Every two years national media and political pundits characterize North Carolina as purple, blue, red, or an unexplainable secret fourth thing. Cycle after cycle, the media gets it wrong because they’re missing the growing independent political power being built by organizations fighting for working people in corners of the state that political parties have abandoned.
Down Home North Carolina, a member-led organizing project based in small-town and rural communities, has spent nearly a decade building independent political power among the multiracial working class. Our theory of change is simple and unglamorous: if you knock enough doors, develop enough local leaders, and contest every school board and county commission seat, you can eventually co-govern with elected officials to deliver for working families. In 2024, that theory produced a result that national maps could not explain: while 90% of the nation’s counties shifted right, Down Home’s rural counties bucked the trend, with six counties actually reversing direction.
Now in 2026, North Carolina is making headlines again about a potential southern “blue wave” along with Georgia and Texas.
It’s gonna be very tempting to try to say everything’s fine and no major changes are necessary because look how well we did in the midterms.
Todd Zimmer, Co-Executive Director of Down Home North Carolina, and Todd Warren, Statewide Campaigns Strategist of Down Home North Carolina, sat down with us to set the record straight on North Carolina politics, what they’re building, and a vision for the future of the state.
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It’s the midterms, many issues are on the ballot this fall. What’s at stake for North Carolina?
Todd Zimmer (TZ): Our main interest is our long-term pursuit of governing power. We know that we do not want to live in a North Carolina that is under single-party Republican control. We know that our communities, unless something changes, are going to be further devastated by the One Big Beautiful Bill as the worst impacts go into effect next year. Our communities face the possible loss of Medicaid expansion, which is something that we helped win and gave 700,000 of our people healthcare; the collapse of SNAP, which is food assistance for 1.3 million North Carolinians; further cuts to our public education system — just for starters. All the public goods that our people rely on are actually at stake in this election.
People across North Carolina are talking about the constitutional amendments on the ballot this year. DHNC, along with many other independent political organizations, are campaigning against them. Why?
Todd Warren (TW): Yes, we’re facing these awful amendments — that are totally irresponsible and would be devastating. They would cap personal and corporate income taxes in our Constitution, making it impossible for any governing body to raise taxes beyond a future point, same with property taxes. The biggest beneficiaries will obviously be the largest corporations and the wealthiest North Carolinians at the expense of everyone else.
We’re fighting uphill against an opponent that’s using racial gerrymanders and partisan gerrymanders to make it extremely difficult. They’re holding onto their majority by rigging the game.
These are gonna be hard to beat, and we’re fighting them, and we might win, we might not.
What’s an example of DHNC’s theory of change of moving local organizing in order to build statewide power in action?
TW: Alamance County. Dreama Caldwell, our director, chose to run for county commission in 2020 — the first Black woman who had ever run for that position. She’s a different kind of candidate than the Democratic Party had ever let through their primary. The local Democratic Party opposed her candidacy, and Down Home rallied to get her through her primary. Dreama didn’t win the general election, but she helped to turn out Black voters in Alamance County and elect the first Latino ever elected to the North Carolina General Assembly on the same ticket, Ricky Hurtado — which was the seat that helped us break the supermajority that year, or prevent its return.
Fast forward to today — which is crazy to think about, only three electoral cycles later — and there are Down Home member candidates, the majority of which are Black and brown people, serving on boards and governing bodies across the county. The county, not solely because of Down Home’s work but in relationship to it, has become much more politically active and is governing that county. This year, we are really hopeful that we are going to finally dethrone one of the most noxious racists in the state, Terry Johnson, the infamous sheriff of Alamance County. And that won’t be because of Donald Trump — it’ll be relevant, but we think it’s because of the base building and the development of a multiracial political alliance that has taken many cycles and many candidates, both running and winning and running and losing. A community that was marginalized — whose experience in Alamance County was summed up as “No Chance Alamance” — has actually moved to the fore and started to govern Alamance County. Our hope is that that can be replicated in other places and replicated at the state level — from margins to governing for the multiracial working class.
DHNC organizes in places where there’s little to zero political infrastructure but those places have major electoral consequences across the state. Can you talk more about that?
TZ: The experience over the last 10 years of running this project is: this is our fifth general election cycle. And in every cycle, beginning in 2018, Down Home has won and helped to flip — in some cases single-handedly flipped — rural districts that should not have been competitive by conventional standards. And every single time we’ve done that, which is all four cycles so far, it has meant that we either broke the Republican supermajority or we prevented its return on paper. Now, the Republicans have used dirty tricks to reclaim their supermajority status two out of those four times. Every cycle, we pick up a seat, and the next cycle, we had to run on different maps. So we’ve won a different seat every cycle for four cycles straight — at least one seat — to prevent a Republican supermajority. We’re fighting uphill against an opponent that’s using racial gerrymanders and partisan gerrymanders to make it extremely difficult. They’re holding onto their majority by rigging the game.
Their desperate attempt to hold onto power also tells us that organizing works. That’s why we need independent political organizations like Down Home: to develop people’s political agency, their ability to translate their desires into organized power, spaces where they can make meaning about political choices and work out their differences without losing their alignment in the face of the forces that want to divide us and sap our power. That is what our project is: to create a space where, through participation in Down Home, our members become more powerful, and when they take action in the political arena, the power that they build accrues to them — not to a candidate, not to another party, but to them as stakeholders in our project and in our democracy.
Gerrymandering..you can’t talk about North Carolina politics without discussing gerrymandering. How has gerrymandering and voter suppression shaped our politics?
TW: When the Voting Rights Act of 1965 passed, that was the first time we actually had oversight in this country and actual enforcement to make sure that we actually had a multiracial democracy. We talk about how we have had a historic democracy in this country since our inception. The fact of the matter is, that was not real until we got the Voting Rights Act. And literally since that moment, conservatives in this country and in this state have been working tooth and nail to tear that piece of legislation apart.
We have been under these Republican gerrymanders for 16 years, and even up until just a few months ago, there were people in the state who thought it was literally impossible for us to ever get to a majority in the state House under these maps. But you can only gerrymander a state so much. There are enough unregistered voters and people who agree with us in all these districts — they just need to be organized.
Gerrymandering isn’t the only way voters are disenfranchised here in North Carolina. There are stories coming out about student voter suppression and mail-in ballots being thrown away. Can you speak about that?
TZ: Ultimately, the interests of the ruling class in North Carolina are in conflict with the democratic will in North Carolina. And so in order to maintain their hold on power, they have used, for 200 years, legal processes to deny the full participation and power of mainly the Black vote, but really the votes of anyone who is going to oppose the interests of the ruling class here. That’s why they’re denying polling locations at NC A&T, the largest HBCU in the country, or at Western North Carolina, which is a mainly white campus in the mountains but where young people vote against the interests of the ruling party.
Our organization was designed to meet these new conditions – to build sustainable multiracial power and wield it against both parties in the interests of working people.
Additionally, we believe there will be a number of narrowly contested races once the polls close on November 3rd. North Carolina is famous for extremely close elections, and we’re going to have a lot of them across the state. Just weeks before early voting started, the State Board of Elections issued a new rule that lets them throw mail-in ballots in the trash if the envelope is ripped a little bit. We sued the State Board of Elections to try to prevent that rule from going into effect. Right after we sued, the Republican Party of North Carolina and the National Republican Party joined as defendants to argue that they should not suspend this rule. We asked for an emergency injunction against this rule, and the judge denied us.
In the first five days of early voting, Thursday through Monday, unaffiliated voters cast 34% of ballots. In 2022, unaffiliated voters cast 29% of ballots over the same time. That speaks to DHNC’s calculation that people are looking for something much better than what they’re being offered.
TZ: Right, up until 2010, when the Tea Party wave and Project REDMAP came and swept itself to power in North Carolina and kept us locked down now for 16 years behind racial gerrymanders, Democrats had ruled North Carolina for more than 100 years. They originally came to power as a white supremacist political party, that’s true. The party remained in place even through the Dixiecrat era, the aftermath of Jim Crow, and the party realignment. It was still a single party state. It was a multiracial party by the time 2010 came around when the GOP took power.
But what that means is that the political institutions of our state for more than 100 years were developed to wield influence inside a single party. They were not developed to carry out a public debate between multiple parties about what the priority issue should be. They were not designed to build independent political power and bases. We have the lowest union density of any state or territory in the United States. So, in 2010, when the GOP came into power we didn’t have the political institutions that we needed to respond to the conditions we found ourselves in.,
Our organization was designed to meet these new conditions – to build sustainable multiracial power and wield it against both parties in the interests of working people. This is also true for our partner organizations Siembra North Carolina and Carolina Federation, which are all community organizing base-building projects.We’re building out a new political ecosystem here in North Carolina that is going to be capable — if it’s not now — of taking governing power and wielding it. That’s the goal. It’s been an evolutionary response to what happened in 2010 and the lack of this kind of formation before that time.
As people talk about the “blue wave” that’s coming to North Carolina and speculating that the change in North Carolina will be a result of Trump and a hope of returning to “normalcy” via the Democratic Party, how do you respond?
TZ: I’m concerned that whatever happens in this election is going to be read only as a repudiation of Trump’s policies. It will be that, but also Trump was elected two years ago. That doesn’t mean that the political solution that people are looking for is available. We don’t want a seesaw between a potential fascist threat and a lame-duck Democratic administration for the rest of our lives.
Voters are strategic by and large. Some voters who maybe want something that’s not on offer today may vote for Democrats because they understand that’s the best chance for them right now to get the boot off their neck and prevent the worst harm and excesses of the current ruling establishment that’s straight-up hostile to their interests. I wouldn’t misread high Democratic turnout in this election as the lack of political imagination or a yearning for something different than what’s on offer.
It’s gonna be very tempting to try to say everything’s fine and no major changes are necessary because look how well we did in the midterms. I don’t believe that’s true. That doesn’t track with our experience on the ground with our base. Those of us who are sincerely interested in governing power and the well-being of our communities know we need to continue to push for better solutions for our people than what’s been offered recently. The main impediment to having those things be accessible has been resistance from Democratic electeds to embracing those positions when they have the power to do so. If that continues, then we’re not going to get very far before we’re back in this situation again.
As we inch closer to election day, what is DHNC doing to make electoral change possible on November 3rd?
TW: Our canvass project has knocked more than 400,000 rural doors this year and is going to knock another 100,000 doors between today and Election Day. The canvassers are knocking on more than 8,000 doors a night. Our canvassers are the multiracial working class. It’s amazing to see what is possible for folks to do when they are organized. And these doors are far apart. They’re scary. Our canvassers knock all summer through heat waves, past dogs. They get guns pulled on them. They get the cops called on them. It is really, honestly, somewhat unbelievable what our folks do.
I always tell people when they sign up for canvass, whether volunteer or paid, that it is actually one of the bravest things that you can do, because we live in a society that tells us — especially in the South — not to talk about our political views if they’re contrary, and also not to talk to strangers. There is such a lack of community that has been intentionally stripped away from us by the ruling class, that people can live in a community for years and sometimes not even know who their next-door neighbor is. So when people come and knock on a door not knowing who is behind it, what they think, or how they’re going to react, they’re doing the thing that society has basically indoctrinated us not to do: talk to strangers about our values and our wants for our community.
Win or lose, we have seen a ton of people come through our canvass program who are now members — probably a quarter of our staff right now came from our canvass program — and that is because of the transformative experience they’ve had on the doors, just talking to voters about what’s important. Speaking to the long-term work, even things as simple as passing a resolution at the county commission or getting $100,000 allocated to a park — sometimes considered small — but for people who never thought government could work for them, seeing that when they organize with a small group of people and make a clear ask and organize for that, they can win, lets them know that there’s something bigger that they can do.
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