It was a dark and stormy night, and all across North Carolina, families were huddled together, uncertain about the future.
In Canton, out west, John has been out of work since the mill closed. Now that he and his wife, Sarah, are getting older, they'd hoped that they could at least count on her pension from years as a public school teacher to help get by, but years of timid management of the pension fund have left John and Sarah with less than they'd hoped.
Meanwhile, in Wilmington, out east, Maria is a working mother trying to give her kids a head start. When she moved here in 2023, she'd heard about a new library complex downtown that would have had a planetarium and a museum attached to it—an amazing way to help her children develop an interest in learning. But the project stalled out after the Local Government Commission refused to help the county fund it through a municipal bond.
And in rural Benson, where Arthur has lived his entire life, his kids are helping him pack up his house—he just can't afford the property taxes anymore because of how many folks have moved in to commute to Raleigh. As Wake County has had to pick up more of the state's slack to fund services for residents, property taxes there have skyrocketed and that's rippling out into the less expensive, neighboring counties like Johnston, Chatham, and Harnett.
This is just a ghost story, John, but it could become real all too easily if we don't take our state back next year. In fact, a lot of it's already happening, and will get worse if we don't turn the tide.
And as I reflect on our end-of-month fundraising today, I've got to be honest: flipping the Treasurer's office isn't a guarantee. If we want to make sure that Sarah has the pension she spent a career earning, if we want to make sure that Maria's kids have the resources they need to thrive, if we want to keep Arthur in the house he bought in 1974, then we need to all stand together and put in the work to reach every voter before next November.
Because if we sit idle, the Republicans will win again, and there will be no one to invest in our communities. If you ask me, that's the scariest story of all.
