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.

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. The body counts could be used in her homeschool arithmetic lessons.

These tributes are markers of a (dare it still 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 incoming GovernorJosh 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 had 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 NC Dems had a big mountain to climb. Trump had increased his winning margin from 2016 to 2020, and ultimately won the state’s 16 electoral votes  by 3.5 percent, expanding his 2020 tally by more than 300,000 votes.

But at the statewide level, Clayton had a huge stroke of good luck disguised as scandals 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 succeeding Governor Roy Cooper. Morrow, whose election denialism and radical anti-school rhetoric  made the Moms for Liberty sound moderate, 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 never been 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 been at the Capitol in Washington during the January 6 2021 insurrection.

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? Rope-stretching?) 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 victory 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. (Despite the welter of lurid scandals, Robinson still finished with 40% against Stein, and Morrow came within three percent of beating Democrat Mo Green.)

And most other red-dominated legislatures across the country stayed that way. But with Anderson Clayton’s organizing activism, plus the Robinson-Morrow windfalls, NC  Democrats emerged from the election with more weight in the long uphill slog of resilience and resistance to the entrenched GOP autocracy.

Though still outnumbered, amid the widespread losses elsewhere, North Carolina Democrats ought to punch above their weight in the coming struggles. They’ll likely have plenty of opportunities to test this

new resilience, as Project 2025 comes back into view after January 20.

And come 2028, maybe somebody better try to persuade Morris & Robinson to re-run their playbook of pizza, porn and public executions.  Could NC Dems be that lucky twice?