For 30 years, Jesse Helms loomed over North Carolina politics like a Confederate statue. “Senator No” tied with his fellow racist demagogue Furnifold Simmons for the longest tenure of any Senator elected from the Old North State. Since he departed the scene, only Richard Burr has even approached his longevity, with three terms to his name compared with Jesse’s five. And Helms continues to cast a long shadow on public affairs ranging from partisan politics to higher education.

One might conclude, then, that he was something of a political savant. I don’t think so. For most of his career, Helms was the ultimate “show horse.” He specialized in parliamentary maneuvers that amount to little more than hell-raising for the vicarious satisfaction of right-wing voters–and the small-dollar donors who allowed him to run richly financed campaigns again and again. His main policy “achievements” were to keep the tobacco subsidy program in existence for another decade, and to gut the U.S. State Department and U.S.A.I.D. with the egregious Helms-Burton Act. For all his notoriety, he left a small imprint on the policies of the United States.

But if policymakers can derive little from studying his crankishness, politicos in his home state can draw two big lessons from his long record of success in state elections. First, he had a cutting-edge political machine. My reading of the history tells me that Helms himself had little to do with the construction of this juggernaut; he was indifferent, if not hostile, to electioneering, and outsourced most of the dirty work to a genuinely brilliant staff. Even though the credit (or blame) for the Congressional Club’s success lies largely with Helms’s svengali Tom Ellis, it was still the most formidable political machine the South had witnessed since the Longs of Depression-era Louisiana.

The Congressional Club adopted new techniques early, fought ruthlessly, and spent wisely and big. They were arguably the first political shop to use direct-mail fundraising, sending out letters when the consensus held that mail was an inefficient use of resources. They used television and media “carpet bombing,” and they never hesitated to go into debt to stay ahead of the competition. Today’s Democrats, who are trapped in a strategic paradigm largely unchanged from the days of Helms, need to consider what this means going forward.

Helms showed how active strategic thinking can make even a crank viable. But he also showed the limits of a candidate’s power. In reality, he had strong political winds at his back. The whole South, North Carolina very much included, was rocketing to the political right in Helms’s era as a result of the backlash against Civil Rights advances. Richard Nixon won over 70% of the vote in North Carolina in 1972, the year Helms first won election to the Senate. In a testament to the appeal of racist demagogues, George Wallace easily took the state in the Democratic primary. Helms, at first considered a rather ridiculous and flukey figure, was blessed with a decades-long trend to white Republicanism.

So. Helms was the most politically successful figure of late-20th century North Carolina. His political apparatus allowed him to triumph over opponent after opponent, and to elect two other Senators to office as well as a Lieutenant Governor. He showed that a shrewd operation buttressed by tens of millions of dollars can make a controversial, unpopular ideologue the giant of the age. But his success also testifies to the limits that politics places on a single candidate. The winds blew strongly, and always at his back. North Carolina politicos need to study this man’s career, no matter how painful the memories their reading dredges up.