the Senate. Voting has already begun, and pollsters say the race is too close to call. Democrats also have a shot at picking up a couple of House seats in North Carolina, which could be equally important.
I spent some time in North Carolina on my Rediscover America tour. I was drawn to Wilmington by the mostly-untold story of a white supremacist coup. Reconstruction, that pivotal era of American politics, played out at different paces in different places. Federal Reconstruction officially ended in 1877, but the seeds of its dream of a multi-racial democracy took root in Wilmington and other North Carolina communities. Black Republicans, white Republicans and rural populists found common cause in Fusion tickets. “Fusionists” won a majority in the state Legislature in 1894 and elected a governor in 1896. Wilmington, then North Carolina’s largest city, had a Black majority population that elected a Fusionist city council, a white Fusionist mayor and a Black police chief.
The counter-revolution, organized by white Democrats and “Red Shirt” militias, proved fierce. They rigged the 1898 election by threatening Black voters into staying home. They forced the mayor and city council to resign at gunpoint and installed themselves in their place. They went on a killing spree in Black neighborhoods and drove thousands of people out of town. I wrote about it here: https://www.rickholmes.net/telling-wilmingtons-secrets .
There is shame in the violence and tyranny of the Wilmington white supremacists, but North Carolina can also draw inspiration from the Fusionist revolution that preceded it. Today’s Carolina Democrats – a different breed from the southern Democrats of a century ago – are consciously building a multi-racial coalition, one that bridges the urban-rural divide, that welcomes everyone into the democratic process.
“We have relied on our diversity to be successful,” Cooper says. “We’re so much better when we’re diverse.”
You don’t have to live in North Carolina to help the good guys win. Cooper spoke on Zoom recently to activist volunteers from across the country, encouraging them to join North Carolinians in phone-banking, texting and sending postcards to voters. For those who prefer to campaign face-to-face, he said, North Carolina is lovely in October.
Campaigns need money too, especially in the closing weeks. But campaigns have a tendency to invest heavily right up to Election Day, then disappear. They spend millions on TV commercials and DC consultants, and pennies on the voters’ communities. I’d rather support organizations that are building democracy year-round, engaging with voters face-to-face, protecting voters’ access at the precinct level, winning races up and down the ballot. For example, here are two North Carolina groups that were the focus of Cooper’s call:
- Advance Carolina (https://advancecarolina.org/) is an independent, Black-led, organization active in building political and economic power in Black communities across the state. They are doubling down on 30 key races in 25 counties in addition to sending Cheri Beasley to the Senate. The money they raise will help them contact 150,000 voters.
- The North Carolina A. Philip Randolph Educational Fund (https://ncapref.org/) is laser-focused on the rural northeast part of the state, one of the densest concentrations of Black voters, who often feel alienated from politics and government at all levels. “We can definitely win in Northeast NC,” said Melvin Montford, president of the organization, but it’s going to take a lot of work.”
You can help both these organizations mobilize rural Black voters in North Carolina, not just this fall but for many elections to come, with a single secure donation to https://secure.actblue.com/donate/get_out_the_vote_in_nc.
One of the lessons of Reconstruction is that voting rights are the cornerstone of a just democracy. Another is that justice and equality in the South are the business of every American. With so much on the line, America can’t afford to have blue-state voters sitting on the sidelines. North Carolina needs us. So do Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Ohio, Arizona and Florida. Let’s join them in building a Blue Wave and a better democracy.