NC-SEN, 2022: The Beasley Resurrection?

[Sorenroy]

Smith is the only candidate that I regret not doing more for in the 2020 primary. I voted for her, but I didn't do much candidate-specific work leading up to the primary. Even if I had converted every voter in my country to a Smith voter, it wouldn't have changed the outcome of the race.

All that said, Jackson is a much better candidate than Cunningham and we might not be in the same base-mobilizing environment as we were last year, so I'm not sure if she's the candidate I will eventually back. I guess we'll have to see how Jackson and Smith decide to run and if there are any other candidates that jump into the race.

[Sorenroy]

How Republican is the district Madison Cawthorn lost the primary in?  The Republican who beat him won by less than 10%. I have a feeling that a lot of Cawthorn supporters out of spite voted for the Democratic candidate. While I appreciate people voting Democratic, if that's true, that's just pathetic.

So Beasley ended up only losing by 3.5, slightly outperformed the polls. Considering the national environment and how Dems didn't spend much in this race, it's pretty decent result. I haven't seen much deepdive into this Senate race results..would be interested to see the swings.

As the results were coming in Beasley’s largest overperformance came from around Asheville, not just Asheville but the many blood red counties around it

As someone who lives in Asheville, the Democrats this year really leaned into the "Coordinated Campaign." Rather than each Democratic candidate running their own campaign with their own set of volunteers targeting the same lists of potential voters, all the campaigns, from County Commissioner up through Senate, ran as a single, unified block. We've had coordinated campaigns before; the big difference this time was that control over the state party's resources was kept locally (mostly in the hands of the Jasmine Beach-Ferrara team) and there was more flexibility in scripts given to the local candidates and their teams. All that, along with better lists of persuadable voters, potential volunteers, and - after Columbus Day - turnout targets, meant one of the most efficient and unified election programs this area has ever had. At the end of the day, Buncombe County had the second most doors knocked of any county for the Coordinated Campaign in the state despite having less than a quarter of some of the others' population and Democrats. While I don't know quite as much about the other counties, they were similarly run (headed by Beach-Ferrara with local flexibility and support).

I really think it just came down to that. Jasmine Beach-Ferrara is a solid candidate - she's a pastor and currently serves on the Buncombe County Commission - but not mindblowingly so and Chuck Edwards is a bad and fairly extreme candidate, but so were Mark Meadows and Madison Cawthorn when they ran to represent the district. That's reflected in Beach-Ferrara getting more votes than Beasley in only three of the 14 full counties that make up the district. And that turnout machine for every Democrat on the ballot is reflected in the results.



Only ten counties in the state gave Beasley the percentage she needed to win (based on 2016/2020 PVI); fully six of them were in NC-11. Buncombe, Transylvania, Madison, and Polk were the top four: all in the district. If Cheri Beasley outperformed in every county as much as she did in Buncombe, she would've won the state by 5% rather than losing it by 3.5%. The real issue was the falloff in support and turnout in the eastern half of the state. In the same way as Buncombe, if the results of eastern counties like Washington or Bertie were reflective of the entire state, you'd be seeing Beasley lose statewide by a 15 point margin.