While our work on the 2020 elections is already well underway, we’ll officially kick off with our “When We Knock, We Win” 2020 Launch Party at Motorco on Sunday, Jan. 12. The launch party is free to attend, but registration is required, and we expect to reach capacity. RSVP here.
Our guest speaker that evening will join us from Crooked Media headquarters in LA. Shaniqua McClendon grew up in the Creedmoor area, graduated from UNC, and went on to work in the White House and on Capitol Hill before becoming political director for Crooked, a company that was founded by former Obama staffers and produces podcasts like “Pod Save America” and “Lovett or Leave It.”
Check out our conversation with Shaniqua below to learn more about her thoughts on the NC General Assembly and Democrats’ chances to win in our state in 2020.
So many FLIPsters are huge fans of "Pod Save America" and everything else Crooked Media produces. You’re the political director at Crooked Media. Can you tell us more about what your job entails?
I am the person who makes sure people get engaged in the issues we’re talking about and not just consuming our content. So, of course we want people to consume our content, but then once we are activating them around different issues, I’m the person who is making sure we have the best insights and groups on the ground so that we can plug people into the most impactful actions they can take. I spend a lot of time talking to organizations, state parties, the national party, and just getting a sense of everything that is going on and where Crooked can be helpful. We have a really huge platform, and it just provides us the opportunity to involve people who would otherwise not know how to get involved. Crooked is a media company, so our political team is pretty small. But because there are so many good organizations out there doing great work, we get to take advantage of the audience we have but then help uplift the work that other organizations are doing. So I spend a lot of time managing those relationships.
We approached you about being the keynote speaker at our 2020 launch party because you have strong North Carolina ties. Give us an overview of your Tar Heel connections.
My mother’s side of the family is from North Carolina. I was born in New York. I lived in New York until I was 9 and then my parents divorced, and we moved to North Carolina because that’s where my mother’s mother was. My formative years were in North Carolina. I started fourth grade at Creedmoor Elementary. It’s funny. When I moved from New York, I remember in fifth grade, a girl that we lived next to had become a friend. And a Duke/Carolina game was coming on one night. She said, “Who are you for?” I was like, “What are you talking about?” She said, “Duke or Carolina?” And then she said, “OK, you’re a Carolina fan. You just have to be a Carolina fan.” By the time you’re in North Carolina long enough, you drink the Kool Aid. My senior year in high school, they won the national championship. At that point, I was applying. It was so exciting.
I went to UNC starting in 2005 and thoroughly enjoyed it. It was kind of the beginning of me getting an interest in politics. I actually majored in business, but while I was there, my last internship before my senior year, it really hit me. I was interning in the financial services sector. All three of my summers had been spent working at banks. I was also a bank teller. We had these sales goals. I was pushing credit cards and money markets on people who couldn’t afford the $5 fee to cash their check. I just had a lot of conflicted feelings about it and ended up turning down a job offer I had. And I tried to figure out how I could get in the public sector. I still remember Election Night 2008. I was a senior at UNC. My best friend and I were living together in Chapel Hill but not on campus. We looked at each other once the results were announced. We were like, “Do we go to Franklin Street? Are people rushing Franklin Street?” We decide to go up there and see what was happening. It’s a pretty small crowd, but people were going crazy. And the crowd starts to build, and the cops have to shut down the intersection at Franklin and Columbia. It was a light drizzle, but everyone was so excited. I graduated and worked at United Way in RTP for about five months, raising money for their different partner organizations. And then, for whatever reason, I became obsessed with moving to Washington and ended up getting an internship at the White House. And while I was there, the Affordable Care Act passed, and it was just this amazing process to watch. And so I said, “I want to go to Capitol Hill.” I ended up getting to work for Sen. Kay Hagan. Working in that office was such a North Carolina experience. I feel like I started saying “y’all” a lot more. I didn’t really care for barbecue when I lived in North Carolina. But when I got to DC, people would always bring barbecue up from North Carolina, and I fell in love with it. North Carolinians just have a really strong presence in DC. I actually met a ton of UNC people working for Kay who I didn’t know when I was at the university. And then after Kay lost in 2014, I went to work for Rep. Alma Adams.
You already alluded to barbecue. Now that you live in LA, what do you miss most about North Carolina?
I was just talking about this the other day. When I was in high school, we lived in this tiny town called Berea. I still went to school in Creedmoor. It was about a 20-minute drive. I have a twin sister, and we shared a car. The days that I loved the most were when neither of us had anything to do and we could go straight home. Driving home at like 3 pm on a spring day in North Carolina down back roads – it’s just beautiful. You open the windows. The trees are green. You can just take it in. You’re not stopping at a bunch of stop lights. I don’t even have a car anymore. Driving in North Carolina is something I miss a lot. I like cities, and I like living in them. But being able to go to those green, rural, open spaces and take it in – yeah, I miss that. And, living in LA, everything is vegan and healthy. Sometimes, I just want a Southern meal. That’s not like vegan cheese mac and cheese, but real mac and cheese. I do miss the food. And the people. I lived in DC and Boston and now here in LA. People in the South are just super nice.
Southern hospitality is a real thing. And sweet tea.
In August, your Crooked Mini podcast, "Rigging North Carolina," followed the story of the GOP political consultant who committed election fraud and the subsequent do-over election in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District. Even though that race was for the U.S. House, it was closely linked to the NCGA, which FLIP NC focuses on. How did the NCGA factor into the story?
I remember when I was thinking through the story I wanted to tell. I knew the big story was the election fraud in the 9th district. But I really wanted to tell the story of the North Carolina legislature and the long trail that led us to this moment.
I did my graduate school capstone project on voting rights in North Carolina, so I had a lot to work with. I will never forget 2010. I started working on the Hill in August of 2010, so right before the midterms. When I started, we had 7 Democrats and 6 Republicans in the House delegation. And by the time I left after the 2012 election, we had 10 Republicans and 3 Democrats. That will never be lost on me. The North Carolina legislature was the reason. They were able to create a supermajority in the state legislature not because the state is overwhelming Republican but because they literally drew the maps so they could steal power. People don’t often pay attention to state legislature races. I really wanted people to understand that yes, Republicans really swept Democrats in 2010, but it didn’t just end there. They didn’t just rig the maps for the sake of rigging the maps. They rigged the maps so that could then pass policies that would never get through a legislature that was reflective of the state. The voter suppression bill. The bathroom bill. No normal set of legislators who were actually in a position to be held accountable by voters would be able to do any of these things. But they were able to do them because they had rigged the maps so bad. And then I look at someone like Pat McCrory who was the mayor of Charlotte and an advocate for public transportation. And he becomes the governor and falls in line with this crazy stuff. So when I was thinking about NC 9, they drew the maps that allowed for these weird districts to be drawn and for us to even have that many Republicans to begin with. Dan McCready did very well, but it shouldn’t have been that uphill of a race to begin with. The other piece of the story is: The legislature of North Carolina has done a lot of crazy stuff to disenfranchise people and not in the normal way that people think, of just saying you can’t vote. Packing minorities into fewer districts so that their vote is not as powerful. Passing the monster voter ID law. And then what they did after Gov. Cooper was elected … trying to take his power away. And even the unrelated intersection of what happened with the elections board and how that had an impact on the NC 9 race. I normally attribute most of the problems that face North Carolina to the legislature and what they were able to do after 2010. … When I was doing my capstone project, I interviewed Rep. Pricey Harrison, and she was telling me that in the ‘90s, the state legislature did a study to understand why voter participation was so low, and after they got the results back, they implemented all of these pro-voter policies, which were then repealed. North Carolina was there. Democrats controlled at least one chamber of the legislature for over 100 years. That doesn’t just happen by mistake. But Republicans won one election and literally we are going to be paying for it for a very long time.
Can you give us a sneak preview of what Vote Save America is planning for the 2020 election?
At the end of January, we are relaunching our site. It will be really beautiful. We have a team working on it and so much thought has gone into it. What do people need to see and how do they need to see it so that we can get them activated around the election? We will identify specific states that we believe are important to winning in 2020, not just focusing on the presidency. Last year, our goal was flipping the House. And this year, it’s electing a progressive majority in 2020 – flipping the Senate, maintaining our majority in the House, and flipping legislatures in states where we have the opportunity. So we are looking up and down the ballot and telling people where they can have an impact.
We launched our Get Mitch or Die Trying fund this year – we will continue that fundraising. We launched our F*ck Gerrymandering fund, which was all going to Virginia, but next year we will include several states where flipping at least one chamber or the entire legislature means that we get fair maps. We will have a lot of fundraising opportunities.
We just finished a campaign for Stacey Abrams, raising $2 million for voter protection teams in 20 competitive states. So we are doing a lot of what we did last year, but also building more strategy on top of it so we can be really specific with our audience about where and how to have an impact.
We know you’ll have a lot more to say at our launch party on Jan. 12, but what’s your message to your fellow North Carolinians as this huge election year approaches?
All of my coworkers know how obsessed I am with North Carolina. North Carolina is one of the most important states for 2020, at every single level. If we can turn it blue for the White House, if we can get rid of Sen. Thom Tillis. If we can keep Governor Cooper in place. People have not talked enough about Cooper winning alongside Trump in 2016. Last year, the fact that Democrats were able to get rid of the supermajority – due in large part to a lot of organizations like FLIP NC – but the fact that they did that with gerrymandered districts, it just gives me so much hope that we can flip at least one chamber and have fair maps in 2021. And then there are new congressional districts! We just have so many opportunities at every level on the ballot. It’s going to take a lot of work. There’s so much at stake. People need to know that it is one of the most important states. We can have an impact. I think if Nov. 3 next year is a good day for North Carolina, it’s a good day for the country. I just want everyone to get involved. Do something. Find a space where they can fit in.