Beasley’s candidacy didn’t seem to energize Black voter turnout. Activists are worried.

Democrats hoped Cheri Beasley’s historic candidacy for the Senate would energize Black voter turnout.

So activists took it as a good sign that turnout was above-average this year in Durham — the state’s most heavily Democratic county, and a stronghold for urban, Black politics.

But Beasley lost. So did every other Democrat in a statewide race. That’s left political organizers around the state debating what worked this year and what went wrong.

“It calls into question the strategy of relying on areas like Durham to win statewide elections,” said Whitney Maxey, executive director of the progressive group Durham For All. “It’s not looking that viable.”

The answers may lie in places like Anson County. Democratic President Barack Obama won the rural county an hour outside Charlotte, whose residents are mostly Black or Hispanic, by 25% of the vote in his campaign for reelection in 2012.

A decade later, Republican Ted Budd defeated Beasley there by 5%.

Anson is home to 22,000 people, too small to wield much power in statewide elections. But its eye-popping 30-point swing to the right is a microcosm of Democrats’ evaporating influence in the rural parts of the state — even in rural areas where white people aren’t the majority.

Democrats routed in Eastern NC

Last week Republicans flipped a number of rural state legislative seats that had previously been held by Black Democrats, centered around Eastern North Carolina communities like Wilson, Nash, Pasquotank and Vance counties. State Sen. Toby Fitch, a 1960s civil rights activist and longtime state lawmaker, lost his seat. So did half a dozen other Black lawmakers from rural areas.

Even though North Carolina’s population is booming, most counties are shrinking. From a political perspective, it has been particularly notable in the state’s historically Black rural communities.

In Anson County, the number of total voters has decreased by over 9% in the last decade — but the number of Black voters dropped twice as much, by over 18%. In Wilson County, where Fitch was just unseated, it’s even more pronounced: The drop in Black voters since 2012 has tripled the county’s decrease in voters overall.

“It’s a double whammy,” said Irv Joyner, a law professor at N.C. Central University and who has long represented the NAACP and others in civil rights and voting rights cases. “Because of the lack of opportunities and the lack of progressive policies in those counties, Blacks are leaving and whites are staying. And in the middle, you’ve got Hispanics moving in, who are not as politically active.”

In the 2020 elections, 75% of all voters cast a ballot, with white voters higher at 79%, Black voters lower at 68% and Hispanic voters even lower at 59%.

It’s a pattern Democrats hoped would change when they nominated Beasley — the first Black person to win a Senate nomination here since Harvey Gantt nearly 30 years ago.

Bobbie Richardson, the chair of the N.C. Democratic Party, said in an email that seeing North Carolina voters nominate a Black woman for Senate for the first time ever “meant the world to me.” Richardson herself is the first Black woman to lead the state party.

“Representation matters,” she wrote. “Cheri’s historic candidacy exemplified the American Dream, that no matter where you grew up or what the color of your skin is, anything is possible.”

But Beasley does not appeared to have amped up voters as much as Democrats hoped she would.

What we know and don’t know

Voter turnout data for 2022, broken down in detail by racial demographics, isn’t yet available.

But the county-level data that is public can provide some hints as to where Democrats struggled energizing voters.

There are 11 counties where 40% or more of the population is Black; only three had above-average turnout. Those 11 are all rural counties, but Democrats also struggled with turnout in some urban areas.

North Carolina is home to 2.2 million Black people, half of whom live in Mecklenburg, Wake, Guilford, Cumberland, Durham, Forsyth or Pitt counties.

Only two of those seven, Wake and Durham, had above-average voter turnout this year. Guilford and Forsyth were close to average. But Mecklenburg, Cumberland and Pitt lagged behind the state as a whole.

And while it’s still unknown which groups had higher or lower turnout within any particular county, data from early voting didn’t paint a promising picture for Democrats: The Charlotte Observer previously reported that data showed turnout was skewing older and whiter than average.

Overall, based on preliminary data, turnout was just over 50% this year, down from 53% in the last midterm in 2018, and particularly low throughout Eastern North Carolina. Fayetteville’s Cumberland County, where Beasley got her start, and which featured heavily in her first ad of the campaign, ranked 96th of all 100 counties in turnout.

2022 candidates were historically diverse

Despite Beasley’s loss in the Senate race, Democrats gained in the U.S. House.

Voters sent three Black representatives to Washington for the first time ever, The News & Observer reported, and also reelected the only Jewish representative in state history. All four are Democrats, and one of the state’s newest Black Democrats in Congress, Don Davis, will represent a largely rural area.

But those were all regional elections, held in districts. At the statewide level, Republicans swept every race from Senate to the judicial races, flipping control of the state Supreme Court in the process.

At the same time, Republicans in the state legislature also diversified their ranks slightly. In the N.C. House, the Republican caucus has long been 100% white. But this year voters changed that by electing Ken Fontenot, who is Black, to represent Wilson, and Jarrod Lowery, a member of the Lumbee Tribe, to represent Lumberton.

After his history-making victory, Lowery told The N&O many rural areas have elected Democratic leaders for years yet are still struggling. That gives Republicans new opportunities to offer a vision for change, even in districts like his, where most people aren’t white.

“For some Republicans, engaging with minorities is — “ Lowery said, pausing to consider his next words. “Maybe you’ve never really done it before. But people have all the same goals. We want good-paying jobs, we want to be safe in our communities.”

Suburban wins, rural losses for Democrats

A major reason Republicans will now have a veto-proof supermajority in the N.C. Senate is that Sen. Bobby Hanig, who currently represents the Outer Banks, flipped a newly redrawn district with more inland parts of northeastern North Carolina.

It was the only Senate district a Republican won this year where over 50% of 2020 voters supported Joe Biden, according to an analysis of election data by The N&O. It includes many of the state’s traditional “Black Belt” counties near the Virginia border.

“I see a very bleak future in the northeast, unless there is an economic resurgence that’s going to bring more African Americans into those counties — and convince young African Americans to stay,” Joyner said.

But at the same time Democrats were losing seats in that part of the state, all of the state’s biggest counties elected Black sheriffs — something that happened for the first time ever in 2018. Democrats saw that result, even in a pro-Republican year like 2022, as a silver lining that their recent gains in the suburbs weren’t fleeting.

In the legislature, Black Democrats also made up for some of their losses in rural areas by gaining ground in some suburban seats. In north Durham, Ray Jeffers flipped a Republican-held seat that also includes Person County. In Fayetteville, even if low turnout hurt Beasley, Democrats still elected newcomers Frances Jackson and Val Applewhite to seats there.

Aimy Steele, who leads the The New North Carolina Project focused on increasing turnout among communities of color, said some urban and suburban areas did seem to have higher Black turnout this year than in the past, even if rural areas did not.

And notably, the reason Republicans likely won’t have a supermajority in the N.C. House is because a Democrat, Diamond Staton-Williams, appears to have narrowly flipped a seat in the Charlotte suburbs of Cabarrus County.

For over a decade, that area has been represented by retiring Republican Rep. Larry Pittman — a vocal supporter of the Confederacy who unfavorably compared Abraham Lincoln to Adolf Hitler — providing a sense of poetic justice to activists that a Black woman is on the verge of replacing him.

“Moving forward, we’re going to continue to be relentless in pursuit of a more diverse North Carolina,” Steele said.

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