Every Democrat who won a state-level race in North Carolina this week ought to be tossing at least a fiver into a common hat.
Then that wad of bills should be plunked down at Greensboro’s greasiest pizza parlor, to have at several dozen steamy pies delivered to the front porch of Chez Mark Robinson, topped by an oversize “Thank You” card. On it will be a PS hinting broadly that Robinson should consider making a second run at the state house in 2028.
That’s a helluva lot of pepperoni, but the social media posts unearthed in the campaign indicate that Robinson could handle it, especially if he resumes his particularly spicy diversions to fill his impending surplus of free time.
Even that plenitude of pasta would be a paltry measure of Robinson’s historic contribution to the state Democratic effort. His only near rival would be Michele Morrow, who came much closer to winning the state Superintendent of public instruction office, and the chance to further erode the state’s school systems.
But rather than pizza, or flowers, Morrow should get a Thank You thumb drive packed with her more exotic video favorites, public executions from around the world. At least the body counts could be used in her homeschool arithmetic lessons.
These tributes are markers of a (dare it now be said?) weird political paradox, which somehow leaves Tarheel Democrats measurably better off than their cousins in the rest of the South, and the red states generally. As the political debris continues to fall outside our borders, NC will face the new federal regime and its odious Project 2025 with (among others) an accomplished educator overseeing the schools, a new attorney general, an experienced governor — all Democrats — and a busted GOP legislative supermajority, in which Josh Stein’s vetoes have a chance to be sustained.
Behind them is an invigorated state party, led by a rising prodigy, Chair Anderson Clayton. Clayton has spent two years working tirelessly to revive and invigorate the Democratic party’s presence and punch in the state, after 14 years of rightwing GOP battering. There was much talk in national media about the state going for Kamala Harris over Trump, who won here in 2016 and 2020.
The fact that didn’t happen overshadowed the real gains Clayton and the party did make. If she can keep up the morale and the frenetic pace, Clayton should have a bright future as a political operative.
Besides campaign enthusiasm, Clayton and the statewide slate had a huge stroke of good luck disguised as scandal in their opponents’ ranks, with a seemingly endless stream of lurid and gruesome revelations about two major GOP contenders, Mark Robinson and Michele Morrow.
Robinson was running to turn his upstart 2020 election as Lieutenant Governor into becoming retiring Governor Roy Cooper’s successor, and Morrow upset the incumbent state superintendent in another primary surprise.
Early on, Robinson had the 2024 equivalent of pure campaign gold: a public endorsement by Donald Trump, who called him “Martin Luther King times two,” among other fatuous encomiums. But then researchers dug up social media posts about his habitual visits to porn shops (with pizza on the side) his calling the Holocaust a “hoax,” naming himself as a “Black Nazi,” and frequent public sliming of LGBT people. His campaign abruptly imploded in September.
Morrow’s bid began to stumble when it was revealed that none of her several children had ever enrolled in a NC public school; all had been homeschooled. Then social media posts turned up, in which she called for public executions of several major Democrats, including presidents Obama and Biden. She also acknowledged that she had taken part in the January 6, 2021 assault on the U. S. Capitol.
Morrow has not been charged with any crime there. But the attempt to shrug it off as little more than a field trip (to study, er, insurrectionary civics?) plus her extreme political effusions and lack of any experience with public education became enlarging drags on her campaign.
Once the polls closed Tuesday and Trump’s advance unfolded, NC quickly faded from view. Only in the following days, as Democrats in most other states counted their losses and recriminations began, did the NC Democrats’ comparative success come more clearly into view.
Yes, the NC GOP maintained most of its hegemony. And most other red-dominated legislatures across the country stayed that way. But with Anderson Clayton’s organizing activism, plus the windfalls bequeathed by Robinson and Morrow, NC Democrats emerged from the election positioned to carry more weight in the long uphill slog of resilience and resistance to the entrenched GOP autocracy. Though still outnumbered, and amid the widespread losses elsewhere, North Carolina Democrats ought to punch above their weight in the coming struggles.
They should have plenty of opportunities to test this new resilience, as Project 2025 comes back into view after January 20, even if Mark Robinson and Michele Morrow stick to their private entertainments.