Eight years ago today, Republicans in Raleigh passed House Bill 2, a horrible, cowardly attack on our transgender siblings. The so-called “Bathroom Bill” marks a moment of deep shame in our state’s history, the repercussions of which we are still feeling.

As the words of our State Toast tell us, North Carolina ought to be a place “where the weak grow strong and the strong grow great”, but eight years ago, our state government failed to live up to that ideal, because the Republican Party would rather use their great power to hurt our neighbors than to uplift them. We’ve seen it again and again—with the bathroom bill, with voter ID, with gerrymandered districts, with the abortion ban.

And if we don’t act, we’ll see it in our future, from candidates like Mark Robinson, who would love to go back to a time when women couldn’t vote, and Dan Bishop, who was the architect of the bathroom bill, and Michelle Morrow, who literally called for elected Democrats to be executed on live television.

There are children in our state who will go to bed hungry tonight. There are people who don’t know whether they’ll have a roof over their heads tomorrow. But the Republicans in power would much rather focus on taking our state backwards and instituting draconian social policy designed to make North Carolina a place where there is no place for the vulnerable.

The only solution is to vote the Republican Party out of power. And the only way to do that is to get organized.

This year, 2024, the Young Democrats are at the forefront of that effort—in the primary, we sent more than 214,000 text messages and made more than 1,000 phone calls directly to Democratic voters in order to get them out to the polls. In the general election, it is my hope to more than quadruple that number, because if we do so, we will make Josh Stein our next governor. We will re-elect President Biden. We will begin the long, hard work of retaking control of the General Assembly.

But I’ll be blunt: I need dollars to get there. The work we do costs money, and to remain on track to do that work, I need to raise another $10,000 before the end of March. Your contribution will go directly to supporting our efforts to reach voters and elect Democrats this year—so please, friend, can I count on you to give whatever you can afford today? Our future might depend on it.

Together, we can win in November, protect our most vulnerable, and make North Carolina the place that I know it can be.