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Anderson Clayton set up a chair outside the Person County Library before the sun came up Tuesday morning, ready to hand out literature as voters arrived to cast their ballots.
“It’s going to be a crazy day,” said Clayton, the 26-year-old chair of the North Carolina Democratic Party. “But I knew I wanted to start here.”
Clayton grew up in Roxboro and still lives in the town of about 8,000. She credits it with helping shape her worldview and keeping her centered.
As the youngest state party chair in the nation, she’s lived in a sometimes blinding spotlight for nearly two years as she worked to break a GOP legislative supermajority, retain the governor’s mansion, and—just maybe—help make Kamala Harris the nation’s first female president.
“Joe Biden called me last night,” Clayton said. “The fucking President of United States being like, ‘Anderson, y’all have done one hell of a job in North Carolina.’”
Clayton choked back tears as she recalled the conversation.
“I’m 26, leading an entire political party in a country that right now is on the precipice of either disaster or joy and hope,” she said. “And I’m like, ‘Oh God, I hope we go the right way’ … So, yeah, the last 24 hours has been a lot of that.”
Clayton did her best to put all that out of her mind as she spent the first half of Tuesday at a Roxboro polling place, doing what she’s argued Democrats need to be doing everywhere in the state: Meeting voters where they are, shaking their hands, talking to them about this election.
In jeans and well-worn Blundstone boots, a blue flannel shirt and McGregor denim jacket, Clayton greeted voters she knew with a warm hug. Strangers she approached with a big smile and a Democratic sample ballot.
“Hey, baby! You going in to vote? Can I give you one of these?”
Her own father, Mark Clayton, is running for office for the first time this year, seeking a seat on the county board of commissioners. A former Trump voter, he’s running as a Democrat.
“I know Mark Clayton would appreciate your vote!’” she called to voters with a big wave.
In deeply red Person County, this sort of last-minute retail politics may make no difference. But Clayton wasn’t writing off anyone or anywhere this year.
Power and Pressure
Clayton’s road to Democratic party leadership in North Carolina was neither smooth nor straight.
By the time she cast her first vote in 2015, Republicans had controlled the North Carolina General Assembly for five years. After taking both the state House and Senate in 2010, they went about transforming voting maps, the judiciary, the powers of the governor and even the UNC System in ways that further solidified their power.
By 2021, when Clayton returned to Person County after organizing stints with the presidential campaigns of Elizabeth Warren and Harris, Democrats were struggling to hang together to sustain the veto of Gov. Roy Cooper—one of the last significant powers left to his office. The party was competitive in just 25 of the state’s 100 counties. They hadn’t won a U.S. Senate or presidential race here since Barack Obama’s first run in 2008.
When Clayton became chair of the Democratic party in her home county, it was hardly a fight.
“Nobody wanted the job,” she said.
Going door to door in Roxboro, Clayton and her team flipped three of the city council’s five seats in 2021, giving people of color their first majority on the council. Clayton’s work got state and national attention. Could that sort of success be replicated in other parts of the state Democrats had all but written off?
Clayton argued it could—and she wasn’t shy about telling other Democrats what they’d done wrong.
In 2022, when North Carolina Democrats took yet another drubbing statewide, Clayton made her play for leadership of the state party. She didn’t have the experience or connections of Cooper-endorsed Bobbie Richardson, the former state representative seeking a second two-year term as party chair. But she did have a youthful fire and deep dissatisfaction with the status quo that resonated with a party tired of losing.
In February 2023, the Democratic Party’s State Executive Committee voted 272 to 223 on a second-round ballot to elect Clayton as the new party chair.
It was a mandate—albeit a tenuous one.
Clayton went at the job full bore, traveling the state to energize Democrats in places the party doesn’t even have a presence. She grew frustrated by how often questions about why the state party took certain steps and not others were answered with simply “that’s the way we’ve always done it.”
She’s proud of how many arms of the party now have headquarters on the main streets of small towns like Roxboro, and believes that momentum can continue.
But the nagging question of whether it will be enough this cycle stayed with Clayton throughout this Election Day.
Outside the Person County Library, she chatted with Tyrie Stewart, a 32-year old Black man who told her he was voting for Democrat Josh Stein for governor but Republican Donald Trump for president. As Clayton and a few other Democrats talked to him about why, she felt the growing frustration of confronting right-wing misinformation on which he seemed to be basing his vote, along with a dose of thinly veiled sexism.
Harris just didn’t seem strong, he told her. World leaders wouldn’t respect her. She had no accomplishments or authority, but was also to blame for any failures of the Biden administration.
For Clayton, the situation was frustrating. The state and national media seem obsessed with the idea that Black men are abandoning the Democratic Party, she said, and this sort of interaction—with reporters looking on—didn’t help.
But also, exhausted and anxious on the most important day of her political career thus far, she wondered if people like Stewart represented a serious threat to Harris in North Carolina and elsewhere. Where had the party failed in their appeal?
‘The Hardest Thing I’ve Ever Done’
After a morning of working the polls, Clayton took a brief break at Cuppajoe Coffee Bar & Grill on Roxboro’s Abbitt Street. In her signature passionate, rapid-fire speech, she talked about the crippling weight of expectation as Democrats across the country looked to North Carolina as one of just a handful of potential swing states that might instead deliver a Harris victory.
When she took the job, she said, she was focused on winning the gubernatorial and council of state races, doing everything she could to break the Republican supermajority in the legislature, showing Democrats they could be competitive anywhere they were willing to fight. Flipping North Carolina blue for the first time since 2008 was a dream.
Now she worried she would be seen as a failure if she did all that but couldn’t deliver North Carolina for Harris.
In the 48 hours leading up to the election, Clayton said, the exhaustion and doubt had worn her down.
“Maybe it was gross naivety that made me think that a 26 year old, or 25 year old, a 24 year old when I fucking ran for this shit at that point in time, could do this,” Clayton said. “Because over the last two years, it has been the hardest thing that I’ve ever done.”
Despite record-breaking fundraising and wins in key races, she said, she worried her youth and inexperience would be blamed if the party didn’t run the table this election cycle.
“There’s a lot that I did not know in this, and there’s a lot that I have had to learn,” Clayton said. “And I’m like, is that what cost you this election, though? Like, is that what’s gonna do it at the end of the day?”
With a deep sigh, Clayton shook her head.
“That’s the pressure that I’m putting on myself more so than anybody else is putting on me,” she said.
‘The Greatest Ground Game’
As Democrats gathered for an election night watch party at the Marriott in downtown Raleigh, most seemed to believe Clayton deserved far more credit than she was giving herself.
The gubernatorial race was called for Attorney General Josh Stein early in the evening—something most Democrats were expecting after the dramatic implosion of his GOP opponent, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, over the last two months.
Democrat Jeff Jackson beat out Republican Dan Bishop for attorney general. Democrat Maurice “Mo” Green pulled ahead in a tight race against Republican Michele Morrow for state superintendent of public instruction. The veto-proof GOP supermajority in the General Assembly crumbled.
The wins and momentum energized the crowd, who greeted Clayton with rapturous applause before stirring speeches from Cooper, Stein, and Robert Reives, the state House Democratic leader.
But as Trump pulled ahead, ultimately winning North Carolina and a second presidency, the energy shifted.
Still, Reives called the party’s push this year “the greatest ground game in our history.”
“Tonight, no matter what we find out, no matter what the result, North Carolina politics have changed forever,” Reives said. “Tonight we have shown what it means when we pull up our boot straps, we get together, get over whatever we were mad about last week with fellow Democrats and we decide we are one big family trying to save our Democracy.”
After midnight Tuesday, as national results showed Trump winning not just North Carolina but every battleground state, Clayton was downcast but philosophical.
She took to X, formerly Twitter, at a little after 2 a.m.
“There’s a saying for everything,” she wrote. “And tonight comes from one my mom tells me often, ‘Sometimes God’s own thunder couldn’t make someone do the right thing.'”
Joe Killian is The Assembly’s Greensboro editor. He covered cops, courts, government and politics at Greensboro’s daily paper, The News & Record, for a decade. He joined us from NC Newsline in Raleigh, where he was senior investigative reporter.