Anderson Clayton is the youngest — and only Gen Z — state party chair in the country. She wants to help President Biden win over young and rural voters in her state next November.
Anderson Clayton, 25, chair of the North Carolina Democratic Party, is the youngest state party chair in the country. She wants to help Democrats reach rural and young voters.Anderson Clayton, 25, chair of the North Carolina Democratic Party, is the youngest state party chair in the country.
She wants to help Democrats reach rural and young voters.ROXBORO, N.C. — Anderson Clayton understands why young people have problems with the Democratic party. She does too. "I used to joke with people that if I didn't run for something else, I was going to be leaving the Democratic Party," she told the audience at a recent event in Washington, D.C. So she ran for something. Now, it's been more than six months since Clayton was elected chair of the North Carolina Democratic Party, a promotion after leading her county's party. And at 25 years old, she's the youngest state party leader in the country. It's a title she wears proudly, right alongside another: being from a small town. Both identities make many of her political battles personal, as she wrestles with the past faults of her party and what she wants the future to look like. "I was angry," she said of the Democratic Party."I was angry that it was ignoring places like where I'd grown up."Clayton's call to action "Rural areas right now are dying, and people for years have just sat there and said, 'y'all deserve that,'" she told NPR, sitting on the couch in her parent's living room during a summer afternoon in Roxboro, N.C."If you're going to choose to live in an area like that, you deserve just to die out." Clayton was born and raised in Roxboro, a town of 8,000 about an hour north of Raleigh. As she talks, her dog, Sadie May, keeps a close watch nearby. In the room over, the dining table is formally set as if for a large dinner party. The windows look out onto her father's ever-expanding garden, where music plays on a radio to scare the deer. Clayton looks over her father's garden where he's grows a range of vegetables including corn, cucumbers, squash, tomatoes and peppers in Roxboro, N.C. on June 27.In the lead-up to the 2024 election, Clayton is spending her time commuting around the state from Roxboro and hammering home a two-part message: Democrats have neglected rural communities like hers, and taken young voters her age for granted. But as she leads North Carolina's Democratic party, she's determined to show voters that Democrats are working to earn back their trust. "My own people are the ones that I've got to figure out a way to motivate and mobilize and get energized around building this thing up from the bottom," she explained.State Democrats are working to regain lost ground as Republicans now hold supermajorities in both chambers of the state legislature, along with the state Supreme Court. On the national level, the state hasn't voted for a Democratic presidential candidate for 15 years, when the state went blue for former President Barack Obama in 2008.
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