Along with updating his website to promote online petitions, Democratic candidate for Secretary of State Terrence Davis needs to redo his website banner, because right now, he’s just a cartoon:
Come on, Terrence! You have that cool picture of your real self looking all studly and Secretarial, and you lead with a cartoon rendering of your face?
If you’re out to beat sitting Secretary Monae Johnson, you have to say at every turn, “She’s the cartoon; I’m the real deal!”
A cartoon banner suggests that the candidate may not be the real deal. In this case, so does the candidate’s university. As Bluestem Prairie notices in South Dakota Searchlight’s reporting, and as Davis himself reports on his campaign Facebook profile, Davis is pursuing a doctoral degree in law and policy from that hotbed of Falwellian theocracy Liberty University. Between his Facebook and campaign website, Davis indicates he pursued a master’s degree in public policy through Liberty University.
Liberty University participated alongside rightwing Hillsdale College in launching Project 2025, the Trump playbook for carpet-bombing America’s civic institutions back into Puritan Christian nationalism. Davis can’t be active in Democratic activities on campus: in 2009, Liberty University banned students’ Democratic Party club, saying the Democratic Party “stands against the moral principles held by” the school.
Davis is studying government at Liberty’s Helms School of Government, named for Senator Jesse Helms, an unrepentant racist who didn’t cotton to people of Davis’s color voting, let alone running for office. Davis’s doctoral coursework includes PLCY 703: Contemporary Challenges to Constitutional Order and the Role of the State, which introduces students to “a Biblical model of statesmanship” to “guide… in the finer points of public policy formulation.” (I’m sure Monae reads her Bible a lot, and all that Biblizing hasn’t made her a more effective formulator or executor of public policy.)
Hmmm… maybe Davis’s enrollment at a racist Christian Nationalist university is just a deep cover operation, like BlacKkKlansman. Maybe his studies amidst the theocrats show his ability to persevere through the suppression of his humanity. Maybe since Davis is studying online, his Helms profs don’t even know he’s black.
Or maybe Davis’s association with some of the most dogged theocratic Trump supporters explains why he’s spouting some of the election-integrity lines that helped Monae Johnson secure her nomination from the Trumpist election-denying wingnuts in 2022.
So maybe that cartoon logo tells us more than we think. Considering Davis’s connection to Liberty University, I have to wonder: are we seeing the real Democratic candidate for Secretary of State? Or is Liberty University not seeing the real Democrat in their midst?