Young chair of North Carolina Democrats, in New York Times feature, calls on outreach to rural

The feature on Anderson Clayton, recently elected chair of the North Carolina Democratic Party, appeared in the New York Times Sunday print edition under the headline, "The Youngest State Party Leader in the U.S. Has a Blue-Collar Blueprint."  Andrew Trunsky writes: 

Ms. Clayton ... is aiming to motivate younger voters, but she also campaigned with broader goals, arguing that Democrats need to invest in rural communities if they hope to erode Republicans’ grip on state and local power.

She thinks a key is being candid about her party’s flaws and missteps. “People with me all the time are like, ‘I wish you’d stop saying we’ve left Democrats behind,’” she said. “I’m like: ‘We have. We’ve left people behind.’”

In North Carolina’s elections last year, Democrats ceded 44 state legislative seats, uncontested, to Republicans. Many encompassed blue-collar, rural towns that had voted reliably Democratic decades ago but by then had no official footprint from the party, much less a candidate to support.

* * * 

[Clayton] said that many Democratic officials viewed rural voters as out of reach. When Hillary Clinton ran for president in 2016, her senior staff scoffed when Bill Clinton fretted that Democrats were losing touch with rural voters. Why view them as valuable when they had the Obama coalition? But as it turned out, only Barack Obama could summon the Obama coalition.

Trunsky quotes David Axelrod, a top adviser to Obama:

The Democratic Party has become too much of a metropolitan, cosmopolitan party. There is a sense in the party that we’re the party of working people, but if you don’t communicate respect, and only say, "Let me tell you what we’re doing for you," then you’re not very persuasive. And there were a lot of working people who felt betrayed.

Clayton acknowledges that the Democrats "don't have a good brand" and says she is eager to "address Democrats' rural struggles."   Her pitch to become chair of the state Democratic Party was "personal."

She grew up in Roxboro surrounded by the farms, forests and rolling hills blanketing rural Person County. It was counties like Person that had raced to the right in the years prior, and whose residents, Ms. Clayton said, had been robbed of a seat at the table. Her father, she said, disavowed the Democratic Party after he lost his manufacturing job in the onset of the Great Recession.

Don't miss the entire profile of the exuberant Clayton.  I've previously written about her on Legal Ruralism here and here.   She's been a refreshing pop of energy on Twitter for several years, sharing photos of her Person County organizing exploits, as well as those of her cats.  

And here's a profile the Washington Post did on Clayton in late March, featuring photos in her father's work/utility truck.  

Postscript:  Here's a late May story about Clayton in Teen Vogue.  A key quote:  "I want to show people that young people are so capable."  

And here is a June, 2023 story in Britain's The Independent newspaper.