The Democrats’ Socialist Tar Heel

Wednesday showed North Carolina Senate candidate Deborah Ross ignoring a question about whether she is a socialist as she made her way from a vehicle to her campaign headquarters.

It’s a fair question, given that she accepted the endorsement this week of Our Revolution, the political organization of self-described “democratic socialist” Sen. Bernie Sanders.

“Sanders’ record could not be more out of touch with North Carolina values. With each passing day, Ross provides more proof that she is, too.”

Sanders does not confer his imprimatur to just any run-of-the-mill Democrat. Ross is just the third Senate candidate to get Our Revolution’s backing.

“Sanders’ record could not be more out of touch with North Carolina values,” the PAC America Rising said on its website. “With each passing day, Ross provides more proof that she is, too.”

Republican strategists have grumbled about what they regard as the lackluster campaign run by the state’s incumbent senator, Richard Burr. Polls have shown a tight race in what the GOP initially thought would be a cakewalk when higher-profile Democrats passed on the race.

The Tar Heel State is in the midst of a demographic and cultural change that has moved it from the solidly Republican column to swing-state status. The Hispanic population is growing fast and an influx of well-educated transplants who work in the tech industry in the Research Triangle area has brought a progressive streak to the state’s politics.

President Obama in 2008 became the first Democratic presidential candidate to win it since 1976, and he lost it narrowly four years ago.

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Still, North Carolina is no Massachusetts, and Burr’s allies hope to define Ross as an out-of-step liberal who is too far left for the Southern state. Linking her to Sanders will only make that case easier.

Americans for Prosperity, a political group that advocates for smaller government, has sent out mailers attacking Ross for her vote as a state senator for voting to raise local sales taxes to pay for road projects. She contends the attack is misleading because the bill she sponsored required voters to sign off on any hikes.

The challenger’s record as former head of the North Carolina chapter of the Americans for Civil Liberties Union offers a wealth of potential targets for Burr and his allies. According to The Washington Free Beacon, Ross fought efforts to ban flag desecration — but turned a blind eye to a request for help by a man who had been ordered by his home owners association to take down an American flag on his own property.

In August 1995, Ross opposed creation of a sex offender registry in North Carolina, writing in a memo to the Legislative Committee of the ACLU-NC that, “this bill would make it even harder for people to reintegrate into society and start over and could lead to vigilantism.”

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Two years later, Ross opposed putting the registry online, telling The Charlotte Observer that it would have “unintended consequences” and would not protect children.”

The Ross campaign argues that Burr is taking her positions out of context. She told The Charlotte Observer that she was concerned about protecting privacy rights, since many sex offender victims are relatives of sex offender perpetrators.

“Richard Burr’s dark money, special-interest backers are getting more desperate by the day,” campaign spokesman Cole Leiter told the Raleigh News & Observer.

But opposition to sex offender registration figures to be a difficult position to defend in any state — let alone North Carolina, which still has a large swath of culturally conservative voters.