Brian Murphy, News & Observer – It was just a year ago that Erica Smith lost her bid for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate. Of course, it was a year that felt at times like a decade. That was before the coronavirus pandemic, before the killings of several Black Americans led to a summer and more of social unrest and ongoing racial reckoning, before the male Democrat who had defeated Smith saddled himself with a sex scandal and lost in the general election, before a Black clergy member won a Senate seat from a Southern state and helped Democrats take the majority in the chamber.

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