The State’s Democrats Ask: What the Meck?

Diego Leibman drove his small red sedan from California to Charlotte a few weeks ago when the Mecklenburg County Democratic Party hired the recent Stanford University grad to launch Mecklenburg Unidos, the party’s first Latino outreach effort. Shortly after, Leibman hired his classmate Fabián Valerio to join the effort.

On the last canvassing shift on the eve of Election Day, Valerio drove that sedan to the southwestern reaches of the county. The Democrats had identified this precinct, 229, as the place with the most potential voters left to win. The Steele Creek neighborhood is mostly small, one-story homes, and has a large contingent of Hispanic voters.

He left literature at one house, then moved across the street to another. The person who answered the door wasn’t the one on Valerio’s list. After explaining that he didn’t speak Spanish, the man in his 30s told Valerio he and his partner had just moved from Oklahoma, looking for more diversity. It was too hard to be gay in such a red state.

By then, a multigenerational group of women arrived home at the first house and grabbed the literature Valerio left. They shouted in Spanish that they had already voted—for Trump.

The efforts of Valerio, Leibman, and other legions of canvassers were supposed to make the difference here. Kamala Harris was always going to win Mecklenburg, and if she could win it by enough she might even take North Carolina.

“Mecklenburg has the most registered Democrats in the state,” said Asher Hildebrand, a Duke University professor and former Democratic campaign operative. “It has become increasingly Democratic in its margins and it has punched below its weight in turnout. While raising turnout in Meck wouldn’t be a silver bullet for Democrats to win statewide in North Carolina, it would make the job a whole lot easier.”

The strategy didn’t pan out. 

As of Wednesday afternoon, Harris had 173 more votes statewide than Joe Biden did in 2020. But in Mecklenburg, she had about 6,000 less.

The shift mirrors national trends. Urban and suburban areas across the country saw a distinct move rightward. Donald Trump won an increased share of the vote in Atlanta, Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee, and other cities that helped Biden win the presidency in 2020. 

The trend left Mecklenburg Democrats scratching their heads.

“I’m going to be probably too frank, and our donors and supporters are not going to see it that way, but probably there was nothing we could have done,” said deputy executive director Andrew Richards. “This doesn’t really make it feel a lot better.”

But their strategy may have worked, at least in some places. Though the abnormally high number of absentee ballots in 2020 complicates comparisons, Harris received 3,000 more votes in Precinct 229 than Biden did, increasing the Democratic share from 57 percent to 62. There just weren’t enough of those places.

The Winning Formula

Going into the election, the target math was clear: Democrats thought they could claw back about half of Biden’s statewide deficit in 2020 through increased turnout in the Charlotte area.

“Joe Biden lost North Carolina in 2020 by about 70,000 votes,” said UNC-Charlotte political scientist Eric Heberlig. “The number of votes that Mecklenburg County Democrats have talked about increasing in this election is 40,000.”

While Anderson Clayton, chair of the North Carolina Democratic Party, focused on cutting losses in rural areas, Mecklenburg was key to two other strategies: running up the numbers in the urban core, especially the Black and Latino populations that make up 33 and 16 percent of the county respectively, and flipping moderate Republicans, especially women, in the suburbs and exurbs.

But doing that requires targeting very different kinds of voters, which needs money and organization. Charlotte Democrats haven’t been known for either.

“Some have speculated that it’s more of a business city than a politics city,” Hildebrand said.

But it’s also about networks and resources. The area lacks the density of activist groups that have been essential to other important urban Democratic strongholds like Atlanta. And the local party structure itself was relatively moribund.

“I think part of the story is an organizational story about the decline of local parties,” Hildebrand said, noting that until this election cycle, Mecklenburg didn’t have professional party staff or resources to match the significance of Charlotte.

That began changing a year and a half ago when Drew Kromer, a 27-year-old Davidson College grad fresh out of law school at UNC-Chapel Hill, was elected chair of the county party. They went on to flip the Huntersville local government, which had been almost entirely Republican, in November 2023. They hired professional staff for the first time ever. And they vastly increased their fundraising efforts this cycle, the party said in a statement, bringing in $2.7 million, or seven times the previous record for a county Democratic party in the state.

Aunties Against Trump

The changes made a world of difference on the ground.

“I didn’t get the feeling that Charlotte was blue when I first moved here,” said Jackie Goldberger. The former reporter and real estate agent retired to Brunswick County in 2007, but followed her daughter to Charlotte seven years later, looking for a place that was less conservative.

“As much as I wanted to help, I didn’t think I would make a significant impact,” Goldberger said. “And now I do because the party is so much more of a presence.”

Goldberger has been politically active since 1969, but her recent work with the Democrats kicked off in anger at longtime Democratic state House Rep. Tricia Cotham switching parties last year. Since then, Goldberger has transformed her home into a canvassing base. On Monday, canvasses were coming and going all day as they knocked on doors in some of the tonier neighborhoods of southeastern Charlotte. 

The parts of Mecklenburg beyond city limits “are the most competitive regions of the entire state,” said Catawba College political scientist Michael Bitzer. “If Democrats want to be competitive statewide, they need to slice that lean Republican tilt in those areas to either 50/50, or one or two points more Democratic than they are Republican.”

The day before the election was uneventful. Most people weren’t home. But county Democrats expected as much: It was the fourth time they knocked on these doors, a sign of just how thoroughly they canvassed.

On the other side of Charlotte, where Valerio and Leibman were trying to organize Latino voters, the story was similar.

“What we’ve done is we’ve activated groups that already existed,” Leibman said. He pointed to a group of Latina mothers who used to teach salsa classes together in local schools. Now, they canvass and table together. Leibman calls them the “Tías Contra Trump”—or, Aunties Against Trump.

Stella Hastie, a Colombian who has lived in Charlotte for 35 years, is one of them. She registered voters during the George W. Bush era, but aside from that hadn’t been politically involved.

Afraid of a second Trump presidency, Hastie called a friend working with Mecklenburg Unidos. Hastie joined as well.

That’s exactly how it’s supposed to work, Leibman said.

“These people are already paying attention, they already exist. They’re already talking to each other. They’re already organized. Each of them can call five to 10 family or friends at any given moment to knock doors, to table,” he said. “It’s not about making them political, it’s about inviting them into the fold and making sure that they feel like they have a home in the party.”

Both efforts seem to have worked. With the same caveats about absentee ballots in 2020, all six of the precincts Goldberger covered voted for Trump in 2020, but went for Harris this year. The areas Mecklenburg Unidos prioritized, including Precinct 229 and 205 in the east, also saw increased margins for Harris.

The Young and the Restless

What ultimately dampered Dems in Mecklenburg was not the county’s party being ineffective. It’s that they weren’t effective in enough places. 

Their priority precincts may have seen Democratic turnout gains, but the rest of the county undid them. It was places like Precinct 41, part of Charlotte’s “crescent” of low-income communities of color that wraps around Uptown from the north.

As the traditional work day ended and polls neared their closing time, voters trickled into Hoskins Avenue Baptist Church by twos and threes. Standing in the gray dusk just outside of the blinding neon glow of the nearby Magic 777 vape shop, voters of Precinct 41 told The Assembly how tenuous their votes were in between the screech of trains that stop just behind the church.

Teresa Walker only made it because her boss at the YWCA gave her time off. Koffi Tanou, a chef, caved after his family nagged him enough. It was the same story for Brandon Moore, a truck driver. He didn’t even plan to vote when he got off work 45 minutes before The Assembly spoke with him. He told his mom and grandma he was heading home, which they would not accept.

Their choice wasn’t always clear, either.

“It actually took me until today to decide who I wanted to vote for,” Moore said. “I mean, really, it just seemed like the past two elections nothing’s been done. Like, you vote for the person only for them to disappear once they get elected.”

Harris got slightly fewer votes in Precinct 41 than Biden did, and Trump improved his performance slightly.

While Mecklenberg Democrats knocked on over 400,000 doors and made nearly 3.5 million phone calls, it wasn’t enough to overcome the disaffection of the voters they needed and the national trends in Trump’s favor.

“The truth is, this is not something where we narrowly lost North Carolina because of Mecklenburg County,” Richards, the party’s deputy executive director said. “It’s happened before. That’s not what happened [tonight].”

At best, Richards said, a get-out-the-vote effort could gain a presidential candidate a few percentage points. “In an environment like this where the county actually shifts red? There’s nothing that a county party—a state party—can do,” he said.

What could matter, in the long run, is continuing to build the local infrastructure to be ready when the overall political environment is better. 

“I think our legacy here is, for the first time, having a cadre of tight-knit bilingual Hispanic volunteers local to the community who can fill out those unorganized precincts, who can carry this work forward,” Leibman says.

For all the enthusiasm of local activists like Goldberger and Hastie, out-of-state volunteers provided a lot of the on-the-ground organizing muscle. They came from 46 states, and even one from Germany. Out-of-state organizers did the bulk of the Mecklenburg Unidos door-knocking, said Tim Huson, one of those volunteers. An international economist and former state department official who worked in South America, Huson relocated to Charlotte from his home in Virginia for five weeks.

Part of the issue was just timing. County party chair Kromer wasn’t elected until April 2023. Richards joined in December of last year. Leibman was hired just weeks before the election after he reached out to the party.

“They wanted to do it,” he said. “They didn’t know how to do it. I did it for them.”

While Democrats can point to gains in down ballot races—a number of council of state candidates improved over 2020 in Mecklenburg, and an open state House of Representatives seat in the north of the county flipped blue—as reason for hope, maintaining trajectory in the face of a devastating presidential loss can be difficult.

That’s likely why the Mecklenburg Democrats watch party, even before returns started coming in, was mostly a celebration of the volunteers.

“The point of tonight is you,” Kromer told the already-thinning crowd a little after 10. “Without you all, none of this happens. Without the donations, without the door knocks, without the phone calls, without the poll greeting, none of this happens..”

Not much later, the crowd grew silent as MSNBC broke down Trump’s likelihood of winning the state. Organizers cut the volume, leaving the room silent until the band picked back up with DNCE’s “Cake By the Ocean.” 

The first lines? “Oh no, see you walkin’ ‘round like it’s a funeral.”