What you need to know about the Editorial Board’s 2022 NC election endorsements

Early voting begins Thursday in North Carolina. That means it’s time for election endorsements from our Editorial Board. That also means it’s time for people to wonder why or whether we even should do these things.

These are good questions. Let’s start with why.

We are proud on these pages to have a voice in conversations important to our communities. We do so with editorials from this board, columns from our opinion staffers, and op-eds and letters from readers and community leaders. Few of those conversations are as important as debating and deciding who represents us in local, state and national offices. As with any issue, we’re not telling you what to think about these candidates. We’re telling you what we think.

Some say that’s confusing, that readers don’t understand how editorial boards across the country work independently from reporters and editors in the rest of the newsroom. We hope that’s not the case, and to that end, we make that distinction regularly on our pages - including at the top of every Opinion item that’s published online. But just in case, let’s be clear: Reporters and metro editors don’t have any say in our board’s endorsements, just as they don’t with the editorials we write.

We’re approaching the 2022 election recommendations much the same as previous years. Some background: In 2019, the boards of The Charlotte Observer and News & Observer of Raleigh joined forces to provide fuller and more diverse opinion content to our readers. The combined board is led by N.C. Opinion Editor Peter St. Onge, who is joined in Charlotte by Observer Executive Editor Rana Cash, Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Kevin Siers and Opinion writer Paige Masten. In Raleigh, associate editor Ned Barnett is joined by News & Observer Executive Editor Bill Church, McClatchy Vice President of Local News Robyn Tomlin and Opinion writer Sara Pequeño.

As with editorials on local issues, members of the board in Charlotte do not participate in endorsements of Triangle-specific races, or vice versa. The full board does discuss and recommend candidates for statewide races, including the U.S. Senate race on the current ballot.

As always, we will be selective in our endorsements, which means we will make recommendations in competitive and notable races, but not all races. In each race we pursue, members of the editorial board conduct extensive research and interview candidates, and we talk to others who know and have worked with the candidates. We then discuss what we’ve learned as a board and make recommendations.

We weigh a lot of factors in doing so. Sometimes those considerations go beyond individual races to the makeup of the larger body the candidates want to join. We generally don’t want any such institution — whether that’s a city council or state Senate — to have such a majority that the minority is too muted.

Another factor in this year’s recommendations: Republicans nationwide, led by former President Donald Trump, continue to say the 2020 election was stolen. That’s a falsehood, and it’s one that threatens our democracy. Not all Republicans believe the election was illegitimate, of course, but many who do could be casting votes on state and national voting measures. So we’ve been asking primary and general election candidates if they believe Joe Biden is the duly elected president. If they decline to say yes, we think that’s disqualifying. We’ll tell you when that’s the case.

Finally (and we get this a lot!): No, we’re not predicting winners. We’re telling you which candidates we think deserve your consideration.

We’ll begin offering these endorsements to subscribers beginning Tuesday online and in Wednesday’s print editions. We hope our thoughts and recommendations are helpful, but mostly we hope that you, too, choose to participate in deciding who represents all of us. Please, go vote.

This story was originally published October 17, 2022 at 8:58 AM.