Burlington is in North Carolina’s Alamance County, once notorious as a hotbed of the Ku Klux Klan back in the day, Neo-Confederates now. A 35-foot statue of a rebel soldier still guards the county courthouse, and the monument itself is surrounded by a thick wrought iron fence and plenty of Don’t-Tread-On-Me attitude.

The county voted against Obama twice by ten-point margins, and for Trump in 2016 by 14 and in 2020 by 8.

During Covid it was a locus for pandemic mask and mandate defiance. When Hispanic Democrat Ricky Hurtado managed to unseat a Republican state rep a few years back, the supermajority GOP legislature promptly re-drew the district and pushed Hurtado out in 2022.

Nevertheless, to lift our spirits on Thursday, Oct. 3, the Fair Wendy and I drove straight into Alamance and then Burlington, to a modest storefront on the edge of downtown. If too much of the county is still stuck in a revanchist fantasy past, this was an outpost of a very different Alamance future that is beginning to unfold.

Yes, Alamance has Democrats. And they’re on the move. Their monthly meeting is the first Thursday, and inside, the joint was jumping.

The session was predictably focused on the last climactic weeks of the current  campaign; but there were a couple of important preliminaries :

First, a discussion of relief efforts for the hurricane-devastated city of Asheville and other communities in western NC. (My contribution was some bottled water.) The County Chair, Ron Osborne (above) knows such emergency work inside and out: he specialized in it for Duke Power as an electrical engineer, managing large crews who helped get the lights back on in the wake of dozens of the worst storms and floods from Katrina to Sandy. Osborne pointed out the safest and most useful ways for those of us who managed to dodge the deluge of Helene to do our bit.

Then he turned to a more pleasant landmark, the 100th birthday of Jimmy Carter. The 39th president was clearly a model for Osborne: another southerner, who publicly renounced his segregationist heritage, and overcame the experience of defeat in 1980 to build a long and uniquely productive post-political career with a multitude of projects, from building houses for the poor to preventing wars and reducing the toll of guinea worm disease from multimillions annually to thirteen (yes, 13) cases in 2023.

Osborne even made a pilgrimage which I long hoped to make, to Plains, Georgia, to join in the Sunday Bible classes Carter taught for more than 40 years whenever he was in town.

Then to the main business of the meeting, which was a series of rapid-fire short speeches by candidates for local offices, county commission, and district judgeships. The multicultural character of the lineup was a standing rebuke to the dogged whiteness of the rival party (does Mark Robinson count? Thats above my paygrade . . . .)

The enthusiasm level was high, and the candidates welcomed the intensity before them in the campaign’s frenzied final month.

Jaded pundits might still be noting that the Carolina GOP has been  gerrymandering and suppressing votes nonstop for fourteen years (true) and is counting on the institutional bias it has been cementing to hold back the rising insurgency growing around the corner in their Alamance stronghold (true again.)

And to further harsh my buzz, they can carp, “So Alamance is happening; fine. But there’s 100 counties in NC, and what about the other 99??” And true, I don’t get out that much.
Finally, they’ll repeat that the polls are all tight as a tick, margin of error, yada yada. (Undeniable.) So is my optimism just whistling Dixie??

Well, I’ve resigned from the Pundit Prediction Panel, so I’ll concede the prognosticators may turn out to be right. However, I’ll recklessly stick a toe back in this muddy pool, and forecast that, at least in Alamance County, the NC Democrats in 2024 will  — wait for it — Do BETTER.

Will that be enough to save us?

Check back with me in a month.

[Note: Here’s the part for Quakers: Ron Osborne is a longtime member of Spring Friends Meeting, which has been in Alamance County for more than 250 years. He’s also a Quaker history buff, like me.  He’s enjoying his retirement, and I don’t think he likes political campaigning much more than hurricanes, but like saving lives devastated by the latter, helping rescue democracy by the former is a part of his low-key but diligent and distinctive Quaker witness.]