by Sarah Michels, Carolina Public Press
May 21, 2025

When Anderson Clayton took control of the North Carolina Democratic Party at 25 years old, she knew she needed to make some changes. The previous election cycle, Democrats had left a quarter of the state’s legislative seats unchallenged, giving Republicans a free ride to Raleigh. From her viewpoint, that couldn’t happen again. 

Clayton’s plan was simple: find a Democratic candidate to run in every legislative race in 2024. The execution was harder. Convincing Democrats, often political newcomers, to face off against strong Republican incumbents in largely gerrymandered districts? Not easy. Add in public scrutiny and slim to zero odds of winning in some of those districts? An even tougher sell. 

Through extensive travel and promises of party support, Clayton got the buy-in she needed. By filing deadline, Democrats had thrown in their hats in all but three of the state’s 170 legislative races. Upon receiving the news, former Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper called Clayton, exuberant. 

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But all Clayton did was apologize. In the push to fill legislative races, she had left two congressional seats uncontested. 

Many political watchers have credited Clayton’s leadership for statewide Democratic successes last year — chief among them, breaking the Republican veto-proof supermajority in the state House, handing Democratic Justice Allison Riggs a narrow victory in a hotly contested state Supreme Court race and winning the governor’s race and half of the council of state seats.  

But now is not the time to rest on her laurels. Clayton is already setting the stage for 2026 and beyond. On a recent Friday afternoon, she sat down with Carolina Public Press to talk Democratic strategy. 

Clayton’s strategic origin story

Growing up in Roxboro, a rural town of about 8,000 people in north central North Carolina, Clayton never considered becoming a political leader. She wanted to be the next Anderson Cooper. 

But in 2016, while she was attending Appalachian State University, the Watauga County Democratic Party sued the State Board of Elections to keep a voting site on campus. The party claimed Republicans wanted to remove the site to make it harder for students to vote. 

Clayton watched the county party fight in court, and also on campus to register student voters. That year, when North Carolina went red, Watauga County went blue. 

“I got to see what it was like when a party really put their money where their mouth was and invested in young people, and it helped them win an entire county,” she said. 

The seeds of Clayton’s organizing strategy were planted then. They were watered later: first, when she worked on U.S. Rep. Kathy Manning’s 2018 campaign against then U.S. Rep. Ted Budd and learned firsthand that “you can’t out-organize a gerrymander.” And again in 2020 when she knocked on doors for then-Sen. Kamala Harris ahead of the Iowa caucuses and realized voters were not as polarized as they’re often painted. 

“Everybody really is somebody worth talking to at the end of the day about issues, about a candidate,” Clayton said.

“Targeting works, but it shouldn’t be the only people that you talk to. It made me believe in rural organizing again. It made me believe in rural people more than I ever had. And it made me be like, ‘God, I want to put up a fight.’”

Short-term losses, long-term gains for Democrats

Gaston County Democratic Party third vice chair Sydnie Hutchinson couldn’t find a Democrat to run against 17-year Republican incumbent State Rep. John Torbett in 2024. 

So, she did it herself.

When lawmakers redistricted, they divided Gastonia, the Democratic urban center of Gaston County, between three state House districts. As a result, Democrats don’t stand much of a chance in any of them. That near-certain failure, as well as safety concerns, kept anyone from seriously considering running, Hutchinson said. 

“I can’t tell you how many people came up to me at events or out at the polls that were like, ‘Oh, I didn’t know a Democrat existed in this county, I didn’t know I had a choice,’” she said. 

Hutchinson was one of many young people to take on Republicans in previously uncontested districts. Justin Matthews was another. He went to the Board of Elections between college exams to file for candidacy against Gaston County Republican Kelly Hastings, who had run unopposed five of the six previous election cycles. 

These younger candidates share the same convictions as Clayton: to win the long game, Democrats have to talk to everyone and be everywhere, even when the odds are stacked against them. 

Hutchinson lost her race. So did Matthews and most of the Democrats who stepped up. And so did former Vice President Kamala Harris, who trailed three points behind President Donald Trump in North Carolina. 

For some, that can make it feel like it was all for nothing, Clayton said. But they’re wrong, she emphasized. 

Just being in places Democrats have neglected is changing the narrative, she said. The party’s absence has given Republicans free rein to define Democrats in a way that benefits them.

By reintegrating into rural communities, Democrats can switch up the messaging; they are friends, community members and neighbors “instead of what Fox News is telling them that we are,” Clayton said. 

They can also build — or rebuild — infrastructure. Democrats can’t drop into a county a year before an election and expect to win; they’ve got to invest over time in the county party and the people, Clayton said. Last year, the state party invested. They gave legislative candidates free access to organizing technology, made websites and logos and offered strategic, moral — and sometimes, financial — support. 

The party did secure a few key statewide victories, too. Justice Riggs kept her seat on the state Supreme Court, the Democrats broke a Republican supermajority by one seat in the state House and won half of the Council of State seats.

Not to mention Gaston County, where Hutchinson and Matthews ran, which shifted three percentage points bluer from 2020, the fifth-largest Democratic shift in the state. 

That wouldn’t have happened without candidates knocking on doors across the state, not only for their races but also for Democratic candidates up and down the ballot, Clayton said. In North Carolina, margins matter. She intends to widen them in her party’s favor. 

Three M’s of midterms

Heading into 2026, Clayton has a few objectives on her list.  

MONEY: First thing’s first, she’s got to raise a lot of money. Like, a lot. Since becoming party chair, Clayton said she’s learned a lot about money. To get anything done, she needs talented people, and talented people cost a lot. Of her approximately $2.9 million operational budget, about $2.6 million goes toward staff salaries, she said. 

Plus, the party just spent $3 million on a state Supreme Court election fight. 

To keep the party in the black, Clayton needs to figure out how to build a better fundraising machine. When she talks to donors, they don’t always understand that donations toward each of North Carolina’s 10 Council of State races may be just as important to success as money for congressional candidates. 

In the meantime, the Democratic National Committee will help Clayton maintain a bigger staff in the off year. In late April, new DNC chair Ken Martin announced that state parties would get an additional $60,000 a year through its new four-year strategy, and North Carolina would get another $60,000 on top of that since it’s largely Republican-controlled. 

MOBILIZING: Clayton has to recruit quality candidates — candidates who people can genuinely believe in. 

After 2024’s successes, Clayton isn’t finding it as hard to get people to buy in. Interest in running for municipal races has skyrocketed, and she doesn’t foresee any issues getting congressional candidates on board. 

As the State Senate Democratic Whip, Sen. Jay Chaudhuri spends a lot of his time providing support and raising money for candidates in competitive seats. His top concern for 2026 is recruiting candidates that reflect the socioeconomic and educational makeup of their community. 

The party should develop more working-class candidates to be competitive, he said. 

“The moment you include members of your Senate caucus that come from a working class background, that also translates into a broader Democratic agenda that hopefully puts the needs of middle class and working class families first,” Chaudhuri said. 

MESSAGING: Clayton believes Democrats have the best message for rural North Carolinians in 2026. For the many years in which they were largely in power, they invested in public education, the “great equalizer” that allows everyone a chance to secure a well-paying job, she said. 

Now, if they’re given power again, there’s an opportunity to use that educational infrastructure to develop an economy that works for everybody, regardless of where they live. In contrast, Clayton thinks state Republicans are focusing more on defunding public education and reversing the progress her party made in the name of tax cuts and private school vouchers. 

It’s unclear whether that message from the Democrats will stick. Nationally, Democratic messaging was a disaster in the 2024 election. 

Democrats didn’t do a great job of educating people on how former President Joe Biden’s economic policies would help the middle and lower class in the long run, Clayton said. 

Meanwhile, Republicans have quietly constructed a media ecosystem with clear, organized, conservative messaging. The national Democratic party hasn’t quite figured out how to compete, Clayton said. 

“People are asking us to defeat something in four years that Republicans built over 40 years, and I don’t know that that is exactly possible,” she said. “I think we have to infiltrate before we can defeat.” 

She’s not counting on Republicans having a bad year, either, even though historically, the party who holds the presidency during midterm elections tends to perform worse. While people may be harmed by Trump actions, that doesn’t mean they’ll flip their vote. 

“Angry in 2025 is not angry in 2026,” she said. 

Democrats hope to outwit, outplay, outlast

Clayton can see the 2026 political board and all the pieces in front of her. But she’s not just thinking about her next move; she’s already thinking about the next game, and the game after that. 

She sees underinvestment in Southern states as a grave mistake for Democrats nationally in the long run, and wants to create a system where Southern parties can pool resources to deploy wherever they’re most impactful. 

Chaudhuri agrees that the national party should step up. 

“The National Democratic Party has tended to ring the alarm bell when we get closer to the end of the decade, because we know we have to take control of legislatures to redraw congressional districts,” he said. “But we need to make that a priority now.” 

In 2026, she thinks Democrats can gain five more state House seats, primarily in areas where Harris won but the state Democrat didn’t. She’s less confident about potentially breaking the Republican supermajority in the state Senate. 

But perhaps the most critical race is North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Anita Earls’ seat. Earls, one of two Democrats on the court, is up for reelection. 

Back in her early campaigning days, Clayton learned she couldn’t out-organize a gerrymander. So, instead, her goal is to remove the obstacle, and take away Republicans’ power to implement maps drawn in their favor. 

“The plan has been to take back our courts and then be able to repeal partisan and racial gerrymandering from the state,” Clayton said. “Once we do that, you’ll have a much better chance at looking at fairness.” 

Keeping Earls’ seat is the second step of a three-part plan to do just that before 2030 and 2032 redistricting fights commence. The first step was retaining Riggs’ seat. The third is flipping at least two of the three seats held by Republican justices when they are up for reelection in 2028. 

The judicial fight will not be easy. After Riggs’ win, Republicans are taking the Democrats’ plans to retake court control more seriously, Clayton said. Next time, they’ll spend more. 

In December, Republicans changed campaign finance laws to allow parties to pay people out of their building fund, effectively adding to potential campaign spending. Now, Clayton has to figure out how to leverage that to benefit her party as well. 

“Every obstacle we’re gonna have, there is also an answer to it, if we are thinking smart, if we are playing hard,” she said.

“But all the sauce has got to work too. Everything’s got to go just according to plan.”

This article first appeared on Carolina Public Press and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.

Political Bias Rating: Center-Left

This content predominantly portrays the Democratic Party in a positive light, highlighting its strategic efforts, grassroots organizing, and focus on inclusivity and public education, which aligns with center-left values. While it acknowledges challenges faced by Democrats and critiques their past messaging, the tone remains generally supportive and emphasizes Democratic goals and perspectives without harsh partisanship or extreme rhetoric. The coverage is detailed and largely sympathetic to Democratic strategies and candidates, which situates this piece in a center-left bias.