For the third election cycle, we’ve put together a handy endorsement guide for candidates running for office in Chapel Hill, Carrboro, and school board races. A new blog post circulating suggests that the endorsement guide is inaccurate and has been “banned from the Democratic Party table at all local early voting sites.”

This is wildly inaccurate and being spread by supporters of candidates who received very few or zero organizational endorsements in this election cycle.

A few points of clarification.

  • The Democratic Party maintains tables at every early and same-day election site. They only allow information from Democratic candidates to appear on the table. As we’ve said many times, the blog is not a candidate in the election. No organizations, ourselves included, can put material on the table. (We think this is a good rule and appreciate the Democratic Party for enforcing it. It could become a very slippery slope.)
  • Our endorsement guide is non-partisan. It includes every candidate across every race and organizational endorsements received. We noted where questionnaires were not sent to all candidates. We used candidate websites to compile this information.
  • This is the third election cycle I’ve rounded up every endorsement. Before the blog, I made this myself in a massive Google Sheet. You can see my guide for the 2021 election cycle here. A lot of people find it helpful to see all endorsements in one place, which is why I do it. I’ve gotten many requests to continue compiling endorsements each year – and have received zero complaints in previous election cycles, which were made exactly the same way this year’s roundup was.
  • (This year, with the help of many volunteering hands, we also rounded up municipal voting histories for all candidates, all candidate forums and questionnaires for the same reason.)

Here are links to all of the endorsements mentioned on our roundup. You can look up every single endorsement yourself to double-check our work. The links to each endorsing organization and each candidate website are also included on our spreadsheet. All links below go to endorsements for that organization. As we said repeatedly when we launched the spreadsheet, if you’re aware of any endorsements not listed, please email [email protected] and we’ll add it.

Read the endorsements!

* Did not send questionnaire to all candidates

** CHALT’s PAC is called the Chapel Hill Leadership PAC. They have funded mailers for candidates, held events for candidates, and created yard signs for candidates. CHALT has put material in its newsletter, social media, and on its website. CHALT has not used the words “we endorse.” Instead they are calling their candidates “candidates who will make a difference.”

You can see our endorsement roundups here. They include all organizational endorsements and people who are community leaders and electeds. In our digital version, we link to each candidate’s website to see additional endorsements.

Chapel Hill

Carrboro

School board

Mel is a journalist and librarian. Outside of work, she volunteers as a reading tutor at Carrboro Elementary School, writes about journalism for a variety of publications, and serves as chair of the OWASA...