Politicking and IG-Stalking: Local Elections 101 with Blair Reeves

Ever IG-stalk your political heroes? Well, Quay has. In this episode of Down Ballot Banter, we’re joined by Blair Reeves, the man behind Carolina Forward, who’s been out here fighting the good fight for state-level sanity (think: keeping loaded AR-15s out of schools – yep, that was almost a thing). We break down why local elections matter, how gerrymandering makes everything messier, and why building trust in a world of misinformation is harder than finding a parking spot in downtown Durham.

Are you ready to start the conversation? Eat, chat and act with Down Ballot Brunch.

Down Ballot Banter is hosted by Monèt Marshall and Quay Weston and is a production of Earfluence.

Creators & Guests

Host

Monet Marshall

Director. Playwright. Arts Consultant. Cultural Organizer.

What is Down Ballot Banter?

Welcome to Down Ballot Banter, the podcast that puts the spotlight on local elections and what local government actually means for you. Hosted by Monèt Marshall and Quay Weston.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
Hey, y'all. Welcome to down Valley Banter. The podcast puts a spotlight on local elections and what local government actually means for you. I'm Monet Noel Marshall.

Quay Weston
And I am Quay Weston.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
Yeah, you are.

Quay Weston
Local elections are extremely important, and we're on a mission to learn together and to break down local politics in a way that makes sense to us and doesn't require us to be experts, because we are not. Hello.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
So, whether you're a seasoned voter or this is your first opportunity, we've got the insights and information to keep you informed and engaged.

Quay Weston
Because when it comes to building new worlds, all of our inputs matter.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
Yes. So, if you're ready to learn with us, let's go.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
Blair, thank you so much for being here today.

Blair Reeves
Thanks for having me. I really appreciate that you asked me to come on here.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
Oh, my gosh.

Quay Weston
I've been a fan, so I'm very excited.

Blair Reeves
I appreciate that.

Quay Weston
Ig stalking, basically.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
I know I get most of my political education from you, so thank you so much for educating the masses.

Blair Reeves
I heard the other day there's a Kamala Harris for or North Carolina women's group. And, like, someone's, like, posted, like, one of the videos on there, and they're like, does anyone know what this guy's name is? And, like, one of our neighbors was like, yo, I live next to that guy.

Quay Weston
Can I share a funny thing about that? Yeah, we were just talking about this.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
Oh, yeah.

Quay Weston
When I said, I want to talk to the guy from Carolina forward, then I went through, like, I went to the website, I googled Carolina forward. White guy googled it. And I was like, what is his name? And then I finally went to, like, a very old instagram bro, you should have emailed. I thought about it.

Blair Reeves
I could have.

Quay Weston
I could have. But I finally found it, and I was like, his name is Blair.

Blair Reeves
There you go.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
Here you are.

Blair Reeves
Here I am. Yeah.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
Which leads to our first question, like, who are you exactly? And what is your human story that got you into this work?

Blair Reeves
Yeah. Yeah. So I am Blair Reeves. I'm the executive director of Carolina forward. Caroline forward. The core group is about nine or ten of us. And we were talking about before, we have, like, a group chat that is basically our, like, we call it the brain trust group chat. And that is, like, where we make all our decisions. So we have a board and all this other stuff. The origin story of Carolina Ford, really, really, in a really short version, is 2019. A couple of our state lawmakers in North Carolina proposed a bill that would have armed school teachers and let them carry loaded handguns in their class. And the other thing people forget it would have also allowed community volunteers to come and patrol your kids school grounds with their AR 15 or whatever. So you imagine the craziest person in your community rolling around your school, and it's totally illegal at that point. Our daughter was two years old at that point. I was like, that's insane. That's insane. Why would, like, Republican, Democrat, whatever, doesn't matter. Like, people. Anyone knows. That's insane. And I was like, I can't do anything. You know, we gotta stop this. We gotta do something about it. So that began. I pay attention to politics, but I didn't, wasn't really activated, but then that was during Trump's presidency, and we all saw, like, how that went. Right? And so I went through a series of steps, and what I realized was that the reason why that bill came up, it did not pass, but the reason why it came up and why they proposed in the first place is cause they don't care. And, like, there's a couple of people behind it. But, like, if you take out those people, there are more weirdos behind it. And the reason is cause of gerrymandering. Right. The legislature is completely hijacked. And there was no, there wasn't a whole lot of groups in the state speaking out very effectively against that whole kind of project. There are a lot of really good, kind of single issue groups out there and they do a decent job. But I met a number of activists along the way. We did some fundraising in the 2020 cycle for different candidates. We won some of those races for the legislature. We lost some other ones. And then we had this, like, group that kind of started to coalesce and we said we should just start our thing. And we just called, it called Carolina forward. And we're not, we don't have, like, yeah, people don't believe in USA, but we actually don't have, like, a partisan, like, bent. Like, we don't, we're not a partisan organization. We're a values led organization.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
Right.

Blair Reeves
Like, we are happy to, you know, talk about and promote, like, any republican candidate who wants to fully fund public schools or wants to push back against an abortion ban. I haven't met one yet.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
Right.

Blair Reeves
And I'm happy to do that when that comes around. So, like, our, you know, if we ever show, like, a preference, like parties, partisan political preferences, follow a set of values. And I think the problem we're having right now is that a lot of people turn that around, and that's why we're in the mess we are today. And I think that people are starting to come around in certain ways, but, and now here we are about four years later, four and a half years later, and we have, you know, we have our email list, we have web presence, social media stuff, obviously, we do a lot of polling research. We do policy, white papers, all the stuff, all the stuff you do as, like, a broad cross issue organization. And I think we're doing a pretty good job, but, you know, we, we'll see what happens.

Quay Weston
Yeah. That actually leads me to a part of what we were hoping to talk about here is because we are such fans of the work you're doing, where you post these weekly updates. Almost every. Not every day is every day.

Blair Reeves
No, not every day.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
Every week.

Quay Weston
Regularly enough. Every week.

Blair Reeves
Post one this morning. Yeah.

Quay Weston
I'm like, this is what happened. And I always go to the page just to see if there's a new post.

Blair Reeves
Oh, cool.

Quay Weston
But I want to ask a question about like, access to information and some of the challenges that you witness as you're sharing out these updates. Like what do you see from your perspective? Like what are the gaps there for people to be aware and stay up to date on what's happening around this state?

Blair Reeves
So it's never been easy to follow state level, local level information.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
True.

Quay Weston
Correct.

Blair Reeves
Right, correct. So we're here in Durham like Harold's son. Like it's good, but like it's, it's not what it was once was. There used to be more outlast information. The problem we're having right now, and this is a broader problem in the news media generally, is that Facebook and Google took away all the advertising revenue. So now, even back in the good old days, 30, 40 years ago, subscriber fees never kept newspapers alive. It was advertising dollars, subscribers for things on top of that. Then you have no, we're all on our phones. I don't have a paper newspaper. No one does. There's basically one news outlet in the world that has really managed to take off and sustain itself with subscriber fees, and that's the New York Times. And outside of that, you have a lot of these groups. I mean, CNN, Fox News, even, a lot of them have a hard time. Their margins are small and they have to appeal to a gigantic audience and all that sort of stuff. So you go down to the state level, people have a hard time finding any information on the state level. And you have a finite amount of time. You're probably looking at CNN, you might be looking at New York Times, NBC, whatever that is. There aren't a lot of state level organizations that are giving you good information. We have the news and observer. There's the WRL Harald sign, obviously, Harold Sun News observer and Charlotte observer are all the same company. They share a lot of the same resources. They share a lot of the same stories. The company that owns them is a conglomerate that owns news organizations in a lot of states and they make a lot of questionable decisions and they suck those papers dry. So you don't get the coverage you once did even ten years ago, 10, 20, 30 years ago. And then there's interest. People aren't always that interested or they don't know why they should be interested in information. Now, Durham is kind of an exception. Durham has a very engaged population. The locals here want to know stuff about what's going on, like what's going on, the Durham City Council, Durham County Commission, all that stuff. Like, people are really into that. But you go to Pitt county, right? There's nothing you go out to, like Duplin County, Stokes county, there is nothing out there. And people out there then default to a national level news. And that's why people, you'll go into a rural county, they can tell you everything about Hunter Biden's laptop. They have no idea who the county commissioners are.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
And I think that's so interesting and part of why we wanted to do this work specifically. Cause I feel like there is an idea that because people have not shown interest, that means they don't care. But really, I do think that the gap in information is causing. It's a self fulfilling prophecy. Right. And if people really understood, like, why that policy that is being passed, that law is being passed, how it impacts their everyday life, they'd be like, oh, actually, let me show up. Cause I actually really care about that. So I wonder for you, as you and I see these videos and everything you post, like, there's a way that you're able to make it really accessible. So I'm really curious about how do you take these state and local policies and bring them to the ground for everyday folks? Like, this is why this matters to you.

Blair Reeves
Yeah. So the real answer is you just like talking a normal person. So the problem, the problem is, like, when politicians, when the political leaders do try to do this stuff, some of them do, a few of them do. I think Jeff Jackson does a really good job of it, and some other ones do as well. But a lot of them who try to do it, they wind up sounding a hostage negotiation. You're reading. They're clearly reading this thing right here. It's so flat. And so another problem is, on social media, you have to be, certain stories work better on social, you have to get people's engagement. We're surfing the algorithm, right? And there's no secret sauce. Like, maybe there is. I don't know what it is. It's, you have to make people do something people care about. That's one thing. The other thing is that social media is the dominant way that most people get their news now. And one issue that we're seeing is that, like, there is no, there's no business case for WRAL or w and c even, or one of these other ones to do what we do.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
Right.

Blair Reeves
Cause they can't make advertising dollars off of it. There's no way they can make any money off it. So there's no reason why they would do that. And their play there is to be present on those platforms to get you to come to their platform and consume their content. That doesn't really work. And it's not their fault. It's the fault of the platforms that are designed to suck up advertising dollars. I don't know what they do about that.

Quay Weston
As a part of that, I was thinking about the conversation around rural counties. I'm from Beaufort County, North Carolina.

Blair Reeves
You're in Beaufort? Yeah.

Quay Weston
Pentigo specifically, right outside of Little Washington.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
How you say it?

Quay Weston
For real? That's what we say.

Blair Reeves
Yeah.

Quay Weston
And I think, interestingly, something I'm curious about, too, is with so much information being on social media, one thing I find, and I think reports and other things show is just how much disinformation and misinformation is available to us. So I'm curious about how you maybe source the information that you're sharing with people and how we do better about being able to tell whether something is misleading or clear in its kind of objectives.

Blair Reeves
Yeah. Yeah. So that's a hard question because. So I do think that there's a lot, obviously, social media is full of bad information. Right. And it's not always all from one side or the other side. Right. Like, I see liberals for sharing bad information as well. I do think it's disproportionately on the other side. You see a lot of, like, you know, Kamala Harris is actually an alien. Hillary Clinton, you know, got the Bill Gates vaccine. She levitates, and she's actually controlled by, you know, whatever. I. Yep, lots of nonsense. It's important to know that misinformation goes back a long way. Like a long time ago. People believed crazy stuff years and years ago. So my grandmother is from Knoxville, Tennessee. And in Tennessee, in Knoxville particularly, they did not fluorinate their water until the eighties because it was a secret communist plot to control your children.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
Naturally.

Blair Reeves
Yeah. And that's coming back, by the way, that's in Union county now. Down Union county. They're defluorinating their water now.

Quay Weston
Deflorenating.

Blair Reeves
It's a couple of their city.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
We don't have the dental care in this country.

Blair Reeves
So, like, this problem has been around for a while. Right. I think that the answer, the hard answer, the hard answer is the real answer. And that is you have to trust. And we are becoming a lower trust society.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
Yes, we are.

Quay Weston
That's right.

Blair Reeves
And if you don't trust anything, then you'll fall for anything. If you can't, if you don't feel like you can trust anyone, then you're not going to trust any information that anyone says. And it's going to be. That's when you get into the weird parts of social media where people just decide to believe insane things. And I don't know how you build trust, people other than talking to them in language that we all use and giving good information. So the way I go about doing this stuff, I find a couple of stories that actually matter to the state that I can explain and, like, 30 seconds and not fully. You can't fully explain anything. Exactly, but you can do the nutshell. And you find more or less reliable information sources. You look at what it is, you try not to make mistakes. Everyone's going to make mistakes every now and then. I made mistakes, too. No large ones yet, though. Knock on wood. And that's going to happen. You accept that's going to happen and you go with it. And if you can build trust with people, then that they'll give you grace for that.

Quay Weston
That's right.

Blair Reeves
And I think this is kind of what's happening right now with right wing social media. They've gone so heavy on the paranoid, crazy stuff for so long, and now people are like, oh, what's Trump saying now?

Quay Weston
They're kind of running out of things, right?

Blair Reeves
Yeah. They have to keep getting entertained.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
Right.

Blair Reeves
People are like, okay, now we kind of see what's going on. Right?

Quay Weston
So, yeah, thank you for that.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
I'm thinking a lot about what you said about trust and the ways that we are a low trust society, and also pairing that with how much information we have at our disposal at any given moment. And how can we, in our communities and our local and state, like our local governments and in the state, how can we use our interpersonal relationships to build stronger coalition, to work together and to, like, cut through the noise again?

Blair Reeves
I think that's a hard question.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
I know.

Blair Reeves
I mean, I think a lot of this kind of goes back to the fact that, like, a lot of, you know, you see there's a lot of research around, like, how people feel more bored than ever today. They feel more lonely. Yes. Especially younger people. A lot of people say it's the phones.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
I think it's partial, but it's not.

Blair Reeves
Like when we were kids, people said something about Nintendo, right? If you play Nintendo all day, you're gonna turn into a serial killer. Or something like that. I don't think that's really true. I do think I have two small children. I do think a lot about, obviously not on social media, way too young for that. Do you give them a device, screen time, all this stuff? It does kind of isolate you a little bit, but you're also sort of connected with people. Right. I think that kind of goes back to a lot of that stuff, like how communities are. How are they woven together? I really think that we do need a. I think we need, like, universal, basic hanging out time, right? Yes.

Quay Weston
Can we pass that?

Monèt Noelle Marshall
Yes.

Blair Reeves
I think people need the barbecue. Right. They need your neighbor.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
Yeah. Your third spaces.

Blair Reeves
You need your third spaces. Yes. You need the neighborhood cookout.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
Yes, we do.

Blair Reeves
And you need to get together and. And that is, there are trade offs to that because we are very segregated as well. Durham here. Right. Famously so, getting a little bit less so over time, but still very segregated.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
But then by class, we're also becoming more. We might be more. A little more racially integrated, but class, we're still going in the opposite direction.

Blair Reeves
Exactly. And I think that goes into, like. And these are all things are all connected. Right. That's how that connects to housing. Housing crisis makes us more segregated. And so there's no one answer to any of that. But I do think that a lot of this goes back to building trust. Building trust within networks of communities, that it really is a hanging out problem. I think that it's very, very hard to build trust over Instagram, and I hope people do, but, you know, it's not ideal. And I do think you need real world relationships. People build with each other. The church has done that for. Did that for a long time. It's not doing that anymore.

Quay Weston
Yeah, they stopped feeding people.

Blair Reeves
More so in the black community than in the white community, but they stopped feeding people.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
The repass is really what was holding the community together.

Quay Weston
It's a lot.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
Okay.

Blair Reeves
And I mean, in the white community, the. So church membership is crashing, right? That's right. Black community, it's also going down, but it's going in different ways. The hispanic community actually is holding pretty steady, but also very different. Depends on your community. And a lot of that is, especially in the white evangelical circles, it's kind of growing insular. And you see, that's how you get the really weird stuff happening in the super right wing church. You see some of that in the black community, but not quite as much, I think, just because the different roles played. But I think that's the role that it plays. And is it still doing that the same way it did? Probably not. And I don't know how you fix that.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
Yeah, no, it's just so true. And I think I define myself as a cultural organizer and cultural strategist, and I think a lot about how culture holds us together and how the fact that we practice together and, like, the fact of being in a space, like, I can see your knees right now. I can't see your knees on Instagram, but, like, I'm gonna have a different relationship to you. Cause I see you as a whole person, and I'm, like, thinking about your family, your children. And I do think that engenders a different relationship to how we talk to each other and how we're curious. And it does knit. It knits us together differently when you're like, oh, I actually see you as a whole person in this moment, as opposed to, like, you know, you're just a username on the Internet.

Blair Reeves
Exactly. Yeah, exactly. We a human being, we haven't changed in a quarter million years. Right. We are. We are all cave people. Right. And the way we relate is by talking to each other.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
Right.

Blair Reeves
And that there's nothing that will never change.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
Hopefully.

Quay Weston
Yeah, hopefully. Um, one thing that I've, as you mentioned, community. And I think about, like, the teams and groups and formations that I'm a part of and communities that I'm. I exist in. Um, a lot of the conversation has been about what it takes for us to move forward. Right. Politically, is it that we need to just focus on running candidates or turning over the general assembly? All these things, I think, to me, are all combined, but. Or is it, we need to focus on money, and until we get money, we can't change any of these things.

Blair Reeves
Right.

Quay Weston
So I'm curious about some of the information you've shared around, like, pacs and how much money is poured into the political ecosystem. Yeah, I will start there. I won't say. I'll start with one question. I tend to ask multiple questions. You'll learn. Yeah, one question. Could you speak to how money is poured into the political economy and what that then means for people who are voting for candidates or representatives?

Blair Reeves
That's a great question. I think I heard Doctor Tressie Cottem said something about this on a podcast recently. I forget where it was. It wasn't the hometown holler. It might have been somewhere else. But she made a really, really good. I think it was in New York Times. She made a really good point. That, look, especially when you get to the national level politics, there's just a huge amount of money floating around. And at some point, once you have a nominee and the candidates are known and this sort of stuff, the money drives a lot of whatever they do in their campaign. In the Kamala Harris situation, there's really interesting nether part where Biden was like, I might drop out. I might not drop out. He's giving conflicting messages. And there's this kind of liminal period where no one was quite sure what was going to happen. And then we thought he was going to drop out. And then it might be Pete Buttigieg or it might be Gretchen Whitmer Roy or whatever. And there was this, I think there was this, there was a gathering of a community around Kamala Harris who were like, there was a woman of color who is second to the president right now, who is right here, and you don't have to go searching around for other candidates. She's literally right here. She's vetted, she's ready, and she wants it, and she has the ambition to do it. And in that liminal space there, that's where having both her political support but also just community support, we were talking about divine nine before this as well. And I think that there was probably an observation that if they bypassed her.

Quay Weston
Yeah, that would have been ugly.

Blair Reeves
That would have been real ugly for everyone.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
Cause the demps know that black women are the ones who are going out getting so many folks to vote, and they would have felt so disrespected.

Blair Reeves
Well, they run a lot of the party. Right. And you have to serve your friends first before you serve anyone else. And then, of course, now we've seen like, oh, yeah, no, she's super confident. That was a good choice. Right. But there was that part there. Where is the money going to make the decision, or are people around? And I think that speaks to how the systems always work. So you asked about the role of money in this whole ecosystem. And what I think people need to understand is that we just look at the state level. We're always going to have parties. We're always going to have elections, primaries. Those camps will have to do things in power and all this stuff. And that requires organization around it. And that's one thing that I do think that black women in particular, I mean, the black community in general has been very keyed into for a long time. Black voters are some of the most strategic out there. They don't really go in for a lot of the change the world, revolutionary stuff traditionally, because I don't think they've had the confidence that that's actually gonna happen. Yeah, but, but that is, that's been a phenomenon and that's why a lot of them run, like, run the party. Right. You go out to pick county.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
Yeah.

Blair Reeves
It's black women. Yep. Right.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
South Carolina.

Quay Weston
Yep.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
Black women.

Blair Reeves
Exactly. And Jim Clyburn. Jim Clyburn saved Joe Biden's together. Right.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
Right.

Blair Reeves
And we are always going to have these organizations around that. And what I think people need to, they don't have to be comfortable with it. But you, but you have to understand at some point that, like, there is a party, you have to coalesce around a party and around candidates, and that requires some level of compromise sometimes. Sometimes saying, I don't love that thing, she said, but I'm going to overlook it because this is a path to power in politics. It's about power. It is not about personalities. It is not about owning people on social media or whatever. It's about power and what happens to all of us. And I think there's a recognition around that, especially right now with Harris saying that you don't have to love everything Kamala Harris says, but she's better than Trump in basically every way. And these are your choices. And I think there are some people who are still not comfortable with that, and that's fine, but that is going to be the choice. And there is, I think, recognition. You know, for the purposes of doing politics, you do have to make compromises at some point for the greater good, and that's never going to change. That's like, that's just politics. Right. And money follows where those decisions lead.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
I hear you about money following. And it does feel like, I think part of the question is, is money following or is money leading? And because I see there's just so much money that goes into certain elections, like certain races, and I'm not always clear even where these monies are coming from.

Blair Reeves
Right.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
So we see the commercials like this is funded by so and so and so and so. Right. But there is no, what is the relationship? How can folks learn more about where the dollars are actually coming from to know who is impacting and who's buying ads and who is, like, papering my door? You know, like, I, that's the question that I have.

Blair Reeves
So there are, there's a front game and then there's an inside game. Right. So there's the hard dollars. There's soft dollars. Hard dollars is the stuff you can look up. There's financial disclosures campaign, you know, the state board of elections is a campaign finance website. You click in, you know, candidates name, Roy Cooper, Josh Stein, Mark Robinson, whatever. And there's their donor list, there's a contribution limit and all that stuff. Hard. That's called hard dollars. You're publicly registered as a contributor, and that's a very important part of their campaign fundraising. It's a minority of their fundraising. So that's the top. That's the tip of the iceberg. The other 80%, or whatever it is, is below the line. You'll never see it. It's dark money. And it's super frustrating because we don't really get very good information about a lot of these. Some of these organizations will be very open. Like, we're spending 20 million to help Mark Robinson or we're spending 20 million to help Josh dine or whatever it is. Sometimes they don't, and you can only find out through disclosures with the FEC or their tax forms or whatever. It's super, super dark, and they've made it that way here, especially here in North Carolina. What I think people need to understand is that while that stuff is super busted, it's super frustrating. We can't really do a lot about that until the Supreme Court turns over. Right. That citizens united, they pass like McCain. I'm a conservative Republican. McCain got together with Feingold in Wisconsin. Wisconsin, yeah, Wisconsin. That was like early 2000, 220 years ago. Whatever. They passed campaign finance reform. They did this thing saying, you can't do dark money. It has to be just publicly listed. Whatever. And the Supreme Court knocked it down with Citizens United. That was during Obama. And Obama said, this is going to wreck politics. This means unlimited money in politics. And he was right about that. And there's nothing we can do about any of that until the Supreme Court turns over. Maybe one day. But what do people think is a long winded answer?

Monèt Noelle Marshall
No, no, no.

Quay Weston
I'm just like, yeah, I'm.

Blair Reeves
People understand is that money doesn't win politics. Money doesn't win elections. It helps. You have to have a requisite amount of money to win a campaign, to mount a campaign. But look, I think Mitt Romney raised more than Obama did. Who is it? Bill Graham, the guy who ran against Mark Robinson in his primary. He spent like $5 million of his own money. He got like 5% of the vote or something like that. Money doesn't win elections. It helps, but it doesn't win elections. And people, people with less money do win races all the time. It's harder. You have to have a really clear contrast. But I don't think that I think people are rightly frustrated about money and they should be because it sucks. We are operating under a system that we have no control over right now. And we can talk about how they made it worse in North Carolina, but it's not definitional, it isn't busted and it doesn't always work.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
I would love to hear the quick and dirty of how they made it worse. And also, is there anything that we can do about it?

Blair Reeves
So back in, I want to say 2013, they passed this big, big law about a whole bunch of election law changes. One of the things they did was they lifted the maximum, the maximum campaign contribution limit used to be capped. I want to say like $4,000. I could be wrong about that, 3000, 4000 something. And they raised it to 5000. And then for that election, and then they said every two years, basically every election cycle, it's going to automatically rise from every year from here on out pegged to the rate of inflation. So it went from 5400 to 800.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
Okay, I'm going to say that they did that for campaign finance, but they did not do that for the minimum wage or for teachers to pay.

Blair Reeves
There was actually, and this is the thing, there was actually a bill that same, that same session in 2013. And people are like, we have a minimum wage bill right over here. It's 725 an hour. And they're like, well, workers don't need that. And the rationale is like, look, political campaigns keep getting more expensive. We gotta raise the thing. And it was.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
But cost of living is not the world.

Blair Reeves
That was the first year of the Republicans rigged themselves a super majority in the legislature. They had Pat McCrory in the government. They didn't need a supermajority, but they passed it. And that is still in place. So the top max contribution this year is $6,400. Minimum wage is still 725.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
Yes, it is.

Blair Reeves
And in two years it's going to go up big. So that's one of the things they did. Another thing they did, by the way, one of the things we do at Carolina Ford is we file complaints with the state board of elections. There are a number of organizations in the state operating as illegal, unregistered paCs. There's one down in new Hanover called tide turners. They print off lawn signs and stickers and buttons and all kinds of stuff for these guys. They're pushing for their county commission, for statewide office, whatever, just for New Hanover county. They spend a lot of money doing that. They don't report any of it. They don't report their donors they don't report anything. It's illegal. And we filed a complaint against them last year or two years ago, Mark Walker out in Greensboro, he rented a bus with the names and faces of all the Republicans running for judicial races that year. It's called win the judges.

Quay Weston
Win the judges.

Blair Reeves
And he took them. They would get on the bus.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
The judges themselves.

Blair Reeves
The judges themselves get on the bus. They take them to different campaign events. All the stuff never reported. Didn't report their donors. We don't know who paid for it. Right. Didn't report anything.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
But I. And I thought that the judges are paid through, like, that little money that we donate or give when we get our ids or something.

Blair Reeves
Oh, no, no.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
Okay. That's not real or true.

Blair Reeves
Wow. No. They killed judicial public financing for those races. And so that feels elite.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
That feels bad.

Blair Reeves
And so we filed a complaint with that, as well. One thing they changed, though, is that now complaints filed with the state board of elections are now confidential. So you don't know one. If they ever did anything with the complaint, if they ever investigated the complaint, if they ever consequences or if they folded it. We've never heard it, like, anything. The reality that a lot of people don't know right now is that most of the election laws in North Carolina are not really being enforced. You have to commit felonies for them to really do anything. A story came out the other day. Mark Robinson spent thousands of dollars in his 2020 campaign at these stores. And so some reporter went to the store, like a kayak store, you guys. Mark Robinson in kayak, by the way.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
But I really hope he's out there because, you know, all our mental and emotional wellness, maybe we just need a.

Quay Weston
Little kayak in our lives.

Blair Reeves
His report said he spent $3,000. Whatever. At the store. Store owners, like, he just spent $3. It was a kayak store. He definitely didn't come here. And. And that complaints been on. Been at the same for, like, three years, and no one's done anything with it.

Quay Weston
Why would they entertain the complaint if they don't need to do anything about it?

Blair Reeves
I mean, you can send a complaint then, right?

Monèt Noelle Marshall
It's like having a suggestion box at your job.

Quay Weston
Yeah.

Blair Reeves
It makes you feel better.

Quay Weston
Complaint.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
Thank you so much. We're gonna take that into consideration.

Blair Reeves
Things are much unfor. And this is like, I hate to bum people up, but things really are much more busted than people realize. And that's by design. It's. People in Raleigh have done that in our legislature, and it's gonna continue being like that until we throw them out.

Quay Weston
Hmm. That spawned a question for me that isn't on my list, but I wanna ask it.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
Okay.

Quay Weston
Instead of maybe the question until we throw them out. How do you think about accountability for elected people that isn't just waiting to. To vote them out? Do you have any thoughts about that?

Monèt Noelle Marshall
And isn't just like yelling about it on the Internet, like actual ways to.

Quay Weston
Yeah. Like, is there something we just are missing about this?

Blair Reeves
So I think that one of the things that. So here in Durham, you just had a big, you know, big example of this. Right? So Durham is super democratic. Republicans never gonna win here. Right.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
And unless they pretend to be Democrats.

Blair Reeves
Well, you have that. We had one of those in Northeast.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
Yes.

Blair Reeves
Oh, no.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
Okay.

Blair Reeves
Up in Northampton, Halifax, Warren.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
Oh, yeah.

Blair Reeves
Yeah. We had one of those guys. And we. And so there's, there's a primary. I believe in primaries. I think primaries are great. And not. And, you know, people. Politicians all hate primaries. They hate primaries. Cause of course. Of course you do. Right. You have to make. Makes you work, makes you do stuff in North Carolina. None of them are making any money anyway. So, like, I get why they get annoyed by primary. I like primaries. Why? Because it affords them accountability. Right. If you can't win a primary, you shouldn't be in office. Right? And most people in office, especially in like, safe blue seats, never get any challenges. And that's why they get complacent and they get lazy. And, you know, if you want. If you have a primary challenge and you lose it, then you shouldn't be in office. Right. And sometimes that's because the community has moved past where that candidate is. And there's no one's wrong with that. It's just a fact. Sometimes that candidate isn't serving the people they went to office to serve. Up in Northeast. There is a guy up there in Northampton or Halifax, I think. I live in Halifax. And he was a Democrat and he voted like a Republican. That's a super safe D plus 25 points kind of area majority black, by the way. And he was not doing that. And he was basically taking money and voting against. He defunded. He voted for the school vouchers. He's going to defund his own school districts by millions of dollars. And so we helped support a primary challenger to him and he narrowly won. And we kicked out a ten term incumbent up there, which is huge. And I think that. That it never happened until Carolina Ford got involved. And I'm happy we were able to do that. But I think that we need. And that's because, you know, the Democrats left to their own, you know, any political party left in their own devices is not going to do that. You need strong external organizations that can provide accountability to the Republicans. If they're misbehaving to the Democrats, they're misbehaving. There's, because there is that on both sides of, you know, and you have to, you have to provide some mechanism for accountability. You ask outside of primaries, outside of voting, it's hard because to some extent, like they don't have to listen to you until the next election.

Quay Weston
Correct?

Blair Reeves
Right.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
I'll do whatever I want.

Blair Reeves
Now. I will say that the better leaders out there, good leaders, are going to listen to you no matter what. And we got a bunch of those, right? We got some of those here in Durham that will listen to you, maybe don't agree with you. That's okay. We don't always have to agree. Right. But he'll hear you out and hear you in good faith. That's usually, that's enough for me. And when we have irreconcilable differences, that's where you say like, well, could we, is a primary challenge like a useful route to go? Sometimes it is, sometimes it's not. Right. Depends what the issue is. But good leaders will hear you out, bad leaders will note.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
So, Blair, a question that we're asking all of our guests. What are you dreaming for North Carolina?

Blair Reeves
Holding the North Carolina Supreme Court and flipping the North Carolina supreme Court? That's what I would really like to do. That's going to happen in 2028 and it's going to be a little while. I think that North Carolina is changing. We see it changing a lot. You see that in the numbers, you see it in the election returns. You feel it culturally. Like, I've been here for 16 years. I've been here a long time. Like the state does feel differently than it did. And I think that's really good. So I told you before, I'm from Virginia originally and I watched Virginia. I grew up with completely changed in a positive way. Like Virginia is a better state now than it was 20 years ago, and North Carolina is not as good as state it was 15 years ago. Our schools are poorer. Our people are more segregated. Our economy has basically tracked. The national average hasn't done especially well. And state government has left a lot of people behind. And I think that needs a lot of help. I think that North Carolina is changing and I want it to change and that's going to take strategy. It's gonna take patience. It's gonna take, you know, method to go about that, but it is happening. I think that, I don't know if Harris is gonna win North Carolina this year or not. I think she has a very good chance. And the thing, the thing is, I always see is that people never believe that it's going. Things like that are gonna happen until they see it happen.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
Right.

Blair Reeves
In Virginia. No one, no one in Richmond believe that Obama is gonna win Virginia in 2008. No one. And they did. And then it was like, there's all hindsight, of course, show signs and we see all those signs right now. I don't know if you have trends. I don't know the trends are going to arrive on time for November 5. They are going to get here, though. And I think that the Democrats are pretty well positioned to do that. We need to keep the Democrats honest. We need to keep them in line. But that is the way you change the state and then you have to repair a lot of damage because there's been a lot of damage rally. That's what I'm hoping for. North Carolina.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
Okay. Thank you, Blair. We have some quick, fun questions to end our conversation.

Quay Weston
Yes. You wanna rotate between them?

Monèt Noelle Marshall
Yes.

Quay Weston
Okay. One. Cheerwine or Pepsi? Cold?

Blair Reeves
Cheerwine.

Quay Weston
Damn.

Blair Reeves
I haven't had to hear a second quick.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
Number two. Bojangles or cookout?

Blair Reeves
A cookout. Okay. We got eight more days of watermelon milkshake.

Quay Weston
So sounds like a.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
By the time you listen, you will probably have missed the watermelon milkshake for 2025.

Blair Reeves
Summer.

Quay Weston
Sweet or unsweet?

Blair Reeves
Sweet. Is there. You mean tea?

Quay Weston
Yeah.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
I know some people are like unsweet.

Quay Weston
Depends on where you from.

Blair Reeves
You're from Beauver County?

Quay Weston
I am. I know my answer.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
I know my answer.

Blair Reeves
Yeah.

Quay Weston
Yeah.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
It's half and half. Oh, God. Carolina or Duke?

Blair Reeves
Neither. Yes.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
What's your team?

Blair Reeves
I went to Uva.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
Okay.

Blair Reeves
I went to Virginia. I stayed agnostic. I did go to Duke for grad school. I do not claim them, though, because they killed light rail in the triangle.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
They did.

Blair Reeves
So. They did.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
But thank you for educating you.

Blair Reeves
I paid them plenty of money. I don't have to pay for anything.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
That's really all we got. Blair, thank you so much for your time. Thank you for continuing to educate us. We're going to continue to stalk your instagram and watch all the videos. Is there anything that you would really like folks to know about Carolina forward? How to get involved and mean.

Blair Reeves
You can follow us on social media, sign for email. We're all on carolinaforward.org. and we appreciate anything people want to do and to stay involved and stay engaged and stay informed with what's going on in our state.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
Awesome. We'll do that. Thank you, Blair.

Blair Reeves
Thank you.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
Thanks for tuning in to down ballet banter. We hope y'all enjoyed the diving into the tentacular world of local politics with us.

Quay Weston
Yeah. And don't forget, this podcast is an extension of Monet's beautiful dream, the down ballot brunch, where there are three simple steps. It's to eat, have a conversation, and to act.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
That's right, have a conversation using this podcast episode, the down ballot brunch chat guide, or your own prompts, write a note to an elected official on a down ballot brunch postcard card. Share quotes from your convo on social media, with consent, of course, or text three friends about their voting plans and find out what matters to them.

Quay Weston
And if you're watching on YouTube, be sure to, like share subscribe if you're listening on other platforms, be sure to rate and review share it with your people.

Monèt Noelle Marshall
Until next time, stay informed, stay engaged, and keep up with the down ballot banter.