The internal geography of the state Senate within the capitol is telling. President Pro Tem Phil Berger and his double-digit staff command a six-office second-floor suite overlooking Jones Street, with overflow space downstairs.
His Democratic counterpart, Wake County Sen. Sydney Batch, gets a three-room office on the first floor that looks out into one of the building’s internal courtyards — and directly up at the Berger operation. She has three aides.
Time will tell if Batch, who became leader of her party’s Senate caucus can somehow flip that script. A start would be cracking the supermajority that Berger has enjoyed for much of his tenure.
So far, Batch’s signature moment was convincing her Senate peers to install her as the Democratic leader in place of fellow Wake County Sen. Dan Blue. He’s a family friend she has known since she was 5 or 6 years old.
“I’m a firm believer that we at this time and in this political space need to be more bullish,” Batch says of the decision to challenge Blue for caucus leader after last fall’s general election.
“We are two very different types of leaders. There’s no one way to do it right; I just do it very differently. And so I’ve told my caucus time and time again that I don’t promise to do it better. I promise to do it differently. And in doing it differently, I hope that we have some better outcomes.”
At 76, Blue is the legislature’s longest-serving member, having racked up 22 House or Senate terms in a career that stretches back to 1981. That includes a stint as the House Speaker. Batch, by contrast, is in her third Senate term and fourth legislative term overall after losing re-election to a House seat in 2020. She is 46.
Batch is a family law lawyer who co-founded her Raleigh firm, Batch Poore & Williams. It now has five other lawyers, including her husband, Patrick Williams. She entered politics in 2018 after having fended off a couple of previous recruitment efforts.
The timing was right in part because her two children were entering kindergarten. She also says she was increasingly frustrated by issues facing her clients.
One, for example, was going to lose her insurance after a divorce. Another had been a stay-at-home spouse who needed job training to get back into the workforce. Then there was what Batch calls “a very broken and fractured” foster care system.
“I kept on confronting issues that were state-level policy issues, things that my clients were having a really hard time trying to address,” Batch says. “So I finally woke up one day and said, if I am in a situation where I have the ideas, I have the experience because of my work within communities and within the court system to change it, then why not me?”
Batch won a House seat in her first campaign, but lost two years later in 2020 to Republican Erin Paré in a district that covered much of southern Wake County. She wound up returning to the capitol anyway, as Wake County Democratic Party leaders had her appointed in January 2021 to replace former Sen. Sam Searcy, who unexpectedly resigned.
Her current Senate district covers much of western Wake County, including Apex, Morrisville and parts of Cary and Holly Springs. Wake is home to “a lot of transplants,” as Batch puts it, which she says informs her thinking about how to reduce the GOP’s current 30-20 margin in the Senate.
Democrats on the campaign trail have to address their message delivery, branding and candidate recruitment if they’re to make inroads within the gerrymandered districts that Berger and his team have created, Batch says.
When campaigning, she says, she’d run into people who’d tell her “‘I was a New York Republican, but I don’t know what this North Carolina Republican is like. It’s a different brand of Republican.’”
“So we have the opportunity to be able to speak to voters in a way … that looks more like what they’re used to,” she says.
Message-wise, Batch took an immediate step to raise her party’s profile by making herself or other Democratic senators available to talk with reporters after legislative voting sessions. The practical effect is to make sure that Berger’s regular 10-minute confabs with the press corps don’t give him the day’s only or last word.
Batch has also made sure that each member of the Senate Democratic caucus takes point on a policy area, and gets some exposure.
“What I said is, ‘I want to make sure that I elevate you all and allow for you guys to shine in the ways in which you are experts in your area,’” she says. “I believe knowledge is power. I believe it should be shared by many.”
On the communications front, Batch is “very willing to be more aggressive in floor debate, and she has a more clear strategy for public communications than what we’ve had in the caucus before,” says Sen. Graig Meyer, who is from Orange County.
That translates into “probably a more aggressive attempt to use amendments and the rules” to make political points, he says.
That’s played out in a trio of high-profile debates, involving the Senate’s budget bill, a proposed loosening of concealed-weapons laws and on Berger’s “DAVE Act” that would encourage State Auditor Dave Boliek to go after state government inefficiency in the manner of the federal DOGE effort.
Batch’s approach, House Democratic leader Robert Reives says, is about “trying to make sure that a lot of what happens in the building is something that can be absorbed by the average voter.”
The real test — the 2026 election — is still more than a year off.
Batch says the N.C. Democratic Party, under State Chair Anderson Clayton, is working more on building strength at
the municipal level. Finding would-be senators is up to the incumbent leaders.
“I believe it is my job as leader of this caucus to go ahead and recruit some of the best candidates that we possibly have that fit their district, that can win seats,” she says. “That is our job. That’s our responsibility. We have to do the heavy lifting of raising the money and resources in order to put them on television. And that comes at a high price for many of our caucus members who give money to competitive races.”
Indeed, Berger’s secret sauce during his 14-year tenure as the Senate leader is that he’s a champion fundraiser. His campaign committee collected $3.2 million in donations in the last cycle and sent more than $2.5 million to party and caucus groups.
That helped fuel the successful re-election campaigns of Republican Sens. Michael Lee of Wilmington and Lisa Barnes of Nash County, who won in fairly competitive districts. They received $2.3 million and nearly $1.8 million in caucus funding, respectively, according to TransparencyUSA.com.
With the Senate GOP holding the exact two-thirds margin to maintain a veto-proof supermajority, a loss in either race would have changed the political dynamic significantly.
The minority party is always at a disadvantage when it comes to fundraising, and Democratic Senate leader Blue raised only $478,907 in 2024, with $360,900 going to caucus or party groups. Batch, who was one of Blue’s key deputies, raised $443,712 and sent $327,500 of that to the party.
Reives, for comparison, raised $764,253 and dispatched $365,569 to the party. The first finance reports from the new election cycle are due in July.
“What the difference is, in my opinion, that you see with us and Republicans right now is at the end of the day, Republicans understand the assignment,” Reives says. “And the assignment is they’ve got to win seats. The assignment isn’t that they’ve got to, you know, like each other and make everybody happy. They’ve got to win seats. And so they tend to have less wasted motion.”
For his part, Meyer says the Democratic caucus picked Batch specifically to shake things up.
“There definitely were people who supported Sydney for leader because they express things along the lines of, ‘We just have to do something different,’” he says. “They wanted to be more aggressive, or they wanted to try different things. I think that those folks felt like we were at risk of a level of complacency that leaves Democrats being in a permanent minority.” ■
