Anderson Clayton: The 25-year-old who may help deliver North Carolina for Joe Biden

Clayton spent her brief time on this planet in places Democrats abandoned. She grew up in Roxboro, a city of 8,000 people north of Raleigh. She left there for Appalachian State University in 2015, telling herself she’d never return.

“I had a gay best friend growing up in Roxboro when I was younger, and I had a lot of friends that were in interracial relationships. You understood growing up in a place like that in a rural area, racism is still very prevalent there,” Clayton says. “I felt like I was running from rural North Carolina in a way. I always felt like I had to get out of there.”

But she kept getting sent back.

In Watauga County, where she attended Appalachian state, Clayton got involved with the party. And though Donald Trump won the state in 2016, Watauga County flipped blue for Hillary Clinton for the first time since 2008, giving Clayton her first taste of grassroots organizing.

After graduation, she joined Kamala Harris’ campaign, being placed in Belle Plaine, Iowa. She was told to find Democrats in the city of 2,300. When Harris dropped out, she signed on for Elizabeth Warren’s campaign, again in Iowa before shifting to Tennessee. Having not had her fill of losing campaigns, she then moved to Pikeville, Ky., to work as a rural field organizer on Amy McGrath’s Senate race against Mitch McConnell. It ended just as Harris and Warren’s efforts had.

Despite the series of losses, Clayton drew what she says are valuable lessons: The importance of grassroots organizing; the need for national investment to build necessary party infrastructure on the ground. That culture matters. That showing up matters.

Clayton didn’t feel that she had the buy-in from the McGrath campaign to organize the way she wanted — by knocking on every door, talking to every voter, especially in the rural parts of the state Democrats treated like a lost cause. And though that campaign and outside groups spent nearly $100 million on the race, Clayton said they weren’t able to put the lasting infrastructure on the ground that local Democrats needed in years to come.