After Democrats gained a 5-4 majority on the Wake County School Board in a high-stakes election, Mack Paul, who chaired the Wake Democratic Party through the 2011 election cycle has a reason to step into the spotlight for once and take a bow.
Paul took over the Wake Democratic Party in September 2010, then managed the party’s efforts in local elections. He played a large role in raising more than $120,000 for Democratic candidates in the school board race.
Now he has announced that he will resign effective Dec. 31, to spend more time with his family and returning to his legal work – and eventually to join in the statewide and presidential campaigns next year.
“What we tried to do this year was really use the party as a tool to maximize the turn-out without trying to inject a lot of messaging and party rhetoric into the discussion,” Paul said in a recent interview. “We were more or less quietly building this ground game of voter contact and door-to-door canvassing.”
The county school board had made national headlines by the efforts of a 5-4 Republican majority to overturn the student-assignments policy for the largest school system in the state that had emphasized diversity in enrollment and preventing the creation of high-poverty schools.
The decades-old system favored maintaining school enrollment of diverse socio-economic backgrounds, but complaints from the families about too much shuffling of students from school to school and about daily bus rides for students out of their neighborhoods led to an overhaul.
A revised system will put more weight on proximity, and the board, with a new Democratic majority, will be responsible for hammering out all the details.
“I’m optimistic that the group that we have in there will be effective, will be humble about how they approach this, and that they listen to all constituents and that they don’t try to take us with a pendulum swing in the other direction,” said Paul.
Typically only about 10 percent of the eligible voting-age population makes it to the polls for school board elections. But this year, about 20 percent cast ballots in the Wake County school board elections, and 30 percent voted in the district run-off that decided which party would emerge with a majority. Paul believes part of the reason for the unusually high turnout came down to reminding voters about the turmoil on the school board over the past two years.
“It was easy enough just to remind them of the disarray and the conflict and the name-calling,” he said.
Throughout the election, Paul, 48, said he focused on rallying support for Democratic candidates by honing in on the fund-raising efforts. Paul called potential donors and led the 600 volunteers who worked on the campaigns. He and other party leaders helped groom the largely untrained Democratic candidates by hiring five professional field organizers, a communications specialist and a professional fund-raiser.
Paul, a reserved and soft-spoken real estate and environmental attorney, somehow managed a demanding schedule with the K & L Gates firm along with the nearly around-the-clock campaigning that came with the school board race. And even though he says politics can be “a pain in the butt,” he has deep roots to it.
Paul’s dad started out as a local reporter in Raleigh, but the family moved when he was a young boy to the Washington D.C. area, where his dad worked for a North Carolina congressman, and his mom spent some time working on Capitol Hill. Even though Washington is a mecca for attorneys and political activists like Paul, he decided on returning to Raleigh after graduating from Columbia University law school.
Over the years, he worked in several campaigns in North Carolina: for example, Al Gore’s 1988 candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination and Jim Hunt’s campaign for governor in 1992. He was an ally of former Raleigh Mayor Charles Meeker. And Paul served as chief of staff to former Lt. Governor Dennis Wicker.
“I’m more interested in local government, planning, transportation, architecture, design…and urban issues,” he said. “That’s what I really love. But having a background in education did help me in understanding these issues about what was going on in Wake County schools.”
At one point, Paul worked in Cameroon to revamp teacher training colleges through a program at the University of Southern California. He jokes now about how he “accidentally” got his Master’s in Education because of his time in Africa, but he also fell in love with his professor’s daughter while over there – and they have been married for 21 years now.
Besides Paul’s parents, his political ties are now rubbing off on his own family. He has two daughters, 14 and 16, and the older daughter protested when Wake County school board overturned the assignments policy.
An ironic arms race between the Democrats and Republicans ensued in the officially non-partisan elections, leading to record-breaking amounts of money raised and a run-off election marked with mud-slinging.
This story was reported for the 253 Reporting class at UNC’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
