The choices facing battleground North Carolina’s voters this November look like America’s in miniature — from opportunities to unseat key U.S. House members to the very real possibility of breaking the GOP’s seven year stranglehold on the state’s General Assembly. But no race on that ballot presents more stark contrasts, nor more promise of seismic repercussions, than that between state Supreme Court incumbent Justice Barbara Jackson (R) and the civil rights icon who would send her packing, Southern Coalition for Social Justice founder and former U.S. Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, Anita Earls.
By all appearances, Justice Jackson hopes to stroll to a second eight year term on the state’s high court without muddying her robe by stooping to campaign, content to let GOP operatives do the dirty work for her through a series of electoral cheats and racist negative ads against her opponent.
Bracing for the Jackson/Earls face-off, beginning in 2017 GOP legislators rammed into law special bills aimed at tilting the playing field: making the race partisan (requiring candidates’ party affiliations to be listed on the ballot), cancelling judicial primaries for 2018 (in hope that Democrats would run a circular firing squad of contenders for Jackson’ seat rather than a single strong candidate), and rigging the ballot to ensure Jackson’s opponent’s name would be listed last on the ballot.
If that smells to you like GOP fear of a formidable opponent in a must-win race, you wouldn't be far wrong.
Meet the North Carolina Republican Party’s worst nightmare: a distinguished civil rights jurist and the woman of color a GOP smear campaign has branded “dangerous:” Anita Earls.