Anderson Clayton Makes an Endorsement, Anita Earls Launches Reelection Bid, and Wiley Nickel Acts the Gentleman

 

A. NC Democratic Party Chair Anderson Clayton has endorsed Ben Wikler to head the DNC:

B. NC Supreme Court Associate Justice Anita Earls has begun raising money for what is expected to be a fierce reelection fight in 2026. Her new website went live on January 9th.

C. Former NC Congressman Wiley Nickel, whose district was gerrymandered to guarantee a Republican would win, decided against running for his 13th CD seat (now occupied by Republican Brad Knott). Instead, he announced that he would run for Thom Tillis's U.S. Senate seat in 2026. On December 15, he filed a statement of candidacy with the FEC.

Ex-Governor Roy Cooper has pointedly told reporters that his own candidacy for Tillis's seat is definitely "on the table," though he hasn't announced anything concrete yet. But Wiley Nickel, knowing that the much better known Cooper would beat him in a primary, has told Bryan Anderson that he's "waiting in the wings and developing something of a contingency plan should Cooper decide not to run."

Wise move.

Anderson Clayton Will Continue

 

The best NCDemParty Chair we've seen in maybe decades, AppState grad Anderson Clayton, who took the reins of the NCDP two years ago, has just announced that she's running for another term.

She has a website up, from which I borrow:

Anderson Clayton is an organizer by trade, a proud rural North Carolinian, and the current Chair of the North Carolina Democratic Party. After winning election (and becoming the youngest state party chair in the country) in 2023, she has spent the last two years working to build a better, more responsive NC Democratic Party.

Under Anderson’s tenure, the NCDP has invested in year-round, local organizing; recruiting and supporting candidates who understand that good politicians are good public servants first; and building the infrastructure to win back Democratic power in NC within the next decade.

Anderson has been unstoppable -- quite literally, in motion all the time, visiting all the far-flung county parties had have struggled to redefine themselves in this new dark age, duplicating the Howard Dean model of carrying the banner of the Democratic Party to every red corner. After she took the reins, Clayton immediately became a media presence whose power for communicating far exceeds anything we're remotely used to or could have imagined. She's quick-witted, always prepared, with a common touch and a country accent that puts me in mind of Nashville at its most honest. This line in her announcement letter also caught my attention and represents the heaviest lifting a state party chair has to do:

North Carolina Democrats believe in ceding no ground to the Republican Party, and I promise that we will continue to aggressively recruit candidates to contest every single race.

No one can touch her. No one will run against her. We've got another two super-charged years ahead of us with Anderson at the helm.

Anderson Clayton, Turning Up the Thermostat on NCGOP

 

AP News/Gary Robertson

Yesterday in Raleigh in front of the state Supreme Court, NC Democratic Party Chair Anderson Clayton called out the NCGOP's evident intent to use the smokescreen of "election fraud" and "election integrity" to continue to contest the reelection of Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs (who beat Republican Jefferson Griffin after two recounts by 734 votes). 

Jefferson Griffin, Clayton said, "needs to drop out of the race and concede defeat." Stop the steal.

Based on the stuff that the NCGOP has already done to cripple Democratic office-holders and gerrymander the rest into compliance, Clayton forecast the Republicans' pushing the Riggs reelection into the court system to get it eventually in front of Chief Partisan Paul Newby, who is a grub soldier but thinks himself clean and righteous. 

He's actually the last cog at the top of a Republican power machine in Raleigh that's totally brazen, unafraid to be cruel, expansive in its ambitions for forcing the Right point of view. So there was good logic for Clayton to answer very frankly, “Do I have fear? Absolutely.” Truth is a motivator.

After all, what did Phil Berger and his boys do immediately after four Democrats won statewide office -- governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, and state superintendent of public instruction? They rewrote with S 382 the job descriptions for those four, taking away former powers -- for just one notorious example, the governor's right to have under his executive control the administration of elections, and gives it to Dave Boliek, the brand new Republican state auditor and a partisan hack who used to be a Democrat when that was useful. Berger passed the sweeping reorganization of the Executive Branch in a big hurry, before the session ends and they lose their veto-proof majority in the House. Insult on top of injury -- Berger did it under the guise of "hurricane relief" -- S 382 appropriates zero dollars to hurricane relief -- and thought he could get away with it.

Gov. Cooper vetoed S 382. The veto-proof Republican Senate immediately overrode; but the veto-proof NC House was suddenly shaken by the defection of three mountain Republicans who voted initially against S 382. so the scheduled veto-override vote in the House has waited until today. I have every expectation that all three mountain Republicans will fall in line. The one potential Republican holdout could be Rep. Mark Pless. If he voted to uphold the veto, S 382 would be dead, and Berger & Co. would have to get busy and actually pass some hurricane relief pronto. But I'm skeptical of Pless's standing up to his caucus. 

Money Isn't Everything But It Beats 2nd Place

 

Kudos to the youngest Democratic party chair in the nation. Anderson Clayton deserves much of the credit for excellent fundraising, as she has brought a new energy and a bright vision, and she seems downright indefatigable criss-crossing the state, holding events, cheering on the troops especially in formerly neglected counties where Democrats have in some cases just given up all hope.

Colin Campbell reported:

So far this election cycle, the state Democratic party has raised $5.26 million for its state and federal campaign accounts. The state Republican Party, meanwhile, has raised over $3.34 million across its accounts.

As of the latest campaign finance reports in February, the N.C. Democratic Party had $2.44 million on hand, while the NCGOP had $871,000.

This success is naturally driving MAGA mad. Anderson's personal mantra of "outwork, out-organize, outlast" has them rattled, and they are trying to tear her down. Someone even posted that she looked a lot older than 26, implying ... what? That she's a 50-year-old political ringer brought in to impersonate a vivacious and successful political organizer in her mid-20s who refuses to accept that the North Carolina Democratic Party was finished after the election of 2020. Suck it, GOP.

Clayton will be holding an April 14th fundraiser for the Watauga Democratic Party at Ski Mountain resort between Boone and Blowing Rock. You can get tickets to come see and hear her rousing message of rock-'em, sock-'em for 2024 here.

Nothing Wrong With Democratic "Performance" During Filing

 

I'm indebted to Bryan Anderson and his Substack feature "Anderson Alerts" for this piece of intel: As of yesterday noon (the close of candidate filing in NC), of "120 seats in the NC House, 50 in the NC Senate, 14 U.S. House seats, 10 in Council of State races and four statewide judicial contests, a Democrat will be running in all but four of the 198 races."

That's incredible. Especially considering everything the Republicans have done to gerrymander Democrats into a tiny corner and pass other vote-suppression measures intended to keep the GOP in power forever.

Much of the credit goes to Anderson Clayton, the new Chair of the Party, whose very presence at the helm has inspired so much renewed energy and resolve to keep up the fight even against terrible odds.

Hopeless Target: Moore County (Or Not)

 

Moore County (with its small towns of Carthage, Pinehurst, Southern Pines, and other white-shoe enclaves) does not vote for Democrats unless they're running unopposed (it's happened twice in the last dozen years), and according to records kept by the State Board of Elections, the last time straight-ticket voting was allowed in 2010, some 66.64% of Moore County voters voted straight Republican. Moore is also, incidentally, the home county for Brant Clifton and The Daily Haymaker, the epitome of hard-right Republican acid-bath.

Into such forbidding terrain comes last Monday Anderson Clayton, the 20-something new chair of the NC Democratic Party, in her quest to awaken progressive grassroots in all 100 counties, even the most discouraging ones. This was her reception on the early evening of July 18th in the courtyard next to the Pinehurst Village Hall, gathering the corps of what could become the 2024 ground troops all across the state.

We're constantly reminded of the courage of Howard Dean's "50-state strategy" when he was chair of the DNC, the courage it took and the results it showed. 2006 was the first year Democrats in Watauga County swept the county commission.

We also note that a coalition of progressive orgs is bringing next Monday, July 24, the #UniteNC "accountability tour town hall" to the county seat of Carthage. These town halls, sponsored by Common Cause, NAACP, League of Women Voters, and others, aim to rally opposition to the multitude of regressive and oppressive actions taken by the Republican General Assembly in Raleigh, from regressive court rulings, a new redistricting cycle, and all-important ballot-access,

There are a bunch of other deep-red counties like Moore, and may The Awakening continue.

More Gen Z Progressive Fighters for North Carolina

 

Drew Kromer, when he received
his law degree at UNC

All we senile Democrats dance a little jig -- holding onto a table for balance, because we may be old but we're not prone to suicide -- that the Mecklenburg County Democratic Convention on Saturday elected 26-year-old Drew Kromer as its new chair, and he's already getting the star treatment with a major profile article by Josh Bergeron that appeared in this morning's News and Observer -- "Drew Kromer wants to 'severely cripple' GOP's chances in NC. Here's how he'll do it." 

Who wouldn't click that link?

Short how-to: "...he’s on a mission to build community connections and Democratic Party enthusiasm in areas with few competitive races."

Kromer's clearly a self-starter. While still a student at Davidson College, he became the Democratic chair of Precinct 206 on the Mecklenburg-Iredell County border. He began organizing "a crew that grew to more than 500 members" and raised an eye-popping $150,000 for the precinct (out-raising the entire Mecklenburg Co. party). His newly energized volunteers "cut their teeth" in Davidson town elections and helped Democrat Christy Clark knock off Republican incumbent John Bradford in House District 98 in 2018. (I covered Christy Clark's campaign extensively that year. But I didn't know about Drew Kromer.) Among other things Kromer is planning, he intends to raise the money to hire an executive director for the county party and "professionalize" the operation. (Drew, can we get lunch? Watauga County might have some tips. We've been "professional" for a dozen years.)

Kromer realized that the great Democratic failure in the 2022 elections was complacency in the most progressive counties like Mecklenburg (and incidentally, Watauga), where Democratic candidates have come to dominate most elections and where local government is controlled by a lopsided Democratic majority. Kromer diagnosed the problem in an email during his campaign for chair: “Democrats easily win the vast majority of our local races. Unfortunately, the more races that Democrats are easily able to win, the fewer local campaigns we need, the less excitement that is generated, and the more complacent we become."

Kromer joins 25-year-old Anderson Clayton, the new chair of the NCDP, in the youth movement to regroup and rearm a Democratic Party that's been drifting into senescence. Josh Bergeron mentions other rising Gen Z and Millennials who took over other county parties at this year's conventions: Mackenzie Reedybacon, Cabarrus; Daniel Quick, Stanly; Michael McLamb, Catawba; Travis Lewis, Jackson; and Parron Baxter, Union.

Anderson Clayton to Mark Robinson: Get Your Nose Outta Women's Bidness!

Proving once again that contemporary Republican politicians have absolutely no self-awareness and zero appreciation for irony, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, in his response to Governor Cooper's "state of the state" speech last night, actually said these words: “If the Democrats have their way, they’ll pull us back into an era of government overreach, high taxes, and attacks on our personal freedoms."

To which Anderson Clayton, the new chair of the state Democratic Party, told WRAL, "It’s pretty rich for him to boast about North Carolina's ‘best in business’ status when his extreme policies are exactly the type of thing that would run business out of this state. It's also rich that he would talk about government overreach when he's made clear that he wants to get in the middle of women's health care decisions.”

BREAKING: Anderson Clayton Elected Chair of the NCDP

 

T. Keung Hui, for the Charlotte Observer:

A 25-year-old activist has ousted an incumbent who had backing from the state’s top party leaders to become the new chair of the North Carolina Democratic Party. 

Anderson Clayton, the Person County Democratic Party chair and president of the state party chairs’ association, was elected Saturday to a two-year term as party chair by the N.C. Democratic Party’s Executive Committee, according to multiple sources in the party. 

Clayton had campaigned on the need for change following last fall’s Democratic losses in state races. Democrats lost control of the N.C. Supreme Court, were swept in the N.C. Court of Appeals and lost seats in the General Assembly. Clayton beat incumbent chair Bobbie Richardson, who had been backed by party leaders such as Gov. Roy Cooper and state Attorney General Josh Stein. Richardson, a former state lawmaker, had become the N.C. Democratic Party’s first Black chair in 2021.

Sisyphus Was a Bad Democrat (In Which I Sass Thomas Mills)

 

Most all troubles come from having standards.

--Thomas Berger, Little Big Man

We Democrats are deciduous. We fade, lose heart, become torpid, languish, then the sap rises again and we are passionate.

--Garrison Keillor, Homegrown Democrat

Democrats are always characterized by their gene for unrequited conciliation.

--Jeffrey Toobin, Too Close To Call

Jerry Meek, 2007

Democratic blogger and political consultant Thomas Mills dropped a turd in the punchbowl yesterday -- "The Low Stakes of State Party Chair" -- in which he argues that even if the reformist insurgency of Anderson Clayton wins the election for party chair today, it won't make any difference. Oh, it'll produce a momentary high for the young and the restless. But then, deflation. "The party chair only has as much power as the establishment, both here and in Washington, allows," Mills concludes. "The chair will either cooperate and become an arm of that establishment and have money, or they will buck the establishment and have none."

I pay attention to Thomas Mills, even when he makes me wince. He's a righteous Democrat, gives off the aura of a scrappy street-fighter, but generally speaking, he's moderate to the point of caution. Mills helped recruit Dan McCready to run for Congress in 2017 and worked as a paid consultant on that 2018 campaign. McCready wrote the definitive book on caution. He's not currently in Congress.

Mills remembers the last insurgency that took over the state party differently from me, the administration of Jerry Meek, but Mills was in a better position to observe and knew the insiders better than I, so I don't discount his recitation of facts: 

While he was popular with the party base, Meek never established much of a working relationship with Easley. Not much really changed within party headquarters. The executive director, who oversees the day-to-day operation of the party, stayed the same and kept his working relationship with the governor, which in turn kept the funds necessary to keep the party operational. The state house and state senate caucuses continued to operate as if nothing had happened. Meek was able to tamp down the restlessness among the party faithful, but he couldn’t change the fundamental reality of politics: it takes money, and lots of it.

One correction: Our "restlessness" with the state party in Watauga was more than "tamped down" during those Jerry Meek years. From our perspective, we had a much more open road, paved with cooperation from Raleigh, leading directly to the total sweep of president, governor, and US Senator in 2008 because we had tested and perfected an intense, data-driven field operation (Meek himself came to one of our canvasses to learn). I give Jerry Meek credit for turning several county parties around between 2004 and 2008, because he was deliberately pursuing a "hundred-county strategy" inspired by Howard Dean's "fifty-state strategy." 

Yet Mills doesn't think his impact amounted to much. Maybe he's right. But I'm pretty dug in with my lived experience.

Mills's downer post isn't just about seeing political history differently. It's also about declaring that the current enthusiasm for change in the party is doomed from the get-go, that "not much is going to change regardless of who is state party chair" because of the stranglehold of a self-interested Establishment. The money grip is iron -- eternal, ineluctable, and insidious. 

Much of the dissatisfaction of the party is far beyond anybody’s control. Those who believe Democrats need a year-round organizing operation have never said how they plan to fund it. The state Democratic Party is dependent on the support of the governor or from some organizational component of the national party. There’s no independent funding base for the North Carolina Democratic Party itself.

[Current party chair Bobbie] Richardson is getting blamed for not implementing a robust statewide field program during the 2022 cycle, but that’s not her fault. All of those operations are funded by national money and have been for decades. In 2022, those folks largely took a pass on North Carolina. Field programs are expensive and take millions of dollars to implement in a state the size of North Carolina.

Money, of course, but also whatcha gonna do with money once you get it?

If I believed that no amount of reform, even reform mixed with a widespread willingness to spend sweat equity, was bound to fail, even as it was being born, how the hell could I go on as a party activist? Hell, how could I go on paying the bills as a simple functioning member of a community held together by a social contract?

Yeah, I'm a fucking idealist.

What's Wrong With NC Democrats?

 

Jeffrey Billman is the best hoof journalist in the state. I first read his writing in Indy Week, where he was editor-in-chief for several years. I followed him to an emailed (sometimes daily) political newsletter, "Primer North Carolina," where I learned significant facts about consequential goings-on and admired his clarity, his depth, his instinct for finding the pulse of things, the greatest talent of any good investigative journalist. Billman's a prolific freelance now, and thank gawd for new internet publications like The Assembly, willing to underwrite good investigative journalism. (Subscriptions are more than reasonable and worth it.)

Jeffrey Billman has produced for The Assembly the most revealing investigation of the current fight for the chairmanship of the NCDP, between a 73-year-old incumbent blamed by many grassroots activists for the 2022 debacle and a 25-year-old upstart with proven skills for winning unlikely campaigns. (I've written extensively about both Bobbie Richardson and Anderson Clayton and don't intend to write more. Use the search function up top, if you don't believe me.)

For his article on the Democrats, "Tangled Up in Blue," Billman interviewed a lot of people, but the interview he landed with Morgan Jackson is by far the most diagnostic of what's gone wrong with the Democrats. Morgan Jackson is Chief Political Strategist for Governor Cooper and also for Josh Stein ("Governor in '24!"), and the state Party has traditionally spent money the way the chief political strategist for the governor wanted it spent. So in the current struggle for the chairmanship, you don't get any more establishment than Morgan Jackson. Jackson has his own consulting firm, Nexus Strategies. He has a clear financial stake in the status quo, which happens to be the reelection of Bobbie Richardson. for it's in his interest and in the collective interests of his guys to make sure the gears are turning correctly down at the state Democratic Party HDQs. 

"It all begins and ends with money," Jackson told Billman. Which ... no kidding!

So the big establishment doubt about Anderson Clayton, the insurgent, is pecuniary. Can a 25-year-old upstart be able to raise the money? Billman says the party under Richardson's management raised a record $29 million in the '21-'22 cycle. Can Anderson Clayton do as well? Or even rake in a more average $20 million? She'll actually need more than that to mount a sustenance plan for activist organizing in the rural counties.

You betcha the money will come for Anderson Clayton!  I feel it myself. I don't think I've ever given anything directly to the state Dems (except my sweat and my blood), but with a new leader who has both a vision and a clue, I would be generous. Others would too. The fecklessness of the Raleigh apparatus frankly caused me to resent the county party's assessment for "the sustaining fund," which all county parties are required to pay to the central office. What's the money going to? 

Clayton doesn't lack for confidence in herself. She forecast to Billman that "donors will open their wallets if there’s a clear vision for how to make North Carolina a beacon of the South.” I agree. 

Jonah Garson, the young Chapel Hill lawyer who ran for the NC House in 2020 in the Democratic primary and is a past chair of the Orange County Democratic Party and is currently running for one of the vice-chairmanships of the state party, told Billman:

“I know from being in conversations with donors, mainly in the context of resourcing legislative campaigns, but also as chair of the Orange County Democrats, that there are a number of donors in state and out of state who would love to fund and feel a part of aggressive, on-the-ground field operations,” he said. “But you just need a strong, credible vehicle for building out strategies and executing plans.”

 "Aggressive, on-the-ground field operations." 

Orange County Senator Graig Meyer agreed that the state party has lacked a taste for blood, shying away from aggressive politics and "too dependent on outside groups to attack Republicans instead of doing it themselves." For example, Ted Budd never got successfully tagged as the good ole boy extremist he was.

Anderson Clayton gets the last word: "This party needs bite again."

We'll find out Saturday.

North Carolina Democrats Will Decide Their Future This Weekend

 

Paige Masten put together a good article focusing on the current fight for the leadership of the NC Democratic Party, "After string of losses, some NC Democrats are seeking a new direction," to which a chorus in my immediate vicinity said, "No kidding!" The vote by the Democratic State Executive Committee (SEC) will be this Saturday in a virtual meeting.

Masten's article highlighted the insurgent challenge for the chairmanship of a badly damaged party by Anderson Clayton, about whom I've already written (and cheered) and for whom I feel some grasping hope for the future of the NCDP. The race between Clayton and current chair Bobbie Richardson has certainly turned into Establishment vs. Grassroots Activist, with all the big establishment dogs lining up behind Richardson -- Gov. Cooper, Josh Stein, Cheri Beasley, Jeff Jackson (a particularly disappointing endorsement, because it signals that the congressman is very comfortable with how elections are currently managed in North Carolina, off-brand for Jackson). I wrote it earlier: Richardson has shown little discernible introspection about what's not working in the Party's current iteration. When asked at the Progressive Dems candidate forum what ideas she found useful coming from her competitors, she couldn't think of a thing.

Late yesterday, Indy Week editor Jane Porter announced her publication's endorsement of Clayton, and Carolina Forward director Blair Reeves published an editorial, "Are NC Democrats Ready for a Reckoning?" in which he complains about "the party’s low-energy, battleplan-by-faculty-committee approach." It's all an implicit attack on Bobbie Richardson's administration, though he never mentions her name, and he never comes out and endorses Anderson Clayton (maybe he supports one of the other candidates. There are now four, I believe. There had been five. One of them, Eva Lee of Raleigh, ran as an insurgent progressive with bold ideas for reform but announced on Facebook on January 31 that she was dropping out and endorsing Richardson. Lee included a lengthy explanation for her change of heart in which she admits that she was conclusively swayed by Roy Cooper and the other bigwigs. So much for The Crusade. That Facebook post appears to have disappeared.

I'm clearly a partisan in this race, though I have no vote. Watauga County as a whole has four SEC votes. But it's the big counties of Wake and Mecklenburg and Forsyth and Guilford that have the majority of the 800 SEC votes, because county allotments are made on the basis of total number of votes for governor in the last election. (You see how this pie is baked.) In other words, if delegates are unwilling to buck the Establishment, like Eva Lee, Richardson wins.

Anderson Clayton deserves to win. She's traveled to county parties all over the state, gathering intel on what the more rural counties think and what they want and what they've learned, and through very effective social media she's energized Gen Z with a fire for doing the hard work. I worry actively about where all that new energy goes if Clayton doesn't win. Who wants the same old thing, the top-down (and trickle-down) distribution of party assets? Who wants more of the same? We stand to lose volunteers. Without volunteers, there's no ground game. People will leave not out of spite and anger (oh some will be spiteful and angry) but out of depressive hopelessness that anything is gonna come from the effort.

Time for New Leadership at the NCDP

 

I wasn't gonna flap my fat lip about insider Democratic Party stuff -- at least not right now -- but Governor Roy Cooper and Attorney General Josh Stein -- Democrats both -- force my hand by endorsing Bobbie Richardson for another term as chair of the North Carolina Democratic Party. Following that disastrous election. Josh Stein just yesterday allowed Richardson to put his picture and his endorsement on her social media, and Gov. Cooper endorsed her a couple of days before that.

Meanwhile, Anderson Clayton of Person County has been endorsed (according to her own website) by over 90 Democratic leaders, particularly young electeds and Party activists in rural counties looking for a different kind of losing proposition, maybe even a winning formula.  (There are others in the race for Chair; see below.)

Why Cooper and Stein did their endorsements I don't know -- I'm planning to guess, by-'n'-by -- but it certainly brands the coming election of Party leadership as Establishment v. The Folks With Pitchforks and Big Jugs of Vinegar. The State Executive Committee (SEC), made up of over 800 voting members from all (?) the 100 counties, will elect the Party chair (and several other sub-chairs) at a regular Winter Meeting on February 11.

The last time the establishment candidate for party chair lost the SEC election was in 2005. That was the year of Jerry Meek, who was the insurgent reformer running against the establishment candidate Ed Turlington. Governor Mike Easley had endorsed Turlington. But Meek won. It was a surprise, apparently, and the Howard Dean-inspired upstarts made some real gains in 2006 and 2008. Jerry Meek was, in my long experience with the NCDP, the best state Party chair of this century. Whoever wrote his Wikipedia entry got it right:

As State Chair, Meek worked aggressively to rebuild the State Party’s grassroots network, to expand services and support to local party organizations, to make better use of technology, and to encourage new people – especially young people – to become active in the Democratic Party. He retired as party chair in 2009....

Meek got measurable results in the general elections of both 2006 and 2008, when Barack Obama and Bev Perdue and Kay Hagan all won the state. The general elections of 2006, in rural counties in western North Carolina, were a no less stunningly good year, because County parties that had been fading away got their gumption back, and fought back, and took local offices (don't ask me for exact numbers, except this one: In Watauga County in 2006, Democrats swept all the local races, from sheriff to county commission, and helped elect Steve Goss to the Senate and Cullie Tarleton to the House. During his tenure as chair, Meek came to Watauga more than once, learned how we do canvassing by going canvassing with us, and he convened the one and only -- far as I know -- round-table for progressive bloggers at Party HDQs in Raleigh, where I met some of the activists still kicking.

So the point is, an insurgent candidate like Anderson Clayton could surprise everyone. And do us a world of good.

Why Anderson Clayton?

Right off the bat I've got to admit that I've known her for years, and I know the tactical incubator that birthed her. Anderson was a rising leader in the AppState Student Government Assoc. at the same time Watauga Democrats were perfecting their staffing model for field and for mobilizing young voters. Anderson rose in the SGA Senate, won president of SGA in 2017, because she had the qualities of born leadership, and good political instincts, and she was key in galvanizing the college cohort to participate in our democracy. 

She's still young (25), vivacious, smart -- she majored in poly sci and journalism at AppState. Grew up in Roxboro in Person County (up along the northern border with Virginia), and when she got back there after AppState, she immediately took the reins of the Person County Democratic Party, "at a crisis point .... Within two years, Anderson led Person County to flip the Roxboro City Council and flip a seat in the NC House—one of just two red-to-blue flips in the House in ’22" (Clayton website).

On her Linked-In page, Clayton names Rural Innovation Network (RIN) as her current employer, working as a "broadband analyst," which captures some of RIN's focus on helping develop tech infrastructure in rural county cultures. RIN's website says the org has developed outposts in 34 different counties across the nation, including one in Wilkes County, where "local leaders are focused on educating and training local residents in tech skills (especially those traditionally excluded from the tech industry), employing them in new economy jobs, and empowering them to launch startups that will drive a prosperous 21st-century economy."

Anderson promises, "We can break the cycle of Democratic decline," a flash of both hopefulness and frankness that's required when the current Party leadership seems loath to admit anything could have been done differently or better in the future. I understand why gentlemen at the top of the ticket might want control of the State Party -- the so-called "coordinated campaigns" run by the state party have always been skewed to the messaging strategy and tactics of the Top Dog, usually the Guv, which Josh Stein is trying to be.

Stein's surprising, even electrifying preemptive attack on Mark Robinson in his announcement video earlier this week -- that rallied me for a Governor candidate who's going to be under vicious attack constantly. But Stein's endorsement of Richardson sends exactly the opposite message for me, that he's nervous about grassroots and progressive energy in this Party. Granted, the grassroots can sometimes grow stinky weeds. I'm willing to admit it. But a Party stuck in neutral, doing the same things again, that's not for me.

Others in the Race for Chair

Aside from incumbent Chair Bobbie Richardson (about whom I expressed an opinion back in December)....

Eric Terashima (website), a retired career Marine, former chair of the Brunswick County Party, and a losing candidate for the NC House.

LeVon Barnes ran for Durham City Council in 2017 and for the Durham County Board of Commish in 2020 and lost both times in the primaries.

Scott Huffman (2022 congressional candidate website) has become something of a perennial candidate, running for Congress in NC-8 in the Democratic primary in 2018, in the 2020 congressional election in NC-13, and in the NC-8 congressional election in 2022. He lost all of those.

Eva Lee, Wake County activist who toyed with running both a senatorial campaign and a campaign for state Labor Commissioner in 2020 (according to Ballotpedia) but never put her name on the ballot.

And there may well be additional candidates in the days ahead before February 11th.