Welcome to Red Wine & Blue North Carolina

Our reproductive freedom remains at risk at both the state and national levels.

After the fall of Roe v. Wade, extremists in our state legislature led the passing of an extreme abortion ban, drastically restricting access to abortion care in our state. And we know they aren’t stopping there. We will continue to work with other reproductive rights activists across NC to help elect candidates who will fight for our reproductive freedom.

At the national level, extremist politicians want to restrict access to birth control and IVF – despite access to both being overwhelmingly popular among the majority of Americans –  and they’re using the same playbook in NC. In fact, while some commonsense legislators have reintroduced a Right to Contraception Act, current General Assembly leadership won’t let it come up for a vote. Birth control will be on the ballot in 2026, so it’s up to us to ensure we elect candidates who will protect our rights.

In North Carolina, millions of women don’t have easy access to an OB/GYN. Close to 30% of our counties don’t even have an obstetrician and only 60% have hospitals that offer labor and delivery services, leaving maternal healthcare deserts in huge portions of our state. North Carolina’s maternal death rate is higher than the national average and it’s doubled in recent years. U.S. maternal deaths are at their highest in 60 years. Indigenous women’s maternal mortality rate is 4.5 times that of white women, and Black women’s rate is 2.6 times that of white women.

To improve women’s healthcare and protect reproductive rights in our state, we must vote in every race on our ballots for candidates that will protect our reproductive rights.

You may have heard of the Leandro case which ensures that all children in NC are guaranteed a “sound, basic public education.” But for two years, extremist leadership in the state legislature has been fighting court orders to fully fund public schools.

At  the same time, they are using private school vouchers to funnel billions of taxpayer dollars away from public schools and into private ones over the next decade, without giving those private schools the same level of accountability for how the money is used.

There’s also a national movement against public education trying to take over school boards. Extremist groups are targeting North Carolina schools and spending millions of dollars on advertising for candidates who support their book-banning, anti-LGBTQ+, pro-bullying, anti-public-education policies.

In 2024, we elected the pro-public education candidate, Mo Green for Superintendent of Public Instruction. This year, we need to focus on our local school districts and ensure we elect common sense school board members who will advocate for strong public schools.

State legislators are busy introducing bills to ban books in schools, block the teaching of honest history, and to deny the existence of trans kids. Our communities and our kids need us to elect commonsense, pro-public education candidates to school boards and the state legislature. Voting is not enough. We also need to talk to our friends and family and make sure they vote, too. Learn how here.

We all want safe communities. We want to be able to go to the grocery store, a movie theater, and to send our kids to school without worrying about being shot. But an average of 1,714 people die by guns every year in North Carolina, and our Everytown for Gun Safety rating for Gun Law Strength is slipping. Gun violence costs our state $19.5 billion every year.

Guns are the leading cause of death for youth in the U.S. Our college campuses — UNC-Chapel Hill, UNC-Charlotte, and N.C. Central — have been terrorized by shootings in recent years. Our elementary, middle, and high school students are traumatized by school shooting drills. Parents will never numb to the fear of lockdown alerts coming through on our phones.

So what are our state legislators doing about it in Raleigh? Some legislators have been filing bills to strengthen gun safety laws in our state for years, like promoting secure storage of guns and extreme risk protection orders commonly known as red flag laws, but General Assembly leadership hasn’t advanced any of them. Instead, as soon as they gained a veto-proof supermajority last year, extremists made it easier to get a gun in our state by removing the century-old law that required a permit to purchase a gun. And now they’ve passed SB50, a bill that would allow anyone over 18 to carry a gun in public without a permit.

The best way to reduce gun violence in our state is to elect “gun sense” candidates who are committed to keeping our communities safe through common-sense gun legislation.

Extremists in North Carolina:

• Are trying to disenfranchise 65K voters in NC to steal a NC Supreme Court seat.
• Defunded and removed all Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives within the University of North Carolina system, and now they want to prohibit Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs and related concepts in North Carolina’s public schools and state agencies.
• Passed a slate of hateful anti-LGBTQ+ bills including bans on health care for LGBTQ+ youth, a ban on trans youth from participating in sports, and a “Don’t Say Gay” bill for our schools.
• Are working to transform state agencies from service providers into potential instruments of immigration enforcement.
• Want to make it a Class 2 Misdemeanor for residents of NC to use the official voter registration form to help register other voters.

None of this is okay! We’re showing up in 2025 and 2026 to stop these extremists from taking over our communities and to rally for candidates who reject discrimination and respect our democracy.