North Carolina Republicans last week missed gaining a supermajority in the General Assembly by just one seat in the House.
The midterm elections arguably came down to a tight race in Cabarrus County, where Democrat Diamond Staton-Williams leads Republican Brian Echevarria by 425 votes.
That apparent victory came after an especially brutal — some say, racist — commercial that the Staton-Williams campaign ran against the Republican candidate.
The commercial talked about Echevarria’s past financial problems, including bankruptcy in 2010.
And the ad zeroed in on him writing a bad check. Echevarria says that happened nearly 25 years ago.
“I was probably a year and a half outside of high school, almost two,” he said. “And bounced a check. You know you bounce a check you don’t have enough money, right? I don’t even remember the check. It was a non-event in my life until now.”
What got Echevarria particularly upset was a fake photograph of him that was made to look like a police mug shot. It even had a height chart behind him.
Echevarria — who is Black and Latino — said he’s never been arrested for anything.
“I thought (the commercial) was racist,” he said. “Here you have a Black Hispanic Male and the best you can do is make a criminal of him. That was a little surprising coming from the party of identity politics you know.”
In an interview, Staton-Williams, who is a Harrisburg town council member, did not directly address Echevarria’s complaints that the commercial was racist.
“This election, the campaign commercials that we saw were very negative, were very derogatory, especially towards me and other women,” she said. “That’s all I have to say about that. It is what it is.”
She said Republican groups ran negative attack ads against her on issues like legalizing prostitution and drug abuse.
Echevarria said Staton-Williams was backed by the Progressive Caucus of the North Carolina Democratic Party, whose platform calls for decriminalizing sex work and to “legalize and regulate all drugs.”
Earlier this fall, Democrats complained about Republican mailers that liberally used Photoshop. One used computer trickery to show Alamance County Democratic House member Ricky Hurtado wearing a Defund the Police T-shirt. Hurtado lost his re-election attempt.
Western Carolina political science professor Chris Cooper said the anti-Hurtado ad was “slightly over the ethical line.”
But he said the Echevarria commercial “cleared the line so far that you can’t even see it in the rearview mirror.”
Cooper said using a fake mug shot for Echevarria is something “that will be remembered 20 years from now. I would say it’s on the shortlist along with the of course the White Hands that Jesse Helms ran.”
The Hands ad refers to a 1990 commercial run against Black Democrat Harvey Gantt in the North Carolina Senate race. It showed a white man crumpling up a job rejection letter because the position was given to a minority.
The Hands ad is notorious in part because the stakes were higher, and there was a clear storyline: That was a U.S. Senate race, featuring Helms, a white arch-conservative, and Gantt, Charlotte’s former Black mayor.
The mug shot commercial was only for a seat in Cabarrus County, one of 120 State House seats being contested. And the cast of characters is more complex.
While Echevarria — who sees himself as the victim — is Black and Latino, Staton-Williams is a Black woman. She and her family were featured at the end of the commercial.
Echavarria says the ad didn’t receive much attention because it was a Democrat who — in his view — weaponized race.
“The double standard is amazing,” he said. “Whereas the Democrats and Roy Cooper pretend that they really care about the Black community, what I prove is they stop caring about Black folks when they become inconvenient.”
Cooper, the Democratic governor, appeared in the commercial asking voters to back Staton-Williams.
Cooper’s political adviser Morgan Jackson said in a statement that Echeverria’s claim the ad is racist is “ridiculous and doesn’t merit a response. The Governor was proud to support Diamond Staton-Williams.”
Staton-Williams’ victory was one of just a handful of bright spots for Democrats last week. The Cabarrus seat has been held by Republican Larry Pittman, one of the most conservative members of the legislature. If Staton-Williams hadn’t flipped that seat, Democrats would have lost their ability to sustain Cooper’s vetoes for the next two years.
The Cabarrus County Board of Elections is scheduled to meet Thursday night to review roughly 500 mail ballots in the race.
