THHE HOUUSE KNOCK DOWN
ALWAYS WINS
Erica Smith sees herself as a progressive idealist taking on the Democratic Party’s deep-pocketed machine. But the story of the Senate primary isn’t quite that simple. BY LEIGH TAUS S ltauss@indyweek.c om
E
rica Smith is late. Her empty chair sits on the stage beside three men hoping to challenge Thom Tillis this fall. National Democrats have pinned their hopes on the one to the far left, Cal Cunningham, a six-foottall veteran in a dark gray suit who has, by today, January 25, already raised north of $3 million. Cunningham looks like a senator, like one you’d order from central casting. If you close your eyes and think of the words “North Carolina Democrat,” something like him probably comes to mind. He’s from a 12
February 26, 2020
INDYweek.com
small town. He served in a war. He has a beautiful wife and picture-perfect children. He’s a successful lawyer. He has a winning smile. He’s politically nonthreatening. Cunningham grips the mic with intention. Though seated, his voice projects loudly to the audience at the RaleighWake Citizens Association’s candidate forum, his confidence tangible as he regurgitates soundbites from his by-now-familiar commercials, his tone somewhere between that of a minister and a car salesman. “Together this fall, we’re going to replace Thom Tillis in the U.S. Senate,” he says.
He repeats, nearly verbatim, remarks he gave a few hours earlier at an NAACP forum in Greenboro—how when he served as senior trial counsel in Iraq and Afghanistan, he could have never imagined that the country’s greatest threat would come from Washington, D.C. Erica Smith was late to that forum, too. Cunningham finishes. Little-known candidate Steve Swenson goes next, offering a forgettable introduction. He’s followed by Mecklenburg County Commissioner Trevor Fuller, who stands to address the crowd. Cunningham appears to take a mental note, wishing he’d done the same.
As the candidates spar over the first question from the panel, Erica Smith bursts through the doors in the back of the room and bolts to claim her space on stage. She’s in an elegant navy pantsuit, but her style has a certain joyous imperfection. The state senator, who has represented North Carolina’s rural northeastern edge for the last five years, asks to be allowed an introduction. With the mic in her hand, her energy consumes the room. Unscripted and jarringly earnest, Smith recounts her journey from Boeing engineer to teacher and preacher, from being raised in Eastern North Carolina to working her way up the ranks of the General Assembly. Smith was the first Democrat to enter the race, back in January 2019. In June and again in August, she made a pitch to the party’s powerbrokers in D.C., but she says they were noncommittal. She later learned the DSCC had met with Cunningham in May. He got the group’s endorsement in October. She says she knew the campaign would be an uphill battle. But her entire life has been an uphill battle. She grew up poor and black. She almost died in childbirth. She watched her youngest son die and her second husband get charged with rape. But she’s persevered. Everything she’s accomplished, she did herself, through grit and determination and her unassailable brilliance. She was made for the hustle— and made from it. At 50, she’s learned not to listen to the doubters. There are plenty of doubters. Objectively, there’s good reason to doubt. At the end of 2019, Cunningham had an 11–1 cash advantage, which has helped him buy TV ads and amass a 27-point lead in the most recent poll. Gary Pearce, a former adviser to Governor Jim Hunt, says that to win elections, you need to abide by the “two Ms rule”: You need a message, and you need money—and the organization that money buys—to get your message out. Smith has the first. She lacks the second. “Particularly Democrats, we’re idealists,” Pearce told me. “We like to think money is the root of evil, and it is, in a lot of cases. But it’s also the only way to get information to people.” Smith isn’t listening. She’s focused on the hustle—swearing off corporate PAC money, driving from forum to forum on a shoestring budget, taking her message to voters one at a time if she has to. The system is broken, she says, especially for women of color. But it doesn’t have to be. She’s determined to prove that big ideas can overcome big money.
