When I decided to run, truthfully, a lot of what motivated me was plain old frustration. Sure, every office I’ve run for has been on the basis of giving back to a state that believed in me and gave me the opportunities I needed to succeed, and that’s at the heart of this campaign as well. But the decision to run for this seat in this election was in large part motivated by how frustrated I was seeing Democrats in our state lose time and time again.
We’d just come off an election cycle that saw us lose the NC Supreme Court, that saw the Republicans claw their way back to a supermajority, and on a night where Democrats historically held their ground nearly everywhere else in the country, we lost winnable seats in North Carolina. A lot of winnable seats.
But we didn’t lose everywhere, and when I looked at the places where we did succeed, I saw a pattern: I saw candidates like my friends Diamond Staton-Williams and Lindsey Prather and Ray Jeffers, who all joined me in the legislature last year because they worked hard, they had good teams behind them, and most importantly of all, they showed up and ran serious campaigns in places that Democrats have otherwise ignored.
See, the common wisdom when you run for office in North Carolina is that Raleigh and Charlotte are growing and if we just wait long enough and focus our efforts there, eventually we’ll be able to win without even trying. If that sounds like a terrible strategy to you, well, me too. North Carolina has a larger rural population than any other state in the country except Texas, and we can’t ignore those regions and expect to win. Mathematically, we can’t take back the General Assembly or win statewide without rural Democrats.
But honestly, even if we could, it would be wrong to do so. Those folks are our neighbors—heck, I grew up in the rural foothills myself, and I consider myself a proud rural North Carolinian. And rural North Carolinians deserve politicians who will show up and fight for them.
(It also happens to be good politics.)
When I announced for this race a year ago, I told myself that I wanted to change the model for Democrats in our state and show everyone that not only is it good to show up in every corner of North Carolina, it’s necessary. I made a promise that I was going to run a true one-hundred county campaign on the belief that rural North Carolina is not lost to Democrats, but if we want to win it back, we have to start showing up again.
Last week, we saw our first real test of that theory, and I feel pretty damn good about how it went. Over the last year, we’ve done more than 160 public campaign events in every corner of the state, literally from Cherokee and Watauga Counties in the west to Pasquotank and New Hanover Counties in the east. I’ve shown up in places like Cabarrus and Alamance that are slowly moving the needle toward Democrats—but I’ve also made a point of showing up and campaigning hard in places that have moved away from our party, like Columbus and Robeson.
And where we showed up, we did very, very well. We moved the needle.
In fact, in Robeson County—maybe the textbook example of a rural county that has stopped voting for Democrats and that the political consultants are all telling us we should give up on—I got more votes last week than any candidate in any race from any party except Donald Trump. I showed up in Robeson three times during the primary, and you’d better believe you’re going to see more of me there in the general election.
I’ve learned a lot in the last year, but probably the biggest lesson is proof positive that when we show up, we really do win. Together, we are literally changing the electoral map for our party, and in November, I fully believe we can shock the state, flip this seat, and give Democrats in North Carolina a new road map to success. And this is bigger than just one race: if we want to see Josh Stein and Joe Biden win North Carolina this year, we’ve got to run up the margins for Democrats in our rural counties, and my campaign is the only one working to do that right now.
But we can’t do any of it without your support.
Because here’s the thing: our strength can be a double-edged sword. Now that the primary is over, we have the Republican Party’s full and undivided attention, and you’d better believe they’re analyzing our electoral map so they can know exactly where they need to throw the kitchen sink at our campaign.
The good news is that my GOP opponent is an out-of-touch, out-of-state Wall Street guy who’s probably never set foot in Robeson County in his life, if he could even find it on a map. But the bad news is, he casually loaned himself half a million dollars just to win his primary, and I fully believe he wouldn’t even sweat from throwing twice that into his race for the general. When I tell you that we’re going to need an unprecedented war chest just to hit back against his attacks and misinformation, I really do mean it.
But that’s why I really, really need you to step up today if you can. Running a credible race is going to depend more or less entirely on contributions from supporters like you—I may be the candidate, but it’s up to you whether or not I have the resources I need to respond to attacks and get our message out to voters in all one-hundred of our counties. November is closer than you’d think, so can I ask you to please step up and make a contribution of anything you can afford today?
