In the state once believed to be Democrats’ best hope to win control of the US Senate in 2020, North Carolina Democrats are picking up the pieces after a loss party insiders deemed “surprising” even as grassroots activists claimed they saw it coming all along. Now those same activists, vowing not to let the party make the same mistakes twice, are searching for a progressive champion to run in 2022 for retiring Republican Senator Richard Burr’s seat. And a growing chorus believe they have found that champion in state Supreme Court Associate Justice Anita Earls.
Earls, profiled here at Daily Kos during her 2018 run for the state’s highest court, checks all the boxes for many NC progressives. She doesn’t merely talk social justice, she lives it: first as a young civil rights attorney and partner in North Carolina’s first integrated law firm, then as U.S. Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights in the Clinton administration, and finally as founding Director of what she built to become one of the state’s most potent forces for civil and voting rights, the Southern Coalition For Social Justice. At SCSJ her crowning achievement may have been her win before the U.S. Supreme Court in North Carolina v. Covington, which affirmed that NC’s state house and senate districts were unconstitutional racial gerrymanders, prompting a redrawing of those districts that in turn enabled state Democrats to break the legislature's nearly decade-long Republican supermajority.
Earls should also check all the boxes for state Democratic Party insiders, Chuck Schumer, and the DSCC as well. Among the names on the current short list of possible Democratic contenders for Burr’s Senate seat (including three-term state Senator Jeff Jackson and retiring state Senator Erica Smith), Earls is the only prospect who has fought and won a statewide race (in which she proved to be a formidable fundraiser, making her state Supreme Court bid the most expensive judicial race in history). In that 2018 ‘blue moon’ election (one lacking a presidential, gubernatorial, or U.S. Senate race) Earls presided at the top of the Dem ticket in NC, and on her coat tails NC Democrats swept every statewide race that year. In a state with a worryingly shallow Democratic bench, Earls is a proven closer.
Justice Earls is an African-American: her birth parents were black and white, as were her adoptive parents. Electorally speaking, that can be both a blessing and a curse. She has seen, and surmounted, the curse, as in 2018 when Republican operatives littered their anti-Earls campaign with racist innuendos. That trouble proved worth the personal cost, however, not least because African-Americans comprise 49% of NC’s registered Democrats, plus 13% of its unaffiliated voters. When NC’s black voters turn out in force, Dems win (as we did in Obama’s surprising 2008 victory here). Unlike recent failed NC Democratic congressional candidates such as Cal Cunningham and Dan McCready, Earls feels, and speaks to, both black and white lived experience with equal understanding.
The depth of Justice Earls’ interest in a Senate bid remains to be gauged, but a recent quote in the Raleigh News & Observer feels like a non-denial:
Justice Anita Earls said some “grassroots folks wanting to have a strong progressive candidate in North Carolina” have reached out to her about a potential Senate campaign. Someone registered several Senate-themed website addresses with Earls’ name, which Earls said she discovered through Twitter. [….] “I’m focused on being a good Supreme Court Justice.”
There’s no doubt Justice Earls has a number of factors to weigh when considering the call to run. Justice is her passion; politics is not. The calculus of retaining Democratic control of the state Supreme Court, with or without her, is tricky indeed. Plus, Earls is among the names frequently offered as potential Biden appointees to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Meanwhile, leading Republican contenders for 2022’s open Senate seat include the state’s infamous ‘bathroom bill’ ex-governor, Pat McCrory, retiring Congressman and Baptist minister Mark Walker, and presidential daughter-in-law Lara Trump. This week, the race’s first poll of Republican voters found Trump and McCrory in a dead heat.