Anderson Clayton is on a mission to turn rural NC blue

With abortion, public education, and decency on the ballot, the NC Democratic Party chair believes rural voters can be convinced to break up with Republicans.  

Anderson Clayton, the chair of the North Carolina Democratic party is a proud resident of the small town of Roxboro, population 8,134.

She always has lived there, and not only is she not moving elsewhere despite her high-profile position, she’s determined to stay and help convince thousands of rural residents to vote for Democrats for the first time in November.

Clayton is fully aware that Republicans have dominated the voting choices of rural North Carolinians for 30 years, but she refuses to believe that their behavior can’t be changed.

“I think that you’ve got to chase every single vote this year. And that doesn’t mean that we’re going to win back rural North Carolina overnight,” she told Cardinal & Pine.

“But what I do know about rural North Carolina is that the second highest population of rural folks besides Texas is sitting right in my backyard…and they haven’t had Democratic representation for God knows how long because of gerrymandered maps.”

“They’re not turning out to vote,” she continued. “So we have to chase after those folks this year and make sure that we’re increasing our margins in rural communities and winning them back over time.”

Prioritizing a strategy that breaks the lock that the Republican Party has had on rural North Carolina is a bold one for Clayton, who at 26, is the youngest Democratic Party Chair in the country. 

But it may also prove smart, because Clayton is right. There are nearly 3.5 million rural residents in the state and she refuses to throw up her hands and walk away from them.

Clayton believes that in 2024, Democrats have a winning message on policies for rural — and all — North Carolinians who are faced with an ultra right-wing gubernatorial candidate in Mark Robinson, who has called for a  six-week abortion ban in the state and compared abortion to “murder” and “slavery.” 

“Abortion is the number one issue that we run on for people across the state this year, to make sure that folks know that we’ve got to protect the right to people to have not only an abortion, but also contraception,” said Clayton.

But she also said that the biggest job for the Democratic party in the state  is to “educate” voters about who their candidates are and what is on the ballot this year besides reproductive freedom.

“They’re voting for human rights on the ballot. They’re voting for workers’ rights and wages that are on the ballot. They’re voting for climate justice. They’re voting for people to have better public schools this year, for teachers to have raises that aren’t chump change,” Clayton said. “They’re looking for actual decency on the ballot.”

“And that’s going to be with the Democratic party this year.”

Clayton’s path to leadership

Clayton’s focus on rural communities cuts against the grain in some circles of the party. 

After graduating from Appalachian State University, Clayton cut her political teeth as a campaign organizer for Senators Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren, as well as for Amy McGrath, the former marine fighter pilot who unsuccessfully challenged Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell in the 2020 election.

“I did the national campaign scene in 2020 and my heart just broke because I realized that the national party was never going to invest in rural North Carolina and I wanted them to. I thought it was worthwhile,” she said.

Instead of being deterred by what seemed like an obstacle, Clayton was determined to prove to national leaders that their point of view was wrong.

“I kind of took the mentality of like, ‘well I am the party,’ and if I go out and I invest in those places and I put some emphasis on them, that’s getting their spotlight put back on them,” she said.

So Clayton went home to her beloved Roxboro and Person County and got to work.

“I flipped three city council seats (to Democrat) and everybody told me that I was never going to do that — that, that was not something that could happen in Roxboro. And I did it anyway just because I was like, ‘F**k you and what you think’ to be real and who cares and I’m going to try,” she said.

With that successful experience behind her, she decided to “fight like hell” to be elected to her position as party chair at age 25. 

“I think that a lot of young people need to see the fact that change is possible when you put your hand on something and you drive it, but you got to be willing to get involved with it.”

One of Clayton’s first goals in her quest to turn rural North Carolina bluer was to recruit candidates to run in every single district in the state legislature.

She pointed out that in 2022, the party left 44 of these seats uncontested “which made it so that 3 million North Carolinians didn’t have somebody (Democratic) locally in their community going after them and chasing their votes.”

The result of Clayton’s efforts in 2024 are that Democrats are contesting 168 out of 170 North Carolina House and Senate seats, and with candidates that she is excited about.

She’s hopeful that money from President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the American Rescue Plan will give her rural candidates something positive to talk about in their districts because “every county, like every city, any municipality and any place you live in got millions of dollars.”

Clayton’s also convinced that if North Carolinians aren’t happy with “the state they’re looking at,” what they “have got to do this year is come at this from the perspective that we deserve better than what we’re getting,” she said. 

“And that’s what we’re promising this year in North Carolina — that Democrats are going to deliver better than what Republicans have given you for the last decade,” when they’ve held majorities in the state legislature.

Clayton is optimistic about her chances to convince some rural Republican North Carolinians to switch party allegiances, and if she does, it could make all the difference come November. 

In 2020, Donald Trump only beat out Joe Biden in the North Carolina presidential race by 74,000 votes.

“Joe Biden lost by what? A 1.3% margin, right? It’s a field margin when you think about it. And so North Carolina to us is not a persuasion problem state, it’s a turnout problem state and we’ve got to have boots on the ground energy everywhere to pull out folks from across it.”

A personal touch

Clayton’s father Mark is one of the 3.5 million rural residents in  North Carolina. And he’s one of the voters Clayton has already flipped  from voting Republican to filling out a ballot for a Democrat — though it wasn’t easy.

Mark Clayton lost his job in 2007 and, according to his daughter, became fed up with the Democratic Party because he didn’t see that it had a plan to grow North Carolina’s rural economy. 

Then, when Donald Trump ran for president in 2016, Clayton said “her dad thought Donald Trump was a businessman. He saw his name on buildings and thought he could take the economy to a place that it had never been before.”

“My dad got duped,” she told Cardinal & Pine. “Honestly, I think a lot of people got duped by Donald Trump, but that means that they’re smarter than that this year and that means they have the opportunity to say, ‘I’m smarter than that.’”

She was working on Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016 and was blindsided by her dad’s allegiance to Trump.

“I came home at Thanksgiving [in 2015] and I was playing Rook with him across the dinner table and he told me and I chucked a deck of cards at my dad’s head because I was like, ‘you will not vote for Donald Trump this year when your daughter is out there working for Hillary f**king Clinton. And yes he did,” she said.

According to Clayton, it took four years of her mom and sister “talking to him and saying, ‘we, love you. Do you love us? Because if you do, you can’t vote for that again.’”

Finally, Clayton said, not only did she flip her own dad’s vote back to Democrat, but he is now running for office himself as a Democratic County Commissioner in Person County.

He is one of two Democrats running — a first in a long time — and they are “hometown folks.” 

Clayton is convinced that they’ll both be able to speak to her local community and listen to residents and “do better than what the Republicans on our County Commission have been doing for the last 10 years that they’ve had a majority on it.”

When her dad called her to tell her the news that he was filing to run for the office he said, “well y’all needed a person.”

That’s exactly what Clayton had hoped and planned for in 2024 as she mounted her campaign to end the Republican dominance of rural North Carolina; having Democratic candidates step up and run to offer voters a choice.

While Clayton is criss-crossing the state to support the Democratic ticket, from Josh Stein at the top of the ticket in the gubernatorial race all the way down to various district races, she still looks forward to coming home to Roxboro.

“The thing that drives Republicans there the craziest is that I’m still there,” she said. “They’re like, ‘why have you not moved to Raleigh by now, girlfriend? Why are you not out of my backyard?’”

“And I’m like, because I’m not going anywhere. You’re going to see me sitting on MSNBC on national television with a little Roxboro, North Carolina sticker in the corner of it,” Clayton said. “And you’re going to know you can hate us all you want to, but I’m right in your own backyard baby. And I ain’t going nowhere.”