NC Democrats vowed to contest all 170 legislative races in 2024. Did they deliver? | Opinion
North Carolina Democrats had a plan this year: compete in every single General Assembly district in the 2024 cycle. All 170 of them.
They didn’t want to repeat what happened in 2022, when Democrats left a quarter of all state House and Senate races uncontested, allowing Republicans to come within one seat of a legislative supermajority. Forty-four seats didn’t have a Democrat on the ballot in 2022 — 30 in the House and 14 in the Senate.
That, among other tensions, was one of the driving forces behind the party’s leadership shakeup earlier this year. People weren’t just frustrated about losing — they were frustrated about not even trying. The new state party chair, Anderson Clayton, vowed to change that by fielding candidates in all General Assembly districts in 2024.
“We left 44 seats uncontested. That is something that shouldn’t have happened,” Clayton told me before her election in January. “And now I think that we know as Democrats, that doesn’t help us turn out the base.”
2024 will be different. Of those 44 seats left uncontested in 2022, all but one will have a Democrat running in 2024, as of the end of the candidate filing period on Friday. In fact, there are only two legislative districts that won’t have a Democratic candidate on the ballot. Republicans didn’t do as well — they’ll leave 33 districts uncontested in 2024.
Senate District 37, which extends from Iredell County to northern Mecklenburg, is one of the districts that didn’t have a Democratic candidate on the ballot last year. It’s a deeply Republican district, but a Democrat signed up to run anyway: Kate Barr. Barr has no illusions about pulling off an upset victory — her campaign logo says “Kate Barr can’t win” and she says she’s only running to ensure there are two names on the ballot.
Democrats face a challenge in fielding candidates for deeply conservative, rural districts. It’s not easy to find someone who is willing to invest time, money and energy into a campaign that’s more or less doomed from the start. Most of the races that Democrats left uncontested in 2022 were in districts that favored Republicans by 10 or 20 points. Republicans face a similar challenge in urban areas — they won’t have a candidate on the ballot in a lot of districts in Raleigh and Charlotte this cycle.
But going out and hitting the campaign trail helps Democrats begin to lay infrastructure in those parts of the state, which oftentimes are areas that they have long ignored. It may not translate to immediate success, but it pays off in the long run, especially in close statewide races, where just a handful of votes here and there can determine the outcome.
Take Senate District 36, for example. The western North Carolina district favors Republicans by 26 points, according to the Civitas Partisan Index, making it one of the most conservative districts in the entire legislature. No Democrat ran in it last year. But this time, somebody stepped up: Darren Staley, a first-time candidate with a blue-collar background.
The last time Democrats had this many candidates on the ballot was in 2018, when nearly every state House and Senate district featured a Republican and Democratic candidate following a major recruiting push from both parties. In the end, it paid off: Democrats ended up breaking through the GOP’s supermajority.
But in 2022, leaving races uncontested ended up hurting Democrats even in districts where they did have a candidate on the ballot. Stephen Wiley, the House GOP caucus director, told WRAL last year that the lack of competition in districts where Republicans had expected a tighter race actually freed up resources to spend elsewhere. Republicans ended up flipping several seats held by Democrats, enabling them to take back a supermajority in the Senate and a near-supermajority in the House, which became an outright supermajority when Rep. Tricia Cotham switched parties.
The fact that so many races will be contested this year might be good for Democrats, but it’s better news for democracy. Voters deserve a choice, but more importantly, they deserve the effort of a campaign. When a candidate has a legitimate opponent running against them, they have to work harder to earn votes, and they become more accessible and accountable to the people they are seeking to represent. If they’re the only person on the ballot, they could theoretically make it to public office without ever speaking to a single constituent. It doesn’t matter what your political beliefs are — we should all welcome a little competition.
This story was originally published December 16, 2023 at 5:00 AM with the headline "NC Democrats vowed to contest all 170 legislative races in 2024. Did they deliver? | Opinion."
