Cleta Mitchell is Worried
Two people from my political past are battling over college students voting.
Cleta Mitchell wants to make it harder for them to vote. Daniel Gilligan wants to make it easier.
Daniel was a student in a politics class I taught at NC State 20 years ago as an adjunct lecturer. (I think “adjunct” is Latin for “unpaid.”)
I met Cleta 40 years ago. She was a Democratic state legislator from Oklahoma serving on the Democratic Party’s Commission on President Nominations, which Governor Jim Hunt chaired.
Today, Cleta has transmogrified into one of Trump’s leading election-deniers. She was on his “perfect” phone call when he pushed Georgia’s Secretary of State to “find” enough votes to overturn the 2020 presidential election result.
“All we have to do, Cleta, is find 11,000-plus votes,” Trump said on the call, which is now under criminal investigation.
She has since moved to North Carolina and runs a national network of election-deniers.
Daniel and his colleague Meghan Quick, both NC State grads, run a next-generation voter-empowerment task force, Current NC. Their College Impact Project seeks to get more of North Carolina’s 390,000 college students on 68 campuses to vote.
They say, “Getting young people to vote offers the best hope for protecting our democracy. We’ve seen that around the country and in states like Wisconsin, and we have a plan for how to do it again in North Carolina.”
They ran a pilot program in 2022 on campuses that were historic targets of voter suppression efforts, including historically Black colleges and universities. They want to expand it in 2024.
That got Cleta riled up. Maybe scared.
An audio leaked of a secret briefing she gave big GOP donors in April. She told them, “I promise you Stacey Abrams has been in North Carolina and we need to make sure that money is not flowing into Mecklenburg, Durham and Wake counties. So we need to be looking at what are these college campus locations and polling? What is this young people effort that they do?”
The Washington Post reported she told the donors “Conservatives must band together to limit voting on college campuses, same-day voter registration and automatic mailing of ballots to registered voters.”
She warns darkly: “Our constitutional republic’s survival is at stake” if young people vote.
In response, Meghan wrote in an email, “The fact that they’re already worried about the impact of this initial program is telling – just imagine what we could do if we expanded to every college in NC! If the people trying to tear down our democracy think young, educated people voting is their biggest threat, then that’s exactly where we should be focusing our efforts.”
I’m puzzled by Cleta’s transformation. I’m proud of Daniel and Meghan. The numbers show their program works.
Their website is just getting started, but you can donate to them here: https://www.currentnc.com/.
Give Cleta something to really worry about.
Post story: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/04/20/cleta-mitchell-voting-college-students/
Cleta Mitchell is Worried
Two people from my political past are battling over college students voting.
Cleta Mitchell wants to make it harder for them to vote. Daniel Gilligan wants to make it easier.
Daniel was a student in a politics class I taught at NC State 20 years ago as an adjunct lecturer. (I think “adjunct” is Latin for “unpaid.”)
I met Cleta 40 years ago. She was a Democratic state legislator from Oklahoma serving on the Democratic Party’s Commission on President Nominations, which Governor Jim Hunt chaired.
Today, Cleta has transmogrified into one of Trump’s leading election-deniers. She was on his “perfect” phone call when he pushed Georgia’s Secretary of State to “find” enough votes to overturn the 2020 presidential election result.
“All we have to do, Cleta, is find 11,000-plus votes,” Trump said on the call, which is now under criminal investigation.
She has since moved to North Carolina and runs a national network of election-deniers.
Daniel and his colleague Meghan Quick, both NC State grads, run a next-generation voter-empowerment task force, Current NC. Their College Impact Project seeks to get more of North Carolina’s 390,000 college students on 68 campuses to vote.
They say, “Getting young people to vote offers the best hope for protecting our democracy. We’ve seen that around the country and in states like Wisconsin, and we have a plan for how to do it again in North Carolina.”
They ran a pilot program in 2022 on campuses that were historic targets of voter suppression efforts, including historically Black colleges and universities. They want to expand it in 2024.
That got Cleta riled up. Maybe scared.
An audio leaked of a secret briefing she gave big GOP donors in April. She told them, “I promise you Stacey Abrams has been in North Carolina and we need to make sure that money is not flowing into Mecklenburg, Durham and Wake counties. So we need to be looking at what are these college campus locations and polling? What is this young people effort that they do?”
The Washington Post reported she told the donors “Conservatives must band together to limit voting on college campuses, same-day voter registration and automatic mailing of ballots to registered voters.”
She warns darkly: “Our constitutional republic’s survival is at stake” if young people vote.
In response, Meghan wrote in an email, “The fact that they’re already worried about the impact of this initial program is telling – just imagine what we could do if we expanded to every college in NC! If the people trying to tear down our democracy think young, educated people voting is their biggest threat, then that’s exactly where we should be focusing our efforts.”
I’m puzzled by Cleta’s transformation. I’m proud of Daniel and Meghan. The numbers show their program works.
Their website is just getting started, but you can donate to them here: https://www.currentnc.com/.
Give Cleta something to really worry about.
Post story: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/04/20/cleta-mitchell-voting-college-students/