North Carolina Democrats weren’t sure what to expect when Anderson Clayton, 25, won their election for chair, making her the youngest state party leader in the country. At one of her first meetings with state party officials, she said, one looked at her with a worried expression and said, “I didn’t know if you were going to be a crazy 25-year-old-type-person.”
Her retort: “What is a crazy 25-year-old-type-person?”
Ms. Clayton didn’t get into politics just to explain Gen Z to old people, she said. She is aiming to motivate younger voters, but she also campaigned with broader goals, arguing that Democrats need to invest in rural communities if they hope to erode Republicans’ grip on state and local power.
She thinks a key is being candid about her party’s flaws and missteps. “People with me all the time are like, ‘I wish you’d stop saying we’ve left Democrats behind,’” she said. “I’m like: ‘We have. We’ve left people behind.’”
In North Carolina’s elections last year, Democrats ceded 44 state legislative seats, uncontested, to Republicans. Many encompassed blue-collar, rural towns that had voted reliably Democratic decades ago but by then had no official footprint from the party, much less a candidate to support.
“Put a map of North Carolina on the wall, throw a dart at said map, and any given county, 50-50 shot there’s actually going to be a Democratic presence on the ground,” said Jonah Garson, the party’s first vice chair. With the party’s election losses piling up, Ms. Clayton’s campaign message was a call for a new direction.
She said that many Democratic officials viewed rural voters as out of reach. When Hillary Clinton ran for president in 2016, her senior staff scoffed when Bill Clinton fretted that Democrats were losing touch with rural voters. Why view them as valuable when they had the Obama coalition? But as it turned out, only Barack Obama could summon the Obama coalition.
“The Democratic Party has become too much of a metropolitan, cosmopolitan party,” said David Axelrod, a former top adviser to Mr. Obama. “There is a sense in the party that we’re the party of working people, but if you don’t communicate respect, and only say, ‘Let me tell you what we’re doing for you,’ then you’re not very persuasive. And there were a lot of working people who felt betrayed.”
Dallas Woodhouse, a Republican political strategist and the former executive director of the state’s G.O.P., said Ms. Clayton could have a marginal effect in rural areas but would struggle to sell her message to people who view the Democratic Party as toxic.
“She can’t overcome the party’s branding problem based on their policy preferences,” Mr. Woodhouse said.
While Ms. Clayton might agree with part of that diagnosis — “We don’t have a good brand,” she said — she is eager to try to address Democrats’ rural struggles.
Her campaign pitch was personal. She grew up in Roxboro surrounded by the farms, forests and rolling hills blanketing rural Person County. It was counties like Person that had raced to the right in the years prior, and whose residents, Ms. Clayton said, had been robbed of a seat at the table. Her father, she said, disavowed the Democratic Party after he lost his manufacturing job in the onset of the Great Recession.
She also wanted to woo young North Carolinians, devising a plan to engage the state’s outsize Gen Z population and tapping into the hundreds of thousands of students enrolled in North Carolina’s colleges.
She wants to show people that the Democratic Party cares about them, she said over coffee recently at a Capitol Hill diner, adding that there’s a “separation between politics and everyday people right now, and folks are inherently disengaged with it.”
That disconnect has come at a cost. In 2022, as Democrats performed better than expected in swing states nationwide, Republicans in North Carolina held an open Senate seat and retook control of their state’s highest court. North Carolina Democrats hope to emulate battleground states like Michigan, where youth turnout in the midterms last year reached nearly 37 percent and the state’s leadership, for now, turned blue. In North Carolina, youth turnout was 13 points lower.
Almost three months in, Ms. Clayton and her three vice chairs are seeking to resurrect a party that has had few bright spots since Mr. Obama and Senator Kay Hagan won the state in 2008.
And while the population has grown, especially in urban centers that skew left, demographic changes have not been enough to overcome gerrymandering and put Democrats back in legislative majorities or turn the state blue in presidential and Senate elections.
While acknowledging it will be an uphill climb, Ms. Clayton’s party has taken a more aggressive stance. Organizing on the ground year-round, not just in the weeks before an election, is a priority, she said.
She often spends several hours a day in her father’s bright-red 1997 Ford F-250, and she estimates that she has driven about 7,000 miles visiting her state’s far-flung counties. (In April, Ms. Clayton also went to the White House Easter egg roll to highlight the North Carolina farmers who had supplied the eggs.)
Back in her home state in the middle of last month, she led a rally of about 150 people in the district of Tricia Cotham, a state representative and a lifelong Democrat who days earlier switched her party to Republican. Afterward, Ms. Clayton chatted with attendees as others broke into groups and went to knock on doors in Ms. Cotham’s neighborhood.
Her defection gave the G.O.P. the numbers necessary to override any potential veto from Roy Cooper, North Carolina’s Democratic governor. But the new party chair, who has also nudged an increase in grass-roots donations and donors, saw it as an opportunity to alchemize anger into action.
Ms. Clayton won her race in February, ousting Bobbie Richardson, the first-term incumbent and the state Democratic Party’s first Black chair, in a race widely seen as an upset. Ms. Richardson, 73, had the backing of the state’s Democratic establishment, including Mr. Cooper and Josh Stein, the attorney general.
Ms. Clayton, who considers herself an organizer rather than an activist, has been involved with politics since early in her time at Appalachian State University, when she ran for a seat in the student government and then became student body president. After graduating, she worked on the presidential campaigns of Senators Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren and on the Senate campaign of Amy McGrath in Kentucky.
She then returned to Roxboro and became chair of the Person County Democratic Party. She helped flip the Roxboro City Council in 2021 and a state legislative seat in 2022 and then decided to run to lead the state party. (She also works part time as a broadband analyst for the Center on Rural Innovation.)
Zeb Smathers, the Democratic mayor of Canton, who endorsed Ms. Clayton, said he was impressed by her understanding of small-town voters. She understood, he said, that “there are a lot more Cantons than Charlottes.”
She speaks bluntly with voters she knows are turned off by the Democratic brand. Though she does not blame Democrats exclusively, she did not hold back when discussing the effects of trade deals like NAFTA, signed under a Democratic president four years before she was born, that have hollowed out blue-collar towns and lurched once-reliable voters to the other side of the aisle.
“What did it do to these communities?” she said, faulting both parties. “We never invested back in them to make sure they survived.”
