It’s November 15, 2024 and I’m in a room so packed with people that I wish I were wearing a t-shirt instead of my Carolina Federation hoodie. More than 50 lead canvassers have come to Durham to debrief the Federation’s paid electoral field program. We’re doing an activity to check on people’s hearts and minds just 10 days after Donald Trump won the US presidency for a second time. “How are you?” our political director Gabe Gold Hodgkin, asks, rhetorically at first. “Don’t tell me yet. Show me,” he says, inviting people to move to one of four quadrants in the room based on their energy and feelings. To my surprise, people concentrate in the positive mood quadrants. Gabe asks folks to share why they chose their quadrants.
“I’m proud of our team. I’m proud of us all,” says Tina Wake, our Durham lead canvasser. “We may not have won everything, but wherever we were engaging people, our candidates won. We made a difference.” Later in the debrief, person after person shares heartfelt reflections:
“I never paid much attention to elections before, but this job changed me.”
“I had been wanting to get involved but didn’t know how; y’all gave me a place.”
“We can’t stop here, our people need this! What’s next!”
Their enthusiasm reflected both a sense of accomplishment at their success and longing to be part of a collective with a meaningful, shared purpose.
The Carolina Federation played a key role in a voter organizing collaboration of more than two dozen NC-rooted organizations working from the mountains to the coast. Our collective effort reached a record scale in 2024: we recruited and trained 200 full-time organizers, almost 2,000 paid canvassers, and thousands of members and volunteers who had real conversations with more than 1.2 million North Carolina voters. Together we broke the GOP supermajority in the state General Assembly and blocked MAGA candidates from winning seats for governor, attorney general, superintendent of public instruction, and state Supreme Court judge.
These victories point to the way the deep organizing conversations and leadership development that our organizations do year-round can make a difference in elections – but events since the election have shown us the limits of our power. Until we can win fair voting maps, it will be hard to make our state legislature reflect and represent our majority.
Who we are
Since 2019, the Carolina Federation has been organizing working people across race in North Carolina, knitting together county-level groups in counties with large metro populations. Our long-term vision is to build a multiracial democracy in North Carolina that centers the leadership of Black working-class North Carolinians and grows a governing culture of solidarity across race, gender, place, and class.
The Federation is ambitiously working to combine the best of Southern freedom traditions: deep base-building, transformative cultural work, power-building issue campaigns, and large-scale voter organizing. Any one of these strategies on its own takes tremendous commitment, effort, and resources. We’re trying to weave them together because we’ve learned that in order to reach our vision, we need them all.
Local issue campaigns offer a chance for people to win changes that make their lives better. Base building makes those changes possible, by recruiting and developing leaders who work together to build grassroots political power. But the state’s pre-emption laws allow the General Assembly to snatch the fruits of our local victories, so we also need electoral work to shift the structures of power at the state level. In order to win the power to permanently change rigged rules, we have to build durable progressive majorities both statewide and at the level of legislative districts.
What we tried
Pivoting our electoral strategy
Going into 2024, right-wing political and corporate interests had outsized power compared to our base. Since gaining control of the state legislature and the redistricting process in 2010, the North Carolina GOP has consistently crafted voting maps for Congress and the state legislature that are a model for right-wing, partisan gerrymandering efforts nationwide. They’ve used the supermajority these maps give them in our General Assembly to systematically tilt the state’s election rules in their favor. In October 2023, Republicans drew wildly gerrymandered voting maps for state legislative and congressional races and because they had just won a majority on the state Supreme Court in 2022, these partisan maps prevailed. The new maps drew candidates that the Carolina Federation had recruited to run for the NC House out of contention.
The strategic lesson we took from this loss was that the path to fair voting maps, and therefore winning real power in the state legislature, runs through the NC Supreme Court. We pitched a new strategy to our members, and in the spring of 2024 they voted to prioritize the NC Supreme Court race. They endorsed incumbent Justice Allison Riggs, a Democrat and longtime advocate of voting rights and fair elections who was defending her seat against Republican Jefferson Griffin, a conservative seeking to move up from the state court of appeals.
Building our team to build our power
As the drama over the maps unfolded in 2022-2023, our local chapters were engaged in deep listening, community building, and issue campaign work. After some success with small-scale base building in 2022, we launched an organizer-in-training (OIT) program in 2023. The program focused on developing the leadership of people who joined the organization via our neighborhood organizing or electoral work the year before and setting up our next round of issue campaigns.
We retained four people from our large-scale electoral field program in 2022, who we put into apprenticeships leading about 10 other organizers in training. Those organizers joined more seasoned members of our local chapters to lead deep listening conversations with more than 1,000 people and turn hundreds out to a set of “Freedom Gatherings” that culminated in a membership drive and a vote to update our statewide People’s Agenda. From there, organizers recruited new and existing members to issue campaign teams who led the local budget campaigns our members chose to run from February to June of 2024.
This base-building program grew our membership and moved over $10 million in local funds for things like eviction protection, guaranteed income for formerly incarcerated people, and public school support staff. It also developed the leadership and skills of nine new organizers who we retained as permanent staff of the Carolina Federation, five organizers who would continue to lead members in our county chapters, and four who would lead our 2024 electoral field program. This crew included Ashley Evans, who started as a field office director with us in 2022, learned to lead an OIT team in 2023, and became our Field Director for the 2024 election cycle.
“I had been part of messed up electoral work for a long time,” Ashley told me. “It was a breath of fresh air to find people who really cared passionately about what I care about, and who showed me they believe in me by encouraging me to bring my lived experience and perspective to this work. And it wasn’t just a feeling—the OIT program was a rigorous learning experience about how to do training, how to do project management, how to work toward shared goals and shared purpose as a team.”
The heart of base building is identifying strong, talented, and politically clear leaders like Ashley, who are respected in their communities and in turn cultivate other leaders. Ashley knows what it’s like to be a “disposable” worker, including a canvasser in transactional electoral programs. Because she has also experienced the Federation’s base-building and cultural transformation work, she’s passionate about linking both to the Federation’s large-scale electoral work. She built the Federation’s team of 2024 electoral organizers by finding, hiring, and developing homegrown canvassers: mostly Black and working-class folks who know firsthand what it’s like to be excluded and ignored by mainstream politicians and electoral mobilization efforts.
“Ashley was so welcoming. With no barriers, I was invited into a space of possibility,” said Zacoda Miles, one of those canvassers. “I hadn’t done anything like canvassing before, but Ashley made me feel like it wasn’t what I knew, but what I could learn. She helped me understand that the problems I had in my life were actually stakes I shared with other people and she helped us all see how the candidates in the elections are connected to things we experience in our own lives,” Miles said.
‘…With no barriers, I was invited into a space of possibility,’ said Zacoda Miles, one of those canvassers. ‘I hadn’t done anything like canvassing before, but Ashley made me feel like it wasn’t what I knew, but what I could learn.’
The training for the canvassers helped them make the connections. “To give our team of canvassers a visceral sense of why the state Supreme Court matters, we ran a political education session where we put the racial makeup of their counties on a map and had them draw voting maps that equitably represented as many voters as possible,” Evans said. “Then, we overlaid the actual, gerrymandered maps on top of theirs. They could see how they and their families were literally drawn out of a district on purpose. From there, we talked about the power the state Supreme Court has to either uphold these bad maps or ensure fair ones, to either protect or roll back access to abortion, to either protect our public schools or allow the legislature to sell our kids’ education to the highest bidder. Our folks were genuinely fired up and eager to talk to people in their communities about the importance of this race.”
How it went
All told, the Federation’s canvassers knocked on more than 800,000 doors and got commitments from over 50,000 voters to support Allison Riggs. They helped voters make a specific plan for when, where, and how to vote. After Election Day, they worked extra hours to help voters who had issues with their ballots cure the problems so their votes would count. When all the ballots were tallied, Allison Riggs won her election by 734 votes. By contrast, Republican candidates in other statewide judicial races defeated their Democrat opponents by no less than 98,000 votes.
What we learned
The Federation’s strategic pivot to focus on the state Supreme Court race was the right call. Even as we await deeper data analysis, the close margins of the win suggest that our face-to-face, deep canvass style of voter contact and our ballot cure efforts contributed significantly to Justice Riggs’s win. This effort demonstrated not just our commitment to the immediate race but also our capacity to build long-term power. By executing a highly organized, high-stakes, and aligned ballot-curing effort, we strengthened our relationships with voters, raised our profile with the Democratic Party, and proved that we can deliver results when it matters most. And we didn’t do this alone. For example, most of the training materials used for ballot cure were developed by our partners at Down Home who had also played a leading role in defending and flipping rural legislative districts in order to break the supermajority. This work wasn’t just about securing one seat on the Supreme Court—it was about laying the groundwork for transformative political change across North Carolina.
The scale and effectiveness of the Carolina Federation’s electoral work last year would not have been possible without the base-building work we did in 2022-2023 that helped us develop the people and shape the field program that contributed to this win. Building on that success, we’re running a new version of our OIT program in 2025, one focused on developing three new staff recruited from the field program and cross-training our field organizers in base building and issue campaign organizing.
As we build toward an integrated model, we also want to do a better job of connecting our members with our electoral work in ways that feel meaningful to them. In 2024, many of our members expressed feeling disconnected from our large-scale door-knocking effort, in part because we did not intentionally build on-ramps for members who wanted to canvass. Instead, we stood up a separate and much smaller-scale relational voter engagement program that focused on events and texting. The feedback members gave us is that they want more choice and integration with the large-scale electoral program.
Finally, we may have prevented a right-wing trifecta in our state government for now, but Kamala Harris’s loss; the fact that so many voters who should be with us stayed home; the razor-thin margins of our wins; and the swift, intense backlash from the Right remind us that scale alone is not enough. Winning will require overcoming both structural and psychological barriers to voting and collective political action. Independent political organizations like the Federation can offer people compelling experiences of hope, authentic connection with others, and opportunities to feel and grow their power. Our commitment to building from the ground up is vital in this effort.
We win, the Right retaliates
Immediately after the election, the NC GOP took advantage of the waning days of its legislative supermajority to override the governor’s veto of a blatant power grab bill, which they embedded in a sham “hurricane relief package.” The bill gives the Right control over our state elections board, and strips other important power from the governor and other executive branch offices won by Democrats in 2024.
In a move that highlights why the Right wants control of the elections board, Jefferson Griffin refused to concede his loss to Justice Riggs, even after her victory was confirmed by multiple recounts. After Griffin unsuccessfully petitioned the state elections board to throw out more than 60,000 lawfully cast ballots (mostly Black, Democratic voters concentrated in the counties where the Federation has members), he circumvented normal judicial procedure and took his challenge to the NC Supreme Court (which has a 5-2 Republican majority led by his own mentor, Chief Justice Paul Newby). We’re in for a long legal battle that may very well result in our state Supreme Court helping a losing candidate steal an election from the voters.
This battle is a stark reminder that we will continue to be forced to play a rigged game as long as our people don’t build enough power and solidarity to fundamentally change the rules and who is making them. The Carolina Federation and our allies are committed to protecting this important electoral win and getting better at the deep, sustained base-building work that is vital for winning durable structural change so we can make North Carolina a state where all our people and places can thrive.