RALEIGH, N.C.—”We are so excited about Dave Matthews!”

Cheri Beasley, the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate in North Carolina, is doing her best to rally the party’s base. It’s a Tuesday night in the state capital, and hundreds of college-educated white millennials and Gen Xers are definitely excited to see Dave Matthews perform at this DNC-sponsored event exactly two weeks before the 2022 midterms. (Matthews, 55, is best known for releasing a hit album several weeks before the 1994 midterms.)

The near-capacity crowd grows restless, nursing local IPAs, as the candidate rattles off some talking points about everything “at stake” in this election: abortion rights, climate change, “safe communities.” Whatever that means. (Beasley’s record as state Supreme Court justice and her willingness to associate with radical “defund the police” activists suggests an expansive definition of the term.) Her abbreviated stump speech does not mention inflation but concludes on an inspirational note: “Things can get worse.”

Matthews takes the stage. The multi-multi-millionaire understands these middle-aged professionals and their bespoke anxieties. He rants semi-coherently about Republicans, denouncing their supporters as bigoted freaks. He wonders why we can’t just get along. With great privilege comes tremendous guilt. “I’m doing good, but I don’t want to feel bad about it,” he complains.

The crowd goes wild.

Most Americans have never heard of Cheri Beasley or her GOP opponent, Rep. Ted Budd, a gun-store owner from Davie County outside Winston-Salem first elected in 2016. The two candidates are running to succeed Sen. Richard Burr (R., N.C.), who is retiring after three terms in office. It’s a race that could determine which party controls the U.S. Senate for the second half of President Joe Biden’s first (and probably last) term in office, but the national media aren’t paying attention.

That is almost certainly by design. Both parties nominated generic candidates unlikely to make headlines. No celebrity doctors. No hulking stroke victims in cargo shorts who speak with the coherence of a teenage beauty queen explaining (and embodying) the failures of our education system. No eccentric football legends betraying the black community by running against a Democrat. No 2024 contenders who might disrupt former president Donald Trump’s path to the GOP nomination.

Beasley is not a self-appointed media darling like Stacey Abrams. Budd was attacked by the Lincoln Project for neglecting “the people of Wisconsin.” He does not provoke national journalists and other Democratic activists into fits of convulsive rage