A Purity Test for Democrats
The state Democratic Party won’t share its voter-turnout tools with certain candidates who previously voted to override the governor’s vetoes.
The North Carolina Democratic Party is withholding a key resource from four state legislative candidates who have sided with Republicans in voting to override vetoes from Democratic governors.
At Chair Anderson Clayton’s urging, the state party’s Executive Council enacted new rules during a closed meeting sometime last year to deny access to VoteBuilder—a voter contact software the state party typically distributes at no cost to candidates—to one former and three current state lawmakers.
The program allows candidates to track volunteers, identify possible supporters, and develop donor lists.
The new policy wasn’t announced publicly. It punishes Democrats who have bucked party leadership and serves as a warning to discourage others from doing so in the future. While Republicans have a supermajority in the state Senate, they need at least one Democratic lawmaker to break ranks to override vetoes in the state House.
Clayton said the party decided to revoke access from anyone who voted last year to override a veto by Gov. Josh Stein. Anyone who had voted in the past to override a veto by former Gov. Roy Cooper and who is now challenging a Democratic incumbent also lost access.
She said the policy applies to state Reps. Carla Cunningham and Nasif Majeed of Mecklenburg County and Shelly Willingham of Edgecombe County, and former Rep. Michael Wray of Northampton County, who is challenging an incumbent in a bid to return to the legislature.
“The state party has restricted some of the access to resources that we have for anybody that’s overridden the governor’s veto in the past election cycles that we’ve seen,” Clayton said in an interview. “We need people that are going to Raleigh to actually represent their district and their constituencies and how they got elected.”
