The contest for U.S. Senate in North Carolina features a stark contrast in personalities. In temperament, background, and ideological intensity, Cheri Beasley and Ted Budd, each carrying their respective partisan banner, are dramatically different people. Their respective profiles reveal much about what each party values in 2022. And this gaping divide will play out in the race to win suburban votes.
Cheri Beasley is one of the most accomplished women in North Carolina. First elected to the state judiciary over a decade ago, Beasley served as the first Black woman chief justice after being appointed to that position by Governor Roy Cooper. She ran tens of thousands of votes ahead of Joe Biden in the 2020 elections, nearly retaining her seat in a year in which Democrats performed poorly in North Carolina. Her demeanor is judicious and judicial, reflective of years of leadership in the courts. She is careful, restrained, and dignified. Little about her could be described as “folksy”–an epithet that tends only to be bestowed upon the white and the rural.
Enter Ted Budd. If there is a good ol’ boy in North Carolina politics, it’s the gun shop owner from the semi-rural exurban county of Davie, in the ultra-Republican western Piedmont. He owned a gun store and received the endorsement of the God-Emperor of Red America. His public image drips with hyper-masculinity, using violent rhetoric like “crusher” and carrying guns in his campaign advertisement. In fact, he owns a gun store, making him a gun profiteer, and likes to display barbed wire and border walls. Everything about this man screams testosterone, perhaps a key reason why he won the Republican nomination by 33 points. (Though his victory owed primarily to massive spending by the Club for Growth.)
A key axis on which the contrast turns, then, is gender. Beasley is among the most politically successful women in recent North Carolina history, and Ted Budd reflects the frat-boy culture that has taken over his party as it became more and more identified with toxic masculinity. Surely, this Battle of the Sexes will play out to at least some degree as the campaign goes forward. It’s long been observed that female voters’ decisions are more fluid from year to year than their male counterparts’ tend to be. If the swing vote is largely female, Beasley should have a natural affinity with many of the people who will choose North Carolina’s next senator.
It may not be enough. North Carolina leans a little bit Republican, and more importantly, the state is extremely polarized, so the Republicans’ small default advantage tends to carry the day in most elections. But the issue landscape is shifting toward a tableau that should push moderate women to the left. In a year when the male-dominated Republican Party is banning abortion and restricting women’s rights, the women’s electorate may be primed to retaliate against the GOP’s institutional misogyny. Ted Budd remains the favorite in North Carolina. But don’t count out the power of sisterhood.
Alexander Jones is an original contributor to PoliticsNC.
But Beasley is hardly running a campaign at all, judging by what one sees on TV. In these days of high-profile campaigns, how can any candidate allow oppontents to define them as “soft-on-crime.” Beasley had the great benefit of not having an primary opponent, but still has not done any significant campaigning in Mecklenburg county (which votes Democratic) except for ads saying “I am NOT soft on crime.” Why doesn’t she call out the Trumpist, stolen-election lying Ted Budd for what he is: incipient insurrectionist who cannot be trusted to walk the halls of the Senate? (Judging by his active campaign for Congress, should the Democratic party have encouraged Jeff Jackson to run for the Senate seat, not Beasley, as impressive as she truly is?) Why is she allowed to campaign as if she is again running a judicial race? Why do Dems insist on throwing away real opportunities?
Obviously Donald Trump had no clue who Ted Budd was until somebody handed him a slip of paper with his name on it.
It isn’t that the “moderate women”(or men for that matter) have moved left, it’s that the Overton Window has shifted so far right that what was the center is now the left. A mere 20 years ago my views would have been considered “middle of the road “. Now? I sit at the border of not being in the window at all. So does Ronald Reagan.
I was what I thought of as a moderate democrat since my first vote for Jimmy Carter. The right has moved so much further right that center is now what a 1980 Republican was. When I stop and think about far left progressive policies, none of them are bad for other Americans. Progressives would like 2 years of paid community college, work on the climate crisis, continue SS and expand Medicaid. Republicans, on the other hand, want to stop LGBTQ+ from being married, all contraceptives and abortion (including Plan B) are teetering on extinction, and republicans want to deny allowing children to know civil war history and that some families have 2 dads all while lying that trump won the 2020 election, tried to overthrow the government, and claiming to be the moral majority. Plus they somehow believe a man who filed bankruptcy 7 times, cheats on his wives, and was ready to sacrifice the VP so he could remain President is the answer to every question. See the difference? Which party is trying to help Americans and which party says I don’t care what the majority wants, come hell or high water, the US of A is leaning right.
I’m hoping most of us ladies see the right for who they are, and the left for what they offer, and we pull together for the blue tsunami that saves humanity, and when I say most of us ladies, I mean white and black and every other color, aged 18 to 118, and if you don’t want an abortion, don’t have one, and if you don’t want to marry a man, then don’t. You don’t even have to marry at all, and if you remember that somebody else is going through stuff, she needs you to imagine yourself in her shoes. Now be kind and take that walk.
The “gun store owner” part is only part of the story. He doesn’t need the income from it, as he is well set-up by his wealthy father. It’s not so much that he profits from selling guns, it’s that he enjoys selling “tactical” weapons.
If it was a national environment like 2018 I’d be a lot more hopeful than I am now… But 2022 just isn’t looking good for Democrats.