NC voters, on both sides, chose historically diverse candidates in 2022

North Carolina voters sent three Black representatives to Washington in the 2022 midterms, for the first time ever.

The only Jewish person to ever represent the state in Congress also won reelection. So even though Democrat Cheri Beasley lost the state’s Senate race to Republican Ted Budd and did not become North Carolina’s first Black senator, voters still chose a historically diverse slate of candidates.

“Election night was half smiles and half tears,” said Aimy Steele, whose group The New North Carolina Project is modeled on Georgia efforts led by Stacey Abrams to turn out more Black, Hispanic and other minority voters.

In addition to reelecting Democratic Rep. Kathy Manning of Greensboro, who is Jewish, voters around the state also sent three Black Democrats to Congress, reelecting Rep. Alma Adams of Charlotte and electing Valerie Foushee of Hillsborough and Don Davis of Snow Hill.

“That represents the multicultural coalition that Democrats have been targeting and organizing around,” said Whitney Maxey, executive director of the group Durham For All.

Highlighting the multicultural options voters had this year in some of the state’s urban centers, Maxey’s group actually endorsed against Foushee in the Democratic primary, favoring Nida Allam, a 28-year-old Muslim woman and Durham County commissioner who was the more progressive candidate.

The state’s increasingly diverse representation comes as the 2020 Census showed North Carolina is becoming an increasingly urban and more diverse state, The News & Observer reported after the 2020 Census.

And for Republicans, even though their winning congressional candidates were nearly all white men and the state legislature’s GOP ranks will remain nearly entirely white, the party had some flashes of diversity in the midterms.

In a state legislative race in Wilson, a majority-minority county in Eastern North Carolina, voters replaced a Black Democrat, Rep. Linda Cooper-Suggs, with a Black Republican, Ken Fontenot, one of the few elected since Reconstruction.

And in the state’s most diverse area, which has roughly equal numbers of white, Black and Native American residents, voters in Robeson County chose Republican Jarrod Lowery for a state House seat — the first Republican member of the Lumbee Tribe ever elected to the legislature, he said.

Elections in much of rural North Carolina are highly polarized by race. But Lowery said voters in his district just wanted change, after the area has struggled under years of Democratic leadership.

“We’ve always felt like not only were we left out, but we were the butt of all the jokes,” he said. “We used to say we were at the top of all the bad lists and the bottom of the good lists, and that’s how people talked about Robeson County. But we just had the same leadership, for years, and nothing ever changed.”

A changing state

Even though most counties in North Carolina shrank between 2010 and 2020, the booming metro areas grew so much that as a whole the state added 1 million new people.

That earned North Carolina a new seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, going from 13 to 14 representatives — which split evenly last week, with voters electing seven Republicans and seven Democrats.

Steele said Beasley could have had a better shot at winning, too, if national Democrats had spent more money on her campaign — and if state leaders had focused more intentionally on energizing Black voters rather than assuming they’d turn out simply because there was a Black candidate on the ballot.

Official racial turnout data isn’t public yet, but unofficial election results indicate that voter turnout was below-average in many of the state’s heavily Black areas.

“The messaging has to be diverse too,” Steele said. “It has to turn out suburban white women. But it also has to turn out suburban Black women, and working class Black men.”

Concerns looking forward

Despite the historic results, some Black leaders are hesitant to celebrate too much.

“As a general notion, I think this election was devastating for progressive issues,” said Irv Joyner, a prominent civil rights attorney and law professor at N.C. Central University in Durham.

He lamented Democrats’ failure to keep control of the North Carolina Supreme Court, which has in recent years delivered big wins for liberals on voting rights cases, frequently ruling against the Republican-led state legislature.

The diverse slate of congressional candidates won in districts that were redrawn in court to be more favorable to Democrats than what the Republican-controlled legislature had originally proposed, in the new redistricting cycle following the 2020 Census.

The legislature, however, is likely to redraw the districts ahead of 2024, The N&O has reported, now that Republicans also flipped control of the N.C. Supreme Court.

Joyner said Black voters and Democrats in general will be hard-pressed to win any gerrymandering or voting rights lawsuits while Republicans control the court — which will likely last until at least 2028, possibly longer.

And in the state legislative races, unlike in the congressional races, advocates for a more diverse legislature had little to celebrate.

North Carolina’s only Hispanic state lawmaker, Democratic Rep. Ricky Hurtado of Burlington, lost his reelection campaign, leaving the state’s 1 million Hispanic residents again without a voice from their community in Raleigh.

And in Eastern North Carolina, numerous Black Democrats in rural districts went down in the midterms. The state’s northeast, home to what are known as the “Black Belt” counties, saw multiple incumbents lose to Republican challengers — all white, except for Fontenot.

Democrats’ loss of a large northeastern Senate district is a key reason why Republicans will have a veto-proof supermajority in that chamber next year. It’s the only state Senate seat Republicans won this year where over 50% of 2020 voters supported Joe Biden in the presidential election.

At the same time, however, Black lawmakers from urban areas all won their reelections. And Black candidates had signature wins in a handful of suburban districts — even in a Republican-leaning year like 2022. Newcomers like Fayetteville’s Frances Jackson and Val Applewhite, and Ray Jeffers in a district covering Person County and part of north Durham, will help stem the loss of Black politicians from more rural areas like Wilson, Nash and Bertie counties.

And it was Diamond Staton-Williams’ apparent victory in the Charlotte suburbs of Cabarrus County, flipping a Republican state House seat, that will prevent the GOP from attaining a veto-proof supermajority in the House, if the unofficial results hold up.

“Our campaign wasn’t just a campaign,” she tweeted on Election Night. “It was a movement. Communities with little in common but a desire for something better for the next generation came together.”

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