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- [00:00]
Lauren Eegan
Hey guys, it's Lauren Eegan here at the Bulwark. I've been really into this Supreme Court race in North Carolina. A quick refresh if you haven't seen our other videos about it. Basically the Republican candidate there has refused to concede to the Democratic incumbent, even though there's been two recounts there confirming both those recounts that he lost and she won. The margin there is super tight. It's about 700 votes. But instead of conceding and acknowledging that he lost like a normal person, he's digging his heels in. And basically this race has just gotten completely caught up in the courts. It keeps tossing back between federal and state courts. And the election there has not been certified. And it's late April. That race was in November. So I have Anderson Clayton, who's the chair of the North Carolina Democratic Party, here with us today. Hey, Anderson.
- [00:55]
Anderson Clayton
Hey, Lauren.
- [00:56]
Lauren Eegan
How's it going?
- [00:57]
Anderson Clayton
You know, it's. It's a day in North Carolina right now.
- [01:01]
Lauren Eegan
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's been like that for the past few months, I assume. Anyways, I just like big picture. Why should people care about this state Supreme Court race? We don't usually talk about state Supreme Court races.
- [01:13]
Anderson Clayton
No. And I think people tend to forget about them. Which is also how Republicans have been able to deny an election for the last six months in North Carolina is because a lot of this has been to your point in the courts. And it's trying to do a subversive, subversive play against democracy right now without people really knowing about it. And the COVID of the courts is kind of how I've been framing it because I don't think that many, like your average voter right now is paying attention as much as what's happening there. But basically what we're seeing is that after six months, to your point, Justice Allison Riggs fairly won her seat on the North Carolina Supreme Court by 734 votes out of 5.5 million cast. One of the smallest margins that we've seen in North Carolina state history, besides what happened in 2020 with another Supreme Court race that we had where Democrats lost that race by 401 votes. And so we came back because our courts are so important to thinking about how do we build Democratic power in the state. And what this implies or the implication of it for nationally right now that we're seeing is Republicans are trying to utilize the election denialism that they've taken as into other states in 2026. And so the type of voters that Jefferson, Griffin and Republicans challenged the legal strategies to which that they took that and utilized to only cherry pick certain counties of voters that they were choosing from in order to challenge is all part of what we're seeing right now that Republicans are going to utilize and sort of uses the petri dish to see. What can we, you know, come up with in North Carolina that we can take out and set a precedent for in other states.
- [02:43]
Lauren Eegan
I think what's so crazy about this to me is that, like, he might actually be successful at this. Can you just kind of get us up to speed? I know I don't want to get people like super, like, weighed down with all the legal ins and outs because it's frankly changing very fast. But get us up to speed quickly and like, what's happened in the past.
- [03:02]
Anderson Clayton
Few days right now where we sit. So we're in federal court again, and federal courts have issued a stay. And so there's not a cure process that's going into effect right now for voters across North Carolina. And honestly, it is complicated. But the Supreme Court essentially told Jefferson Griffin that we're not going to let you throw out all 67,000 ballots that you're challenging. We're going to make you count 60,000 of them. They're going to be fine. And that last little 6 to 7,000 number of voters who we don't actually know who those people are right now, we're going to let you throw those out potentially. Right. And so Allison Riggs, being the good voting rights attorney that she is, said, no, we're going to challenge that in federal court, and we're going to take that and make sure that military and overseas voters that are protected in their rights to be able to access a ballot box should be able to. And so making sure that we're elevating it where it needs to be, and we fully anticipate, if we have to, to take this all the way up to the United States Supreme Court. Allison Riggs is very much so on the case that one voter disenfranchised from this election cycle is one voter too many. And so I hope to God that everybody knows that we're going to fight as hard as we possibly can in North Carolina. And, and to your point right there, you were like, I think he could get away with it. And I'm like, no, he's not. And I, for some reason I have.
- [04:17]
Lauren Eegan
But the fact that we're even, like, here, you know what I mean, is hell no.
- [04:22]
Anderson Clayton
It's insane. I just, like, my immediate reaction is like, I can't let anybody that's your job.
- [04:27]
Lauren Eegan
That's your job to be optimistic. I got it. It's my job to be kind of jaded about it. I get it. Okay.
- [04:32]
Anderson Clayton
Real, Real. Real recognizes real.
- [04:35]
Lauren Eegan
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, let's talk a little bit more about, you know, what you're saying about Republicans, that they could try this in other states. You know, what are you all, like, talking about in North Carolina in terms of, like, is this going to be a playbook for 2026 in other states and not just for Supreme Court elections, too?
- [04:55]
Anderson Clayton
Right.
- [04:55]
Lauren Eegan
Is that a concern that you have even in North Carolina? Like, if he is successful or even the fact that it's gotten this far? Do you feel like the Republican Party, North Carolina is like, oh, so maybe this could work?
- [05:06]
Anderson Clayton
Yeah. I mean, I think the Republican Party nationally is saying it could work. The fact that the courts have allowed this to go on to your point for as long as they have is telling people, no, you can hold off and you can deny an election for an extended period of time after it's over with. And, you know, people are looking at it right now, and they're like, it's a Supreme Court seat. Why should I care? And I'm like, it's a Supreme Court seat in North Carolina. It's a United States Senate seat in Maine next year. It is a United States House of Representatives seat that we need to make Hakeem Jeffries the Speaker of the house in 2026. Like, they could do this with race on the ballot. And that is what I think is the most important aspect, is that they are setting the precedent to be able to do it up and down. And I think that when you're looking at how close the margins are in Congress right now, people should care about whether or not this makes it out of North Carolina.
- [05:50]
Lauren Eegan
Yeah. Yeah. Like, if this is the new normal, I don't know. If you're a North Carolina voter, how can you go to the voting booth and feel, like, really confident that your vote's going to count? That's kind of the upsetting part to me, too, you know?
- [06:05]
Anderson Clayton
Yeah. And honestly, I. I go back to the thing of if we have to cure these ballots, if that's where we end up. Like, I. I have full faith and confidence in the organizing team and the volunteers across the entire country. We have had so much support from people on the ground who were organizers this last election cycle that are like, how can we help make sure that voters know to the point where we've activated Dems abroad and we are bringing in people to safe. We've got to go knock doors of voters that are still in or like, you know, kids that are in London right now that are studying abroad or something like that. That we have people mobilized in every part of the world to be able to do that. And I think it's going to be able to show organizing power and it shouldn't be where we have to be right now. But I do think that Democrats need to understand that we are going to be prepared for whatever Republicans throw at us and continue to, because that's what we're going to have to like. State parties are going to have to be the place that has a, you know, an ability to say we're going to take on the fight that comes after the election, which is also litigation and making sure that you have the monetary resources to be able to do it, but also the people power to be able to fight this off if we needed to for what the courts are going to decide.
- [07:09]
Lauren Eegan
Yeah. And just quickly, in case folks don't know, can you explain what it means to go and cure these ballots? And like, he's going after a lot of overseas ballots. So, like, would someone literally from the state party have to like, show up abroad and be like, knocking on doors in London to your point? Like, what would that actually look like?
- [07:27]
Anderson Clayton
It might look like that, honestly. And what we're looking at right now is, you know, how are you supposed to let the basically where this sits in the court. Jefferson Griffin challenged 67,000 voters in the state of North Carolina. The 60,000. And he sort of challenged two different parts of voters. And I think it's important for people to realize this because the 60,000 voters that he challenged that are hava voters, which are a set of voters that got grandfathered into a federal piece of legislation that was passed in 2001 called the Help Americans Vote Act. And so if you got registered to vote before 2002 in the in the United States, in any state that you are in, you did not have to put your Social Security number or your driver's license number on your voter registration form. And these voters exist in every state across the country. And that's why it was such a huge thing when our Supreme Court said, no, these voters have to be counted, because setting that precedent alone right there means that Republicans are not going to be able to continue to do that in the future in other states. The other set of voters that he challenged is honestly the most unconstitutional set of voters that he's challenging because they're called uacava. Voters. So military or overseas voters that voted by absentee ballot in this last election cycle. He's challenging a 6 to 7,000 group of voters from only five counties in the state of North Carolina that are Democratic majority counties. And so what we're dealing with right now is whether or not the courts are going to go back and make people retroactively, quote, unquote, cure their ballots. They should not have to cure their ballots because they did nothing wrong when they went and voted last November. But what our courts are saying is that there is either a number or something missing from your voter registration form and they are going to give people the opportunity to have a 30 day window to go and fill out or to submit that missing number or missing form that they may have attached to their voter registration form. Mind you all, this is in a state where the Republicans also instituted voter ID last election cycle. So everyone that went to the ballot box also had to show a proof of ID when they went to vote. And so it is crazier to me that we are asking military personnel, people that voted by absentee ballot, that did everything right, including showing that and having to go back and do this process. But the cure process would be the state party knocking doors and making phone calls, going to find people, chasing them down, to make sure that they know that this is happening to them. Because right now a lot of people don't. And you, if you're in North Carolina and you're listening to this, you can go to the griffin list.com to see if you are one of the originally challenged voters. We do not have the full list yet though, from the state Board of Elections of everyone that's being challenged in this, which is also the crazier part to all of it.
- [10:09]
Lauren Eegan
Is he saying that it's just the Supreme Court race that needs to be tossed out? Or like, you know, all these voters I'm assuming most of them voted for in the presidential election and other local races, or is it just his race?
- [10:22]
Anderson Clayton
So Jefferson Griffin is just talking about his race. He's just challenging these voters for his. The RNC though, came in in December and launched another federal lawsuit where they are asking for this to retroactively count for every single race up and down the ballot. And so not only are we fighting Jefferson Griffin in court, but we're also fighting the RNC in court too, to make sure that this doesn't, if the courts fulfill Jefferson Griffin's request, make sure this does not retroactively apply down the ballot does as well, because it would harm Our Democratic super super majority break that we had in our legislature this last year with Representative Lindsay Prather, who really pushed us over the line in an R plus 3 district in North Carolina.
- [11:00]
Lauren Eegan
Is there something that the Democratic Party can or like should be doing right now? You know, when we talk about how this is like potentially a playbook that could be replicated in the future, how do you prepare for that as a party?
- [11:12]
Anderson Clayton
You hire lawyers in advance, which is what Justice Riggs did. To be honest with you, one of the best things that North Carolina had in this election cycle was someone that has seen what Republicans are willing to do with the corruption in our courts right now because Justice Riggs went ahead and hired legal protection and looked at the fact of how do we fight election denialism after the fact? Because we've also seen it from 2016 and 2020. Cleta Mitchell, who started the Election Integrity Network, lives in Moore county in North Carolina. Right now she is talking and doing this in her own backyard because she does want to be able to take this national. And what happened with the Election Integrity Network is that they actually filed these lawsuits before the election happened to retroact or to not retroactively, but to throw out hava voters in the state of North Carolina. That was denied in the courts before the election because our court said it is too close to the election to say that any voter right now shouldn't be on the rolls. And so there's procedures and timeframes to that that Republicans just are ignoring and not following. But this is a playbook that they have been instituting, in my opinion, for the last two election cycles. And right now they are trying to see how far can we push a friendly court when we have one in the state.
- [12:22]
Lauren Eegan
What do you think is ultimately going to happen with this North Carolina Supreme Court race? Like, do you think this goes on for another few months? Or like, what's. Where does this end?
- [12:32]
Anderson Clayton
I'll be honest with you. I think we will see a decision come out here shortly. I think that may is probably what we're looking at for an end in this. But I don't know. I do anticipate that it could take longer. I would have told you last November that around the April timeframe is when this would have ended. But I'll be honest, Justice Riggs, my voter protection director, Kat Lawson, two of the smartest women that I've ever had the privilege of being able to work with and around, both of them looked at me last November and were like, this is exactly what's going to happen. And everything that they've said to me has. And I think that that is what gives me the confidence to tell you, like, no, I know that we can win this and I know that we have got. We put ourselves in the right position to be able to defend against it. We shouldn't have to be. And I think that that is the part of this, that people across the country need to understand about what's happening in North Carolina can happen to you next. And we're trying to make sure that we're on the front lines to say, okay, here's the legal strategy. We're writing our own playbook, right, about how to defend against this. Here's the legal strategy, here's who we hired, here's what we're doing, here's how much it cost us, honestly. Here's what state parties have to prepare for. I'm not kidding with you. Like, I am a young state party chair. And I think that the insane thing is the amount of money that people that's in election cycles right now. If you looked at me and you said, what's the number one thing that you think needs to go? I'd be like, campaign finance reform. Like, we need it in every way, shape and form. Big money in politics has got to get out of it. But this lawsuit is going to end up costing Justice Riggs and the North Carolina Democratic Party almost $3 million. And I think if you're a candidate or if you're a working class person that we're trying to encourage to run for office, Republicans are also using this as a way to weaponize the courts, to be able to say, if you can't pay your way out of this, you're not going to be able to. And I look at a lot of state parties right now and candidates across the country, and I'm like, we're not prepared to do that yet. We're not prepared for the cost of litigation and everything else that it could cost after election cycles. But we will be now. And that's something that I'm trying to talk about with all of my state party chairs, the DNC, making sure that we are prepared for this in 2026 because it's going to happen again. It's just how well can we meet the mark that time and how much can we make sure that we're utilizing what we're doing in North Carolina to take it everywhere?
- [14:39]
Lauren Eegan
I also want to talk about 2030 census changes. This is something I've written a lot about for at the Bulwark they're happening as we've talked about. A lot of people are moving to the Southeast, including North Carolina. Y'all are probably going to get at least one, right? We think new congressional see after the coming census. And what that also means is that after this next presidential election, if a Democrat wants to win the presidency again, they're going to have to learn to invest more in the South. They're going to have to pick up some, some additional states in the Southeast. There's just probably, if these, you know, demographic changes hold, there's just probably no other way to do it. It's been kind of this ongoing discussion in the party that, like, we know these changes are coming. 2030 feels really far away, but it's actually not. Do you feel like the national party as a whole has kind of like woken up to the reality that they have to spend more time in the south? Or is this still something that you feel like you, you're constantly talking to the national party about, like, you guys got to come down here more, otherwise we're never going to win a presidential again.
- [15:47]
Anderson Clayton
Honestly, I'm talking to national donors right now about that because I think that what people need to understand about this election cycle, Hakeem Jeffries would be speaker of the House if we had won a Supreme Court seat in North Carolina in 2022. And in 2020, the reason that we are not investing or the fault of our own party right now for not investing in places like the south at this moment in time and even in previous election cycles is going to dismantle our own party. And I tell people that because North Carolina, when we had, when our Supreme Court went from being a Democratic majority to a Republican majority on the Supreme Court in 2022, we saw racial and partisan gerrymandering be reinstituted in our, in our state. I mean, the Supreme Court Republicans brought back up partisan and racial gerrymandering without even having a case brought before them. They did it on their own volition. They ignored stare decisis and they were like, let's, let's cut it out completely and let's take this in our own control. That's what Republican dominated courts do in states like North Carolina. And they rig our state to being in the favor of Repub. Instead of making sure that Democrats have a fighting chance. We lost a 7, 7 congressional split that we had in 2022. Seven Democrats, seven Republicans. Because North Carolina is a 50, 50 state. Right. And what happened was we went to a 10 and 4 minority in our congressional representation. And those seats that we lost in Congress is the reason why he's not. And that's why we are fighting so hard for this Supreme Court seat this year, because I've got three Republican seats up in 2028. North Carolina's plan when I became state party chair was number one, to make sure we get Justice Allison Riggs and hold a Democratic seat in 24. Number two, we got Justice Nita Earls up in 26, my other lone Democrat on the bench. Right now, we're going to hold that seat. And in 2028, we have the ability to take three Republican seats on the North Carolina Supreme Court back. And when we do that, we're going to be able to use their own playbook against them and say we're going to bring back and make partisan and racial gerrymandering illegal. We're going to give a fair representation. So Even before that 2030 census gets there, I'm talking about the year of 2030, that I want to make sure I've got democr Democratic majorities in my state House and also a fighting chance back in Congress. And, and so when we get that extra congressional seat, I'm going to have an 8 and 7 split in that sense, and I'll make sure I have another Democrat in there, too. But it's a long game in North Carolina.
- [18:03]
Lauren Eegan
Those conversations with donors, like, what are you hearing from, from them? Do you feel like, you know, because that's part of it, like, you've got to convince the, the big party donors to give money to some of, to some, some states in the South. And, you know, I think a few years ago they would have like, laughed if you were like, no, no, like, maybe you should give some money to the Democratic Party in Mississippi. But now I think people are kind of like, oh, yeah, like maybe, maybe I should.
- [18:27]
Anderson Clayton
Yes. Like, investing everywhere doesn't mean that we are not being strategic with our investments. It means that we're sowing the seeds for actually playing the long game, which to me is what the party needs to be thinking about is how do you build political power?
- [18:40]
Lauren Eegan
And it's had some trouble, I think, in the past of playing that long game. And like, you know, looking ahead, I think sometimes the party can just have really tunnel vision on the election that's right in front of you, which is understandable, but it's also like, no, no, no. Like some big changes are going to happen and you got to do something about it.
- [18:58]
Anderson Clayton
Yeah, I mean, I agree with you. No, like, I genuinely, I think I was screaming for all of 2023, I was like, north Carolina is a battleground state. I shouldn't have to be fighting y'all on this, to be honest with you. Like, it is a place that, with the right investment, like Sherry Beasley losing a United States Senate or Senate race to me in 2022 was at the fault of people not investing in her race. Like, that was a field margin that she lost by, and it means we didn't get money early enough. And I, I cannot stress it, the party and I think, honestly, donors look at it and they're like, we need to invest in election year. And I'm like, no, you invest every year. Well, that is what Republicans have done consistently. And when they do that, you have the ability to build the infrastructure so you don't have to spend as much money in an election year. Because Democrats have been talking to people year round in communities. They've been helping people understand how government is supposed to work for them. And it's a different way of looking at how do you actually organize. And I think that that's the future, at least I see in this party.
- [19:53]
Lauren Eegan
Yeah. Well, Anderson, thanks for coming. You know, the Supreme Court, things gets resolved anytime soon, come back and chat with us about it. Appreciate it.
- [20:03]
Anderson Clayton
Thank you.