When Democratic North Carolina state Sen. Rachel Hunt announced her candidacy this week for lieutenant governor, she wrapped it in a cautionary message for voters: "I’m running for Lt. Governor because the Republican plan isn’t this year’s 12-week abortion ban; it’s next year’s total abortion ban."
Republicans, she suggested, won't stop at the 12-week abortion ban they rammed through the state Legislature last month. They're coming back for more—just as soon as they have the votes to do it.
North Carolina Democrats are betting Republicans overplayed their hand on abortion—not only passing the ban, but then using their recently ill-acquired legislative supermajority to override Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper's veto of the measure.
Polls suggest Democrats have a point. An Elon University survey released this week found that 45% of Tar Heel voters oppose "recent changes" to the state's abortion laws, while just 23% support them (33% neither supported nor opposed).
A Carolina Forward poll, conducted by Change Research immediately after Republicans passed the 12-week ban, found that 59% of North Carolinians say abortion should be legal in all/most cases, while 40% say it should be illegal in all/most cases. Only 10% supported making abortion illegal in all cases.
The Biden campaign also sees potential in the state President Joe Biden lost in 2020 by 1.4 points, his narrowest defeat of the cycle.
"We really expect North Carolina to be competitive," Kevin Munoz, a Biden campaign spokesperson, told NPR's Tamara Keith. In a recent 2024 strategy memo, the Biden campaign names North Carolina and Florida as the two states it is seeking to flip next year, while also holding on to five battlegrounds it won in 2020 (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin). The effort includes an early investment in those key states, including a seven-figure ad buy that could yield dividends for Tar Heel organizers.
In North Carolina, specifically, the Biden camp plans to stress the president's job creation and federal investments in the state, but it also views the GOP abortion ban as a major distinction between the two parties. "It demonstrates the stark contrast in leadership and the choice that the people of North Carolina are going to have in 2024," Munoz told NPR. "A president and a vice president that are going to work to codify Roe into federal law—or one of the extreme MAGA Republicans who supports a national ban."
Beyond the financial investment, North Carolina is also getting a jolt of fresh energy and ideas from the state’s new Democratic Party chair, Anderson Clayton, the youngest state party leader in the country at 25.
"I got in this job through a lot of hard fight and organizing from young folks across our state who are ready to see a new direction," Clayton told Daily Kos several weeks ago on The Brief. (Side note: The episode was pure fire! Highly encourage a listen.)
Clayton, who grew up in the rural town of Roxboro (roughly 8,000 people), doesn't shy away from saying the Democratic Party has left many voters behind by focusing almost exclusively on densely populated cities. In fact, Clayton is making candidate recruitment one of her chief goals after Democrats left 44 state legislative seats entirely uncontested last year, a key contributor to the Republican Party’s current supermajority.
"I want to put people in every seat," Clayton told us. "I want to give everybody somebody to vote for because we know that democracy is not democracy without choices, and a lot of our Democrats— especially in rural North Carolina—haven't had someone else to vote for in a really long period of time."
It's a formula she has already proven can work. As the chair of rural Person County (population: 39,000), Clayton helped flip Roxboro’s City Council from red to blue in 2021. How? The party ran three "amazing" Black Democrats, she says, in a town that's 51% Black. Unbelievably, that wasn’t being done before.
While some Democrats question the return on investment of putting money into field organizing across the state, Clayton says it's crucial. She reels off a half dozen races that Democrats lost in last year's midterms by a margin of 600 votes or less.
"Those were actual investments that we should have made in order to be able to get back votes and actually have those seats," she explains. They are very seats that would have deprived Republicans of the super majority they used to impose their highly unpopular abortion ban on the state. "Even if you're in the reddest of rural—to me, you are still worth fighting for, your vote is still worth fighting for, people are still worth talking to, because I came from a place like that."
That type of ethic can improve Democratic performance across the state simply by losing less in every contest.
"This year, I am chasing after the margins," Clayton says.
Clayton's vision is one piece of a trifecta that could boost Democrats' chances of retaking the state in next year's presidential contest, not to mention keeping the governor's mansion and dismantling Republicans' supermajority.
Organizing prowess at the state level combined with investments from national Democrats and a once-in-a-generation issue around which to organize—abortion—is the stuff of rocket fuel.
Don't sleep on North Carolina: Republicans are putting it in play and Democrats just might have the infrastructure to make them pay for it.
There have been sooo many hot takes about the 2022 midterms, which is why we're joined on this week's episode of "The Downballot" by Michael Frias and Hillary Anderson of the progressive data firm Catalist to discuss their data-intensive report on what actually happened. They explain how they marry precinct-level election results with detailed voter files to go far beyond what the polls can tell us. Among the findings: Highly competitive races were much more favorable to Democrats than less-contested ones; Republicans paid a "MAGA tax" by nominating extreme candidates; and non-college white women shifted toward Democrats by notable margins compared to 2020.
