North Carolina gubernatorial candidates Josh Stein and Mike Morgan made their pitches to an influential Black political group in Durham Monday, leaning into their ties to the civil rights movement.
The two were trying to woo the Durham Committee for the Affairs of Black People, as were many other politicians hoping to be the Democratic Party’s nominees for one of the dozens offices up for election in 2024.
Approval by the civil rights group, which has been active since the 1930s, is key for any Democratic hopeful to impress the party’s base. About half of all North Carolina Democratic voters are Black, and Durham is the state’s most heavily Democratic urban area.
Stein, who is white, told of his dad’s work as one of the state’s most prominent civil rights attorneys in the 1960s, who opened the state’s first integrated law firm in Charlotte. The current state attorney general promised, if elected governor, to fight the Republican-led state legislature on what he framed as ongoing attacks on public education and voting rights: “Right now, we all know that things in North Carolina are tough,” he said. “But we also know this: The people of North Carolina are always worth fighting for.”
Morgan, who is Black, is a former state Supreme Court justice. He told of integrating his elementary school at 8 years old, the first and only Black student at New Bern’s Trent Park Elementary in 1964. He asked his parents for the chance, he said, even knowing the adversity he’d face. He promised to bring that same sense of courage to the governor’s office. “If it was in my DNA as a child, you know it’s in my DNA now,” he said.
The elections are less than a year away. Candidate filing starts in a week and already many campaigns are in full swing. And 2024 promises to have particularly competitive primary elections, too, since so many incumbents are leaving office. Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper is term-limited and can’t seek a third straight term, causing a ripple effect as other state leaders seek to replace him.
Stein and Morgan, who recently stepped down from the court, leave their seats open to new candidates. On the Republican side, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson and Treasurer Dale Folwell are also running for governor, meaning other politicians are preparing to replace them in 2024.
Satana Deberry, the Durham County district attorney who is one of several Democrats running to replace Stein as attorney general, said Monday that Democratic politicians too often take for granted Black voters — and especially Black women like her. That needs to change in 2024 if the party hopes to return to power, she said.
“They come to us, especially as black people, they ask us to turn out that first Tuesday in November,” she said. “And we wake up that first Wednesday in November, and what happened? Nothing.”
A spokesperson for the North Carolina Democratic Party didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment late Monday.
Lora Cubbage, a Guilford County Superior Court judge who’s running to replace Morgan on the state Supreme Court, noted how Republicans swept every statewide judicial race in 2020 and 2022. If Democrats are concerned about the issues like voting rights and abortion, she said they’d better start working to flip back control of the courts — which ultimately have the power to rule on whether controversial laws should be stopped from going into effect.
“We’ve been sleeping, Democrats,” she said. “Every time we sleep and we come back for another election, we have to fight for another right that’s been taken.”
