U.S. Senate candidate Erica Smith, a Democrat, running again in 2022
President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris took office Wednesday, and Democrats took control of both the White House and Congress, gaining a new majority in the Senate with Harris’s tie-breaking vote.
Two new Democratic Georgia senators won their party the control, in a special election two months after North Carolina’s closely watched U.S. Senate race ended with the reelection of Republican Thom Tillis.
The Old North State’s other senator is also a Republican, Richard Burr, who has already announced he’s not running again when his term is up in 2022. Enter candidates from both parties who want to replace him.
Republican former Rep. Mark Walker is in the running, and on the Democratic side, former state Sen. Erica Smith has already declared she’s running again. Smith lost in the 2020 Democratic primary to Cal Cunningham, who went on to lose to Tillis in an expensive, and eventually scandal-ridden, race.
Walker might face Lara Trump, former President Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law, in a 2022 primary election. And an expected primary opponent for Smith is a state senator who sat right next to her this past session — Jeff Jackson of Charlotte, who won reelection in November.
Smith, a Henrico Democrat, represented northeastern North Carolina in the legislature until she made her statewide run last year instead of seeking reelection, losing to Cunningham by 22 points.
Smith said 2022 will be different.
“I‘m not sitting in session making sure I don’t miss a vote or sustain the governor’s veto,” Smith said in a phone interview with The News & Observer. She said this time around she is building a more experienced staff and starting to fundraise early along with “casting a wider net for those voices left behind.”
Smith is African American, and Cunningham is white. National Democrats put their fundraising power behind Cunningham in the primary, and he far outraised her. Smith said it was an overwhelming obstacle to overcome Cunningham’s campaign money.
“Money is key,” Smith said. She won’t accept fossil fuel money and large corporate PAC money, she said, and wants to start small with grassroots donations. She said Democrats need to pay more attention to Black women candidates and have more of them in the candidate pipeline.
After Cunningham’s extramarital sexting became public, Smith still supported him as the Democratic candidate. His loss to Tillis “was a deep loss. Who could have called it if he would have won without the scandal,” she said.
Smith said she doesn’t think Democrats had a strong enough message on what they were running on vs. who they were running against. She said Democrats “didn’t have a message, didn’t have a platform, didn’t have a message about a platform.”
She’s getting staff in place now and hopes to campaign in person in the summer, assuming vaccinations are widespread by then. It’s not early, she said, “when we look at what we have to accomplish.”
So far, she has at least one likely Democratic primary opponent, her former state Senate colleague Jackson, who sat to her left this past session. Smith said she and Jackson bumped heads on multiple bills over the past few sessions. They rarely chatted with each other on the floor, and social media posts circulated claiming that she endorsed his Republican opponent in the election. Smith calls that a lie. She said her picture was shown on Jackson’s opponent’s website, then taken down.
Smith is a graduate of two HBCUs — N.C. A&T State University and Howard University, where she went for divinity school. She has served as an associate pastor at a Missionary Baptist Church and has spent much of her career in education. She is currently a curriculum and instructional specialist at Haliwa-Saponi Tribal School in Hollister. Smith said COVID-19 has revealed the differences in schools that have more resources than others, and said schools should be redesigned to be more equitable and inclusive after the pandemic.
Smith’s ethics complaint
In May, Smith made public an ethics complaint against several of her Senate colleagues, most in her own party, which was first reported by The News & Observer.
Within the complaint was a police report from a confrontation between her and state Sen. Paul Lowe during a Democratic caucus meeting, when a General Assembly Police officer concluded that Lowe committed a “simple assault” in his approach of Smith. Though the secretive Legislative Ethics Committee dismissed all the complaints within the overall complaint, Lowe issued an apology after the documents were made public. During an online forum, Smith also talked more about her allegations of harassment by other senators, who denied any wrongdoing. And the chief of staff for Senate Democratic leader Dan Blue said Smith’s allegations had been previously addressed.
Smith told The N&O earlier this month that the ordeal ended when she decided later not to press charges against Lowe for the caucus incident. She said she would rather there be a change to the “corporate status quo” and that the General Assembly as a workplace should be free of harassment.
However, she would like her proposed “Be Heard” bill from last session to be reconsidered this session and hopes “good men and women” will stand up to make changes at the legislature about harassment and protections for those who work there.
During an interview on Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, Smith referenced his quote about it being “not the words of my enemy but the silence of my friends” that are remembered, and added, “there’s a special place in hell for those who remain silent when evil is abounding.”
Future of the party
Smith said one lesson from Democrats’ success in Georgia and elsewhere is that the party does “better when our candidates look like and reflect the values of what our party should be as the party of big tent inclusion.”
Smith is hoping voters find that in her.
“There is not a cookie cutter white male version that is successful,” she said. “Electability should look different now moving forward.”
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This story was originally published January 21, 2021 at 8:00 AM with the headline "U.S. Senate candidate Erica Smith, a Democrat, running again in 2022."