Rep. Val Demings and former North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Cheri Beasley have accomplished a feat that has frequently eluded candidates of color, especially Black women: managing to clear their Senate primary fields of heavyweight competition
Rep. Val Demings, pictured, and Cheri Beasley have both drawn notice for managing to clear their Senate primary fields of heavyweight competition. | Mandel Ngan-Pool/Getty ImagesAs Black women running in two of the nation’s most closely watched Senate races, Democratic Rep.of Florida and former North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Cheri Beasley are poised to make history if they’re successful in November. But that’s only part of what makes their campaigns stand out this year.
“This is definitely, I think, a paradigm shift,” said Stefanie Brown James, co-founder and senior adviser to the Collective PAC, which supports Black progressive candidates for office. “We’ve had qualified candidates all along. The problem is that we’ve had to spend too much of our time having to convince people that what you see in these candidates is enough to stand toe-to-toe with anybody else that’s in the race. But we don’t have to do as much convincing.
In the days before Jackson suspended his campaign, several party heavyweights — including Democratic Reps.“I think the party in North Carolina, and even to some extent nationally, is starting to put their weight behind people of color more than they have in the past,” said Doug Wilson, a Charlotte-based Democratic strategist who was a senior adviser to Jackson’s campaign. “Not that they didn’t like Jeff — Jeff has a lot of respect among the party.
Brazile, who is part of a collective of strategists and organization heads working to elect more Black women to top statewide offices, said that their main priority for candidates like Beasley and Demings is fundraising. Now that donor networks are supporting Black women candidates at earlier stages and in higher sums, she added, their viability is less of a question.
the president in rural areas. Statewide operatives — some of whom had long been pushing her to run for Senate — pointed to that performance as an example of her ability to appeal to a broad swath of general election voters in a contest likely to be won at the margins.
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