North Carolina State Democrats face unique challenges in this year’s election.

In a webinar hosted by Carolina Forward and Work for Democracy last week, North Carolina Senate Democratic leader Sydney Batch and Senator Michael Garrett discussed these challenges in moving forward progressive policies.

Carolina Forward is an independent, nonpartisan nonprofit that focuses on supporting progressive candidates for fair elections, quality education and environmental protections, among other issues.

Work for Democracy is a political action committee that supports candidates who work to reduce gun violence, support free and fair elections, strong public education and universal health care.

Garrett lives in Greensboro and has represented North Carolina’s 27th District since 2019. Batch works as a family and child welfare attorney and has served in the General Assembly since 2018. She was elected leader of the Democratic Caucus in 2024.

Garrett said this election is a historically significant moment.

“The supermajority that we talk about all the time, it isn't just a number. It's a system, and it's a system that allows one party to govern without negotiation, without compromise, and, more and more, without accountability,” he said. “I've watched my colleagues shut down debate. I've watched them ram bills through committee without even a hearing.” Garrett also said his Republican colleagues voted to strike his remarks from the official record, something that “hadn't happened in modern history.”

“It happened because our caucus stood up and we told the truth about what they were doing to democracy through gerrymandered maps,” he said. “That's what a supermajority does, folks. It rigs the game.”

Batch said the Republican supermajority functionally renders every Democratic senator and representative ineffective because Republicans have enough seats to have a quorum without any Democratic representatives. She added Republican infighting is what is stalling any progress or negotiation from being made.

“One of the most important jobs at the General Assembly as legislators is to pass the state budget. Haven't done it,” she said. The state has gone 205 days without it, “without teachers getting raises, without state employees getting raises, without us investing in the necessary infrastructure projects, without us actually spending the money that we need in Western North Carolina to recover from Helene.”

In a discussion with her Republican colleagues, Batch told the audience about the reaction to her suggestion of utilizing North Carolina’s vast network of community colleges and universities as polling sites to increase voter participation.

“A Senate Republican colleague looked at me, dead serious, and he said, ‘we're not going to do that, Senator Batch, those people vote for you,’” she recanted.

“We're going back to the times of coming up with all of the literacy tests, poll taxes and everything else, because they no longer speak and represent the majority of North Carolinians and their values. If they did, they wouldn't cheat to go ahead and redraw the districts.”

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