Meet Anderson Clayton, leader of North Carolina’s Democrats and the youngest state party chair in the country

When Anderson Clayton went to the ballot box for the first time as a first-year at Appalachian State University, she had never seriously considered a career in political organizing.

Now, she’s just won a second term as chair of the North Carolina Democratic Party, having become the youngest state party chair in the country only two years ago.

“When people look at me, they’re like ‘why on earth were you crazy enough to do that?’” Clayton said, reflecting on her decision to run for the position.

For nearly a decade, her answer has been driven by a fiery passion for engaging with “forgotten sector[s]” of the electorate, listening for and uplifting the issues that matter to North Carolinians from the Blue Ridge Mountains to the Atlantic coast.

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Clayton grew up in Roxboro, North Carolina, a majority-minority rural community just under an hour north of Durham that she described as not overtly partisan in everyday life, despite its Republican lean according to voter rolls.

However, for college, Clayton decided to travel three hours west to Boone, North Carolina. While she now spends much of her time today in rural communities across the state — connecting with a demographic Democrats have struggled with for years — her younger self felt she needed some distance from her hometown.

“I’ve got a lot of different opinions than the people that live here with me,” Clayton recalled thinking. “People all the time looked at me growing up and they were like, ‘You’ve got to get out of here. You’ve got big ideas.’”

“I was the only one in my intern class that was from below the Mason-Dixon Line,” she recalled. “Everybody else there [was] from Ivy League schools, or they were from Georgetown [University], or American [University] — they were somewhere in D.C.”

Clayton credited the support she received from her colleagues with teaching her about how political campaigns work, noting that she probably had “100 coffees” with other employees at the advocacy group that summer.

The up-and-coming organizer hit the campaign trail for several candidates before running for party office herself — including the presidential campaigns of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and then-Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., in their respective 2020 bids. In 2020, she joined Amy McGrath’s U.S. Senate campaign in Kentucky, later working for then-Rep. Kathy Manning, D-N.C.

“I think I spent my entire life running from rural North Carolina because I didn't know what was possible there and what my own power was to build something there,” Clayton admitted.

Engaging in retail politics in rural Iowa for the Harris campaign changed that perception.

“​​Everybody looked at me and they said, ‘Democrats just don't show up here anymore. No one comes out to us … no one wants to talk. No one wants to say that they're a Democrat,’” Clayton said. “And I was like, ‘well hell, I do.’”

So began a long journey home.

Clayton returned to Roxboro and moved back in with her parents, unsure of what to do next. She eventually took a virtual job expanding rural broadband across the country.

She became chair of the Person County Democratic Party in 2021. Over the next two years, the party flipped three city council seats to win a majority on the Roxboro City Council for the first time in its history. Nevertheless, Clayton was frustrated by the lack of attention the state party was paying to rural North Carolinians and what she saw as an inability to prioritize local issues.

So, she challenged incumbent Bobbie Richardson in the 2023 state party chair election. Richardson, a former state representative, was backed by establishment figures and party heavyweights, including then-Gov. Roy Cooper and then-Attorney General Josh Stein. In a stunning upset, Clayton became the first person in over a decade to defeat an incumbent N.C. state party chair.

She set about trying to revitalize a demoralized party that lost every statewide election in the 2022 midterms, including control of the North Carolina Supreme Court. Her first term was marked by the 2024 election and efforts to rebuild ties with rural voters.

Clayton won reelection Feb. 15 in the first round of voting, a drastic change from her initial run which forced a runoff — and a sign that her time in the political limelight may be only just beginning.

Miles to go

When Clayton first assumed her position as head of the party in 2023, she was working under Democratic executives at the state and federal level while contending with a Republican supermajority in the N.C. General Assembly and a Congress that was split across party lines.

Now, the script has mostly flipped. Trump has returned to office and now presides over a Republican trifecta at the federal level. Meanwhile, North Carolinians elected a new Democratic governor and broke the Republican supermajority in the state House of Representatives, and the Tar Heel state was one of only two statewide races in the nation to flip offices from red to blue last November.

As the political landscape changed, so did Clayton’s responsibilities and her sense of voters’ priorities.

“I think that there is an inherent anger right now that I’m seeing from so many people, and I get why,” Clayton said, referring to the chaotic entry of the new Trump administration and the Democratic Party’s disjointed response. “I want to turn that anger into action.”

The state party chair has found herself caught between mounting an opposition to current Republican leadership and investing in the next generation of Democrats, a balance that can be difficult to strike.

“Donald Trump’s not the full problem,” Clayton said. “I think our party actually needs to get smart and realize this is not just about the one man in the White House. This is a permeated thing throughout a party and throughout a country right now that we have got to be combating at every single level.”

Clayton’s been encouraged by grassroots organizing and “anger … coming from the ground” in the wake of Trump’s return to power, which she believes has an important role to play in conjunction with more formalized political organizing. She stressed that successful activism requires collaboration: “It can’t just be the Democratic Party.”

Clayton hopes “more of a collective coalition” between Democrats and politically unaffiliated organizers could work to not only build a broader base of support for common policy goals, but also to help reinvigorate a party that has in some ways stagnated, failing to reach many voters.

“I think our party just missed a mark,” she said about the 2024 elections, noting that the only demographic with which Democrats made gains was white, college-educated voters.

She attributes much of the problem to messaging. To Clayton, an essential component of reaching prospective voters is meeting them where they’re at — showing up in their communities and listening to what they have to say, even when they aren’t fans of the party she represents.

“I genuinely believe that everybody is somebody worth talking to,” Clayton said. “At the end of the day, if you give people information, and you approach them as a human being, they’re more likely to listen to you.”

But she thinks Democrats haven’t always invested in connecting with constituents that could be supporters if they saw more of an effort from the party to meet their needs. Rural voters are one such group. Young men are another.

Clayton is looking toward a number of possible solutions to this engagement problem. She thinks building up a stronger media ecosystem for Democrats will be essential, noting that “people are not listening to and not watching national media” but instead are “getting media from their own individual silos.” She also suggested a different financial model that fundraises on behalf of the party as a whole instead of individual candidates, which she believes would allow Democrats to spend more time on long-term engagement campaigns instead of only mobilizing ahead of elections.

Above all, Clayton thinks a robust organizing apparatus is the key to political success for Democrats going forward. By speaking to voters in the field, she aims to reach communities that may have turned to the GOP or disengaged from politics entirely because they felt politicians on the left weren’t concerned with their views.

“We’ve got to have places for people that didn’t vote in this last election cycle because they felt like the party wasn’t representing them, and we’ve got to have a lower barrier of entry for them to come back in,” Clayton said.

On the local level in North Carolina, at least, the party chair is hopeful for the future. She noted that of the 50 largest municipalities in terms of population, 17 are “potential flips” for Democrats.

But getting there will likely require the party to reinvest in communities it has strayed from in the past — and figuring out that voter engagement strategy is Clayton’s next challenge.

The next frontier

Clayton first entered the political arena because she felt inspired by a party that seemed to “put [its] time, [its] time, [its] energy where [its] mouth [was] about investing and creating spaces for young people.”

Now, she’s looking to bring back that spirit of civic passion for a new generation of young voters.

According to Clayton, young Americans are stuck in an environment that emphasizes that “the world around [them] sucks,” courtesy of “doom-scrolling” and messaging implying they don’t have the power to effect political change.

“Folks are not realizing that together, you have more of that collective power,” she said.

Clayton acknowledged that political change is an uphill “fight” and that it can be difficult for young people to say they want “power,” but it is a necessary demand for those seeking change.

“How do I, as a person that's now gotten here, make it less of a fight for the people that want to get up in this after me?” she reflected. “I don't think that college activists probably see themselves as future politicians right now. I see them as that.”

Zoe Kolenovsky | News Editor

Zoe Kolenovsky is a Trinity junior and news editor of The Chronicle's 120th volume.