What you need to know about the Editorial Board’s 2024 NC election endorsements

Early voting began Thursday in North Carolina. As we do each year, our Editorial Board will be making endorsements in local and state races, beginning Sunday with our recommendations for governor in the Democratic and Republican primaries.

Another annual tradition: People wondering why we do these things at all. Some media don’t do endorsements or have pulled back on them in recent years. We feel differently. Here’s why:

We are proud each week to have the opportunity to join conversations important to our communities. We take part with editorials from this board, columns from our opinion writers in Charlotte and Raleigh, and op-eds and letters from readers and community leaders. Few of those conversations are as important as discussing who represents us in local, state and national offices.

We’re approaching the 2024 election recommendations the same as previous years. Some background: In 2019, the boards of The Charlotte Observer and News & Observer of Raleigh joined forces to provide fuller opinion content to our readers. The combined board is led by N.C. Opinion Editor Peter St. Onge, who is joined in Charlotte by Observer Executive Editor Rana Cash, and Deputy Opinion Editor Paige Masten. In Raleigh, Deputy Opinion Editor Ned Barnett is joined by News & Observer Executive Editor Bill Church and opinion writer Barry Saunders.

As with editorials on local issues, members of the board in Charlotte do not participate in endorsements of Triangle-specific races, or vice versa. The full board does discuss and recommend candidates for statewide races, including the governor’s race and other Council of State races on this year’s ballot.

As always, we will be selective in our endorsements, which means we will make recommendations in competitive and notable races, but not all races. In each race we pursue, members of the editorial board conduct research and interview candidates and talk to others who know and have worked with the candidates. We then discuss what we’ve learned as a board and make recommendations.

We weigh a lot of factors in doing so, including how a candidates’ values represents their voting constituencies (that’s especially true in primary races). Sometimes those considerations go beyond individual races to the makeup of the larger body the candidates want to join. We generally don’t want a city council or state Senate to have such a majority that the minority is too muted.

Another factor in this year’s recommendations, as in previous years: Republicans nationwide, led by former President Donald Trump, continue to say the 2020 election was stolen. That’s a falsehood, and it’s one that threatens our democracy. Not all Republicans believe the election was illegitimate, of course, but many who do could be casting votes on state and national voting measures. If that’s a part of a candidate’s platform, we think that’s disqualifying.

Finally (and we get this a lot!): We’re not telling you what to think about these candidates. We’re telling you what we think. And no, we’re not predicting winners. We’re recommending candidates we think deserve your consideration.

We’ll be offering our endorsements to subscribers all week online, and each endorsement will appear in in the next day’s print edition. We hope our research and recommendations are helpful, but mostly we hope that you, too, choose to participate in deciding who represents all of us. Please, go vote.

This story was originally published February 17, 2024 at 5:00 AM with the headline "What you need to know about the Editorial Board’s 2024 NC election endorsements."