Cheri Beasley backers seek more party money in Senate race vs. Ted Budd
“When I talk to a lot of my friends, most of them don’t know who she is,” Baxter, an 81-year-old retired hospital administrator, said in an interview after the event. “I think people aren’t hearing her voice.”
The paucity of ads — and money from deep-pocketed political action committees and donors that would fund them — has been an enduring worry for Beasley’s supporters days before voters begin to head to the polls to determine who will replace Sen. Richard Burr (R), with control of the Senate up for grabs.
Since August, Beasley, a former North Carolina Supreme Court chief justice, has been in a dead heat with Budd, a three-term congressman endorsed by former president Donald Trump. North Carolina Democrats have been raising the alarm that without more help, their chance to end a 14-year streak of Senate losses will evaporate.
Last week, a political action committee aligned with Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer announced it was putting $8 million more into North Carolina, and noted that it had already spent $15 million in the race. But Beasley’s backers say those contributions are dwarfed by the $26.38 million that the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the conservative Senate Leadership Fund have spent backing Budd.
Beasley’s supporters say they worry that the woman seeking to become the first Black Senator from North Carolina is receiving only a trickle of the cash from national Democrats that is flowing into key contests — and that an opportunity to retain the Senate is being squandered.
“I hope we don’t wake up in a few weeks and realize, man, if we had just spent some more time, gave some more resources diverted from other places, we could have won North Carolina,” Zeb Smathers, the mayor of Canton, N.C., who introduced Beasley at a stop in nearby Waynesville, said in an interview, adding that the attacks on Beasley in his area seem to be going unanswered.
Smathers said the race is “not getting the national attention for a candidate who is just as strong, if not stronger, in a race that is as winnable if not more winnable than in some other places.”
Beasley, in an interview, said she was not concerned about the disparity in outside spending. And campaign officials note that because she’s outraised Budd — and ads purchased by the campaign don’t cost as much as ads paid for by outside groups — the gap is not as extreme as it seems.
On Saturday, her campaign announced that she had raised $13.3 million in the third fundraising quarter, and it boasted that she had outraised Budd in every quarter — bring in a total of $29.2 million for the race.
“If anybody’s afraid, it’s Ted Budd and his national Republican allies,” Beasley said in an interview. “I mean, they’re the ones who are spending the millions of dollars against me, and they’re spending that kind of money because they know that we really can win. We’re doing well in this race and really excited that folks have offered a lot of energy in this race.”
On the campaign trail, Beasley has stressed her biography and spoken about a return to civility in Washington. She’s also spoken with urgency about the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, telling voters that if Republicans take control of the Senate, more rights could be stripped away.
After the Republican primary, observers say, Budd has kept a low profile and has sought to downplay his more controversial positions, including expressing support for a nationwide 15-week abortion ban, denying the results of the 2020 president election and calling the Jan. 6 insurrectionists “patriots standing up.” In an interview, he said no amount of money will help Democrats win because their stances are out of touch with the North Carolinians he’s been talking to.
“I mean, that’s up to them, but they’ve wasted a lot of (outside) money here in the past, and I’m going to do everything I can to make sure the Democrats are still wasting money here,” Budd said in an interview last week. “Because we’re going to run a good campaign and the issues are not on their side. And you can’t overcome bad stances on inflation, crime, education, national security, energy. All five of those issues are on our side and not on the Democratic side.”
In interviews, 27 strategists, consultants, politicians and voters offered a litany of reasons for the lack of national attention on a coveted seat. The Democratic Party’s funding apparatus is trying to defend a large number of seats, and Democrats in high-profile contests are eating up the attention and dollars. Democrats in North Carolina have also endured 14 years of letdowns in Senate races, stoking subtle skepticism about Beasley’s viability. North Carolina hasn’t sent a Democrat to the Senate since Kay Hagan was elected in 2008. That same year, presidential nominee Barack Obama also won the state in the general election.
Beasley has twice won statewide election and lost a third bid in 2020, for chief justice of the Supreme Court, by 401 votes. She has kept the Senate race close mostly on her own, even though her résumé and performance should have brought her attention — and help — a lot earlier, said Stefanie Brown James, co-founder of the Collective PAC, which supports Black candidates.
“Coming into this race, she should have been one who was looked at as a person who has shown that they have the chops to have this sophisticated campaign to win the statewide U.S. Senate race,” Brown James said. “That being said, she has had to almost prove herself over and over and over again.”
Aimy Steele, CEO of the New North Carolina Project, who ran unsuccessfully for a state House seat, said it’s naive for Democrats across the nation to not account for the fact that Black female candidates face stronger head winds.
“The type of support and a level of support is starkly different for black women, and that’s just a fact,” said Steele, who is Black. “I wish it were just an opinion. It’s a fact. It’s patriarchal, then it’s just the whiteness of politics. … Now if you take race out of it and gender, oh, she’s the perfect candidate for every investment guru, every business owner who wants to invest, every entity, DSCC, DCCC, all the C’s.”
Some of Beasley’s supporters, including Brown James, say the late-in-coming funding shows an ignorance of the distinct hurdles of running as a Black woman in a southern state. North Carolina has never elected a Black person to the Senate and has sent only two women to the upper chamber.
Several groups are trying to get her more resources in a year when midterm elections will determine whether Democrats continue to control Congress.
Brown James said she is trying to enlist help from Black Hollywood celebrities to campaign with Beasley, or at least tape ads for her. Sens. Cory Booker (N.J.) and Jon Ossoff (Ga.) campaigned with Beasley this weekend. Democratic Reps. David E. Price and G.K. Butterfield of North Carolina have lobbied the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee to pump more cash into the state.
Butterfield said he recently talked to Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), head of the DSCC. “He tells me that his first obligation is to take care of his incumbents, the Senator Warnocks and the like … and now it’s time to invest in red-to-blue seats in battleground states,” Butterfield said. “And I believe based on my conversation with him that he’s guaranteed that there will be more investment. I certainly hope so.”
With weeks left in the race, Beasley and Budd traveled throughout the state last week, trying to energize their respective bases and put a fine point on the choice voters have.
Beasley has said she’s running a North Carolina-centric campaign and sought to distance herself from the national referendum on the president that midterm elections frequently become. In most events, she stressed her family’s humble origin story, which starts with her grandfather leaving Alabama with 76 cents in his pocket.
Budd and Beasley’s only debate, which was held this month and wasn’t aired in the entire state, featured a clear difference but no flame-throwing. On the campaign trail, Beasley’s most…
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