Clayton wins second term as NC Democratic Party chair

Anderson Clayton will lead the North Carolina Democratic Party for another two years, party leaders decided Saturday.

The state party’s executive committee met Saturday in Wilson to elect a chair and several vice chairs, which direct state party operations and play a critical role in fundraising, messaging and campaigning. The committee elected Clayton 405-71 to its chair position over challenger Marlando Pridgen.

Clayton’s first win in the race for chair was a surprise: She was 25 years old at the time and she had just unseated Bobbi Richardson, a former state legislator who had been endorsed by some of the state’s most prominent Democrats.

Clayton’s win Saturday was less of a surprise: Democrats won several statewide races in 2024 under Clayton, after losing every statewide race in the 2022 elections, before she took the reins of the state party.

Clayton issued a statement after Saturday's vote, saying she was humbled by the committee's support.

"We must continue the work of organizing all one hundred counties, recruiting and training candidates for local races in every community, and standing up to Republicans who are attempting to overthrow our democracy — both at the state and federal levels," she said in a statment.

Each of the incumbent vice chairs up for reelection — Jonah Garson, Kimberly Hardy, and Elijah King — also won reelection.

The presidential candidates’ presence in North Carolina helped boost turnout in the November elections, Clayton acknowledged in an interview prior to Saturday’s meeting. However, she campaigned for reelection by promoting the party’s efforts to boost interest in down-ballot races.

“We kept an organizing team called Project 100 in the North Carolina Democratic Party that was separate from the coordinated campaign, and help really helped focus on building up county party operations,” she told WRAL.

North Carolina Democrats won races for governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, state superintendent of public instruction, and secretary of state. The party also helped Democratic U.S. Rep. Don Davis fend off a challenge in a newly drawn northeastern North Carolina district, and guided Democrats to key legislative wins — breaking the Republican supermajority in the General Assembly.

Democratic Justice Allison Riggs also emerged from Election Day with more votes than Republican Jefferson Griffin, the Republican challenger in the race for a seat on the state Supreme Court. That race hasn’t been certified, though; Griffin is challenging the eligibility of more than 60,000 voters.

Clayton said last year’s election results overall show that the party is on the right path, and that she plans to continue building a more robust party network in the years ahead.

“What we really emphasized with our organizing team is the counties that were not getting enough emphasis,” Clayton said ahead of Saturday’s meeting. “And so we really focused on almost 80 rural counties across the state this year, helping emphasize voter turnout.”

In the November presidential election, Donald Trump carried the Tar Heel State on his way back to the White House, even as North Carolina moved to the right less than other swing states he won.

The North Carolina Republican Party said in a statement that the Democratic Party has become detached from the broader electorate and pointed to a statewide decline in the number of registered Democrats.

“Today’s Democrat Party stands for the liberal billionaire elites and is out of touch with the working men and women of our state and country,” Matt Mercer, the state GOP’s communications director, said in a statement.

Pridgen, Claytoin’s 41-year-old challenger, is a campaign manager and former congressional candidate who works as a community engagement coordinator for a Columbus County nonprofit organization. In a speech prior to the vote, Pridgen cast last year’s election results as a disappointment: “not our year,” he said.

Pridgen has said he challenged Clayton because he didn't think the party had done enough for rural Democrats. Ahead of the vote Saturday, he said he struggled to get support from the party during his run against Republican U.S. Rep. David Rouzer, who won by 17 percentage points.

Pridgen said his experience, combined with the party’s budget priorities, made it seem like Clayton was out of touch with party members. Pridgen said he disagreed with the party’s decision to suspend the Eva Clayton Fellowship Program, a fellowship that pays for college students from underrepresented communities to work and learn alongside party officials.

The party initially planned to suspend the program amid a budget shortfall, prompting criticism from some party members. On Wednesday, Kian Sadjadi, the party’s executive director, announced that a Democratic donor provided the funding needed to sustain the fellowship.

The fellowship shouldn’t have been on the chopping block to begin with, Pridgen said, “because we are constantly in need of developing and recruiting and having new candidates and new talent to develop for work in the party.”

Party organizations often face budget shortages after major elections. Clayton said the issue is exacerbated for the North Carolina Democratic Party this year because it is covering some legal fees for Riggs, the incumbent state Supreme Court candidate, who’s fighting the legal challenge from her Republican opponent.

Clayton has said she understands the importance of the fellowship and is eager to build the party into an organization that no longer has to rely on the ebbs and flows of election-year donations. “I want to be able to save every staff member that we had on for the state party in this election cycle,” Clayton said.

Funding that goal is going to require a change in mentality, she said ahead of the vote.

“Most donors tend to want to fund a party in an on-year and I'm trying to get people in the mentality in North Carolina that every year is an on-year,” she said. “We don't want to just show up at people's doors every five or six months. We want to be there year-round, and we want to be talking to people in communities about how the Democratic Party is … there to help them and provide opportunities for them to engage in services that they didn't even know existed.”