If Democrats will let it Whether Republican or Democrat, it is not often that state power players fail to get their way in North Carolina politics. On Saturday, however, high-level Democrats’ pick for state party chair lost reelection in an upset to a young, rural activist. Center-left Carolina Forward, a nonprofit progressive research group, dubbed the election “a massive rebuke of the party establishment.” Anderson Clayton, 25, is chair in Person County (pop. 39,000) bordering Virginia north of Durham. N.C. Democrats’ State Executive Committee (SEC) chose Clayton over incumbent, Bobbie Richardson, 73, a former state House member and the party’s first Black chair elected in 2021. Richardson garnered endorsements from all seven Democratic members of the Congressional delegation, Attorney General Josh Stein, and Gov. Roy Cooper. Cooper delivered a prerecorded pitch for Richardson on the statewide Zoom call. Richardson brought endorsements. But Clayton brought game, too. The president of the state party chairs’ association was a field organizer in Iowa both for Kamala Harris (2019) and for Elizabeth Warren (2020) before becoming regional field director for Amy McGrath’s 2020 campaign for U.S. Senate in Eastern Kentucky. She works as a broadband analyst focused on bringing service to rural communities. Clayton has been profiled in The Daily Yonder and quoted as a Trump-country progressive organizer in (of all places) The Washington Times. North Carolina politicians use “from Murphy to Manteo” to reference the largely rural state’s expanse, a nine-hour drive west to east. But few actually traverse it. In her campaign…