As Black women running in two of the nation’s most closely watched Senate races, Democratic Rep. Val Demings of Florida and former North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Cheri Beasley are poised to make history if they’re successful in November. But that’s only part of what makes their campaigns stand out this year.
Demings and Beasley have drawn notice — and a heavy dose of respect within their party — for accomplishing a feat that has all-too-frequently eluded candidates of color, especially Black women: Managing to clear their Senate primary fields of heavyweight competition.
In the process of squeezing out top prospective challengers with a show of political force, the two Democrats managed to break through a different kind of barrier to high office — longstanding perceptions about the profile of an electable statewide candidate. In the past, those perceptions have often worked against Black candidates. Now, two Black women are frontrunners and poised to appear on the ballot in at least two top Senate races in November.
“This is definitely, I think, a paradigm shift,” said Stefanie Brown James, co-founder and senior adviser to the Collective PAC, which supports Black progressive candidates for office. “We’ve had qualified candidates all along. The problem is that we’ve had to spend too much of our time having to convince people that what you see in these candidates is enough to stand toe-to-toe with anybody else that’s in the race. But we don’t have to do as much convincing.”
Demings, who is running against GOP Sen. Marco Rubio, and Beasley, who is seeking the seat held by retiring GOP Sen. Richard Burr, still face nominal competition for the Democratic Senate nomination in their home states. But thanks to their political muscle-flexing, they are largely free to focus the bulk of their attention and resources on winning the general election in November.
Fundraising has been an important driver of their success so far. Black women have often decried contributions to their campaigns that come too late to matter, and little party support in past primaries — support that they contend enabled white or male counterparts to lock down party nominations. The recent ascendance of Black politicians like Vice President Kamala Harris and gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams in Georgia has helped change thinking, however, and the donor class has taken note: In late 2021, numerous Black candidates, including those vying for statewide offices like Abrams, Beasley and Demings, posted hefty fundraising sums.
With national stature stemming from her role as an impeachment manager and her appearance on President Joe Biden’s shortlist for vice president, Demings has set a blazing fundraising pace, raising more than $25 million since launching her campaign in mid-2021 — far outpacing the closest other Democrat in the race, Ken Russell, who’s raised just over $1 million. The Collective PAC threw its support behind Demings nearly a month before she formally announced her bid.
Demings’ prospective strength as a candidate was enough to convince a top potential rival, Rep. Stephanie Murphy — who had already launched a listening tour — to opt out of the Democratic primary once it became clear that Demings was running.
In North Carolina, Beasley’s fundraising has also resonated. She brought in more than $2 million in the last quarter of 2021, outraising both her Democratic and Republican rivals. In late 2021, the other leading candidate in the race, Jeff Jackson, decided to drop out — a move that his campaign said owed in part to his inability to out-fundraise her.
In the days before Jackson suspended his campaign, several party heavyweights — including Democratic Reps. David Price and G.K. Butterfield — had endorsed Beasley.
“I think the party in North Carolina, and even to some extent nationally, is starting to put their weight behind people of color more than they have in the past,” said Doug Wilson, a Charlotte-based Democratic strategist who was a senior adviser to Jackson’s campaign. “Not that they didn’t like Jeff — Jeff has a lot of respect among the party. I think that the party was saying, ‘we want to have a woman of color at the top of the ticket this go-around.’ That it is time for it.”
It’s a development that many Democrats say was a long time coming. In addition to fundraising hurdles, Black women candidates have had to challenge the perception that their candidacies might struggle to connect with non-Black or male voters.
“Electability continues to be part of the double bond that Black women and women of color face,” said Donna Brazile, former Democratic National Committee chair and campaign manager for Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign. “I mean, yes, if people see that you can raise some money, that’s important. But the other issue is can you win. For some reason, that becomes a bigger question. It becomes a question of viability as well as electability.”
Brazile, who is part of a collective of strategists and organization heads working to elect more Black women to top statewide offices, said that their main priority for candidates like Beasley and Demings is fundraising. Now that donor networks are supporting Black women candidates at earlier stages and in higher sums, she added, their viability is less of a question.
North Carolina’s Senate primary is the clearest example yet of a shift in thinking among party leaders. In addition to Beasley’s fundraising, she had another asset that spoke to her electability: an impressive track record at the polls that included an election to the state’s appellate court in 2008 and Supreme Court in 2014.
She was appointed chief justice, the first Black woman in North Carolina to hold the position, in 2019. The next year, in her 2020 Supreme Court run, she outperformed Biden by 11,000 votes and ran ahead of the president in rural areas. Statewide operatives — some of whom had long been pushing her to run for Senate — pointed to that performance as an example of her ability to appeal to a broad swath of general election voters in a contest likely to be won at the margins.
In concert with a state party that had an interest in making a Black woman the standard bearer, it was more than enough to send a message to Beasley’s potential adversaries.
“Jeff [Jackson] is not a negative campaigner, never was. And we knew that trying to out-fundraise her would have been tough, because of the desire for donors and for party elders to get behind a woman of color,” Wilson said.
Still, even as likely nominees, both Beasley and Demings face considerable headwinds in the fall. Midterm political conditions are not looking favorable for Democratic candidates. Each is running in a state that former President Donald Trump won twice. Demings, who has never run statewide before, faces an entrenched and well-funded Republican opponent in Rubio.
Even so, Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), a co-founder along with Rep. Karen Bass (D-Calif.) of Representation Matters, an organization aimed at electing a Black woman senator, sees progress.
Lee, who learned from her earliest congressional campaigns — and her time working for Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to the House — of the hurdles Black women face in appealing to donors and talking about issues without alienating voters, says that while the pace of change has been slow, there’s a different environment now, especially when it comes to fundraising.
“I think what has happened now, over the years, is that donors have said, ‘Ah, yeah,’” Lee said. “You can look at all the surveys ... Black women have not received the type of funding for their campaigns, even with the dynamics of the politics in their district being the same as white women. So there is a bias. And I think donors are beginning to see that bias.”
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