I spent two weeks visiting and talking to organizers and volunteers in the states where Hope Springs from Field PAC volunteers were canvassing last year. The first week, my Western States swing, took place in December and were diaried here (Arizona, Nevada, Montana, Wisconsin and Michigan). Earlier this month, i hit Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia and Northern Florida. This diary summarizes what our North Carolina volunteers decided we would focus on in that state. Unlike the prior states i had visited, North Carolina has no Senate election, nor does it have a Reproductive Freedom amendment to vote on this year.
Our work in North Carolina is, basically, a pure Electoral College play, a state the Biden campaign thinks it can flip. It is so serious that it has already named senior campaign operatives to run his campaign in the state.
I met with volunteers and organizers in 4 different areas in the state. Like the six states before North Carolina, there was interest in hearing about the Ohio referendum but not much anticipation that we could learn much from it here. Instead, the goals our volunteers here wanted to discuss centered around two things: redistricting and expanding the electorate.
North Carolina’s new maps for the 2024 elections, passed by the General Assembly on Wednesday, are likely to give Republicans who drew them at least three more seats in Congress and shore up their supermajority in the legislature.
With state law allowing no role for the governor in redistricting, Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper cannot take any action to block them from becoming law.
Democrats say the maps are gerrymandered, and they are likely to end up in the courts, where Republican Senate Majority Leader Paul Newton of Cabarrus County predicted they will be upheld as “fair and legal.”
Our volunteers and organizers in North Carolina were plenty steamed that Republicans waited so long to enact the new maps (six weeks before candidate filing ended).
North Carolina has long been one of the most gerrymandered states in the country, as well as the subject of years of legal battles. Last year, the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled that a previous gerrymandered map was illegal, and court-drawn lines were used in the midterm elections, producing more competitive districts and, ultimately, an evenly divided congressional delegation.
The redrawing of the state’s congressional districts followed years of litigation in state and federal courts and has sparked a new round of litigation. But, as our volunteers pointed out, Republicans struck too late to change the law before the 2024 election. Like Florida before the 2022 elections, Republicans packed Democrats into Blue Districts. “Those looming GOP pickups will bolster the party’s chances of defending their narrow House majority next year by erasing or even surpassing Republican losses elsewhere in the South, where courts have begun tossing out congressional lines for diluting the power of Black voters.”
To no one’s surprise, a group of Black and Latino voters in North Carolina sued to overturn the new Congressional map, because of racial gerrymandering:
The lawsuit filed Monday focuses on Districts 1, 6, 12, and 14. These districts are unconstitutional because they intentionally weaken minority voting power, the lawsuit says.
[...]
The lawsuit quotes a 2017 US Supreme Court decision in another North Carolina case over congressional districts: “the sorting of voters on the grounds of their race remains suspect even if race is meant to function as a proxy for other (including political) characteristics.”
My visit did not end the discussion on redistricting, but our North Carolina volunteers seem to be settling on a bifurcated effort to preserve the Democratic seat in NC-01 (thus expanding our efforts North) and continue to expand the electorate in the areas where we had already been successful.
Hope Springs from Field volunteers knocked on 348,988 doors in North Carolina last year. Almost million doors (901,529) over the last three years — more than 22% of the households in the state. We registered 125 New Voters in the state, and re-registered 634 (for a total of 759 voters registered at their doors). We collected 1,148 Constituent Service Requests here, and we found the CSRs to be extremely popular in the minority communities where we knocked (African-American and Asian-Americans more than Hispanics).
Hope Springs from Field PAC has been knocking on doors since 2021 in a grassroots-led effort to prepare the Electoral Battlegrounds in what has been called the First and Second Rounds of a traditional Five Round Canvass. We are taking those efforts to the doors of Democrats and unaffiliated voters with a systematic approach that reminds them not only that Democrats care, but Democrats are determined to deliver the best government possible to all Americans.
Obviously, we rely on grassroots support, so if you support field/grassroots organizing, voter registration (and follow-up) and our efforts to protect our voters, we would certainly appreciate your support:
https://secure.actblue.com/donate/fistfulofsteel
Hope Springs from Field PAC understands that volunteer to voter personal interactions are critical. We believe that in-person voter contact that is interactive and volunteer-driven is key to success in 2024. But we need your help.
We raise money before we start knocking on doors in order to pay for literature (we leave a piece of lit at every house we target) and for access to the voter file (VAN). We dropped more than 2,066,424 pieces of lit in Ohio last year, and we are still trying to pay off the debt to the printer for our GOTV literature we dropped in October and November. We’ll need to do that before we can start printing up 2024 lit!
There was definitely a general consensus among our volunteers in North Carolina that the political establishment in the state is doing everything it can to keep recent arrivals and minorities from gaining even a modicum of power. At several stops i heard the mantra that North Carolina had at least the number of unregistered potential voters that Stacey Abrams had registered in Georgia. One thing i did point out, though, to the volunteers i talked to was that the D6 region of the AME (Black) Church in Georgia had more congregations and were more politically active before 2018. But at one of my stops, several volunteers pushed back, noting that even if the Black Churches in North Carolina were starting from scratch, North Carolina had more HBCUs than Georgia, and more active Divine 9 chapters.
Yes, We Can!
Hope Springs will be working to Expand the Electorate as well as expanding our Early Organizing with our Issues Questionnaire into Congressional District 1 this year with the intent on winning North Carolina for the president. Volunteers had a lot to say about Biden in these discussions, some expressing disappointment, others praising Biden’s appointment to the Supreme Court of the first Black Woman and others wondering why we didn’t see more of the vice-president. There was also am expressed desire to see the national party spend more in the state than it had in 2022. “Cheryl Beasley could have won if they had.”
But our volunteers were focused on the possibility of turning North Carolina blue! And they were excited to hear about the Biden campaign’s inclusion of their state in his efforts. Trump’s margin of victory was the smallest in North Carolina (and Joe Biden’s two-party vote share was the smallest in Georgia). So while this isn’t unexpected, our volunteers here were laser-focused on the question of resources. And they were happy that Biden was appointing campaign staff for North Carolina and they were even more happy when i pointed out that the campaign hadn’t announced these kinds of appointments for every (other) Swing State.
And they were excited that we were carrying over our special projects from last year. These two special projects were an intensive Voter Registration effort in the counties that Jhacova Williams found had lower voter registration rates among African-Americans than the norm. “Black Americans who reside in counties in the South where there was a higher number of lynchings from 1882 to 1930 have lower voter registration today.” Hope Springs has been using this data to target Voter Registration efforts in those counties, especially in our recruiting and prepping Divine 9 chapters to canvass in counties like Chatham and Rowan (among others). North Carolina is not the only state, Georgia and Northern Florida are also part of this program.
The other special program is organizing Voter Photo ID Days for primarily African-American voters who do not possess the required identification to vote now. Voters can obtain a free Photo ID at their local Boards of Elections and voters seem to find this option less embarrassing and time consuming than trying to get one at their local DMV. Our North Carolina volunteers are eager to catch up to Georgia in this regard!
If you are able to contribute to our efforts to protect Democratic voters, especially in minority communities, expand the electorate, and believe in grassroots efforts to increase voter participation and election protection, please do. We need your help:
https://secure.actblue.com/donate/fistfulofsteel
You can follow that link for our mailing address, as well (for those who would rather send us a check). Thank you for your support! This work depends on you!