NC Democratic Senate Candidate Plays Identity Politics Card Against Chuck Schumer

A Democratic candidate for the Senate seat currently being held by Thom Tillis (R-NC) lashed out at Sen. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) at a recent campaign stop. She accused the former DSCC chairman of handpicking a primary candidate he wanted to win instead of allowing Democratic voters to decide.

But it didn’t stop there. State senator Erica Smith also told attendees that Schumer “for whatever reason, did not want an African American running for Senate in North Carolina.”

Video footage published by the Free Beacon shows Smith first speaking to the crowd about how she had “positioned” her political career in a way similar to how former President Barack Obama got started. She noted he, like her, started off as a community organizer, then ran for state senate, and then for the U.S. Senate.

Then, apparently referencing Schumer, Smith talked about how “he told us he was not gonna endorse in this race and would just let us duke it out. The next day,” Smith stated, “they sent DSCC staff. They told [former state senator] Cal Cunningham ‘you need to get out of the lieutenant governor’s race, and you get into the U.S. Senate race.'”

“Sen. Schumer, for whatever reason, did not want an African American running for U.S. Senate in North Carolina,” Smith alleged.

For the record, Cunningham is white.

In the very next sentence, however, Smith did a complete 180, saying the Democratic primary battle was “not about race.” She urged those in attendance not to vote for her because she would be the third black woman to “seek to do this” but because she was “the most qualified candidate for the job.”

That was a pretty classic Democratic tactic, to make a damaging insinuation about someone else and then try to walk it back in the next breath. Too late. Cat’s out of the bag on this one.

Smith then spent the next 2 minutes slamming the DSCC for what she perceives as meddling in the Democratic primary and urging voters to reject big money in politics.

Watch video of Smith speaking below:

Schumer and the DSCC both have been blasted by Democratic candidates for Senate across the U.S. for months for not letting the primary process play out in key Senate races, and this is not the first time the identity politics card has been played against them.

Back in August, six Democratic women running for the U.S. Senate in Colorado wrote a letter requesting the DSCC “reconsider” their endorsement of former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper.

“We are writing today to urge the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee to reconsider its early endorsement of former Governor John Hickenlooper. All of us, like many women in Colorado and across the country, have seen well-qualified women passed over for male candidates in the workplace time and again,” wrote Sen. Angela Williams, Alice Madden, Diana Bray, Stephany Rose Spaulding, Lorena Garcia and Michelle Ferrigno Warren to the DSCC, Sen. Chuck Schumer and Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto.They sent the letter on Monday, which was Women’s Equality Day 2019 in the U.S.[…]“Those of us who have run for office before have been told to ‘wait our turn’ and ‘don’t rock the boat’ more times than we care to mention,” they wrote. “Now, the DSCC, by its endorsement, is implying that we should defer to a male candidate because you seem to believe he is ‘more electable.’ Colorado has never had a woman United States Senator and one has to wonder if circumstances such as this have contributed to that unfortunate outcome.”

To be fair, the DSCC has endorsed minority candidates in other races, presumably because they feel they have the best shot at winning those seats. But even with that in mind, watching Democrats gets hoisted by their own petard when it comes to the identity politics games they usually play against Republicans was just too karmic to ignore.

— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —

Tags: 2020 Election, Chuck Schumer, Democrats, North Carolina, US Senate

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