The 2022 Senate Race Has Already Begun In North Carolina

With the inauguration of President Joe Biden on January 20th, the end of the 2020 election cycle officially came to an end. After a transition filled with unfounded claims of fraud, dozens of lawsuits, special elections, and a failed insurrection, the new administration was able to shift its focus to governing.

This respite from the bombardment of political ads and haranguing will be short lived, however. It seems that every election cycle begins closer and closer to the previous one’s end and this year is no different.

The race for the Senate is already in full swing in states like North Carolina, where incumbent Republican Richard Burr has announced that he will not be seeking a fourth term. In the wake of this announcement, the senior senator’s seat has become a focal point for Democrats as a potential flip to solidify their slim majority in the Senate.

Two candidates have already announced their intent to seek the Democratic nomination for the seat: former state Senator Erica Smith and state Senator Jeff Jackson.

Smith was also a candidate for the 2020 Democratic Senate nomination, losing out to Cal Cunningham, who went on to lose to incumbent Thom Tillis. Cunningham had raised a record-setting amount of funds for his campaign and was leading in the polls for the majority of the race, when an extramarital affair was revealed in the final months of the campaign and he ultimately went on to lose the election.

Smith, a state senator from 2014 to 2020, believes that the outcome of the primary race will be in her favor this cycle, saying she will be able to focus more on her campaign now that she is no longer also balancing her time between her career as a teacher and as state senator.

“I‘m not sitting in session making sure I don’t miss a vote or sustain the governor’s veto,” she said in a phone interview with The News & Observer, a Raleigh-based regional newspaper.

A Black woman, Smith has been an outspoken critic of Democratic leadership’s choice to endorse Cunningham in the 2020 election.

“To do the same thing over and over again and expect a different result is insanity. North Carolina cannot go down the path we have gone down for the last election cycles as it relates to the U.S. Senate race,” Smith said in her interview. “There is not a cookie cutter white male version that is successful. Electability should look different now moving forward.”

With Vice President Kamala Harris resigning her seat to assume her new position, there are no Black women currently in the Senate and Democrats in North Carolina have never nominated a Black woman for a Senate seat.

“We need to stop misusing and abusing the most loyal voting block in this party and that is Black women. That’s the African American women voting block,” said Smith.

Another hurdle that Smith has to overcome in her bid for the nomination will be her perceived inability to be an effective fundraiser.

While Smith raised only about $239,000 during her previous primary campaign effort, her future primary opponent, Jeff Jackson, announced on January 28th via Twitter that his campaign had already raised $500,000 in the first two days of their efforts.

In her phone interview with The News & Observer, Smith said that she recognized that “money is key,” but that she will not take donations from the fossil fuel industry or large PACs to fund her campaign, preferring to go the grassroots route.

Taking full advantage of the grassroots funding movement Smith hopes to tap into has been the Jackson campaign, who in the same Twitter thread announcing their successful fundraising efforts, also said that nearly 80% of their contributions were under $100 and had received no support from PACs.

First taking office in 2014, the same year as Smith, Jackson is a veteran with 18 years of service, and continues to serve as a captain in the Army National Guard.

In a campaign video posted on January 26th, Jackson laid out a plan to visit all 100 counties in North Carolina as part of his campaign.

“We’re going to make it a 100-county campaign. A true 100-county campaign,” Jackson said in the video. “An organized effort to reach every county in the state, to cut through the noise and hear directly from you about what our state needs. And that means we’re going to be on the road a lot.”

While Jackson has gotten out to a strong start early on in the process, it has not come without criticisms.

The Smith campaign said in a statement, “It’s important that we let this primary campaign play out and do not anoint front-runners based on money more than a year before any ballots will be cast. We saw how that turned out last cycle.”

While alluding to Cunningham’s defeat in the general election, Smith also played on the same issue that the North Carolina GOP has raised with Jackson, who they have nicknamed “Cal, Jr”, given their similar military backgrounds and being seemingly cut from the same cloth: younger, White family men.

In a video posted to their YouTube channel titled “Cal Junior models his first TV interview after Cal Cunningham Senior”, the NCGOP draws direct comparisons between Jackson and Cunningham’s first interviews after announcing their candidacy and how similar they appear to be when addressing certain issues.

Jackson has also had to answer questions concerning the previous nominee’s infidelity and any parallel that there may be in Jackson’s own marriage, furthering comparisons between the two.

Whoever the nominee will be to fill the seat, they will be in what many consider a key race for the next Senate.

The state has become extremely competitive in recent years for Democrats, with Donald Trump losing ground in the state in the 2020 presidential election, edging out President Biden by 1.3% compared to the 3.6% he defeated Hillary Clinton by in 2016. Thom Tillis’ reelection in 2020 was only by 1.7% over Cunningham, even after the latter’s sex scandal was exposed.

Many political insiders believe that the race will see some of the largest fundraising and spending figures of any election outside of a presidential race. Given the record-breaking amounts raised in the 2020 Senate race and the importance of the seat, one can only expect even larger numbers to roll in once the campaigning officially kicks off later this year.