Hey, John,
If you don’t know me, my name is Grayson Barnette, and I’m Wesley’s campaign manager. I first met Wesley a few years back, when he was running for state legislature – but from the first time I shook his hand, I knew that Wesley Harris was the real deal!
That’s why I’ve spent the last year and some change working closely with Wesley to build out our playbook for flipping the Treasurer’s office and completely changing the map for what winning as a Democrat looks like in our state.
See, something interesting happened on primary night. Wesley performed very well in his home region, the western Piedmont, about in line with his overall, statewide performance of 67% – but his real standout region was the east. All said and done, Wesley got 75% of the vote in Wilson County. 79% in Robeson. 88% in Bladen. 91% in Northampton. And in almost all of those counties, he consolidated a higher percentage of supporters than even Joe Biden, who literally didn’t have an opponent on the ballot!
If you know much about North Carolina’s political geography, you know why that’s such an exciting set of numbers. Twenty years ago, those counties were all some of the most solidly Democratic regions of the state, but election after election, they’ve been slipping away from our party, and we’ve seen that reflected in the primary vote as well as the general election.
Because even if folks out that way aren’t voting for Democrats in November anymore, many of them have been registered with our party for decades, and they aren’t planning on changing that any time soon. That ends up affecting our primaries – you see things like Joe Biden only winning 63% of Democratic voters in Robeson County, where Trump won handily in 2020 even though registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans there three-to-one.
A lot of the out-of-state political strategists think we ought to give up on the east. They see it as irreversibly lost, as incompatible with our party’s modern coalition. But seeing Wesley Harris win Democrats in Robeson by about sixteen more points than Joe Biden tells me that those strategists are wrong! Those voters aren’t gone forever. The east isn’t lost. But the voters out there need candidates they can believe in.
Let me tell you something else about Wesley: since launching this campaign, he’s been to Robeson County three times. In total, he’s done thirty-seven public campaign events out east – with even more scheduled. He’s shown up, in a way that Democrats just haven’t in these parts of the state, at least not in this decade. Because when you show these voters that you aren’t giving up on them, they won’t give up on you.
You’ve got to give people hope. Hope is a great strategy. I believe it’s a winning strategy.
But as Wesley’s campaign manager, I’d be remiss if I didn’t also tell you that it’s an expensive one. Part of the reason Democrats haven’t shown up out east in recent elections is because it’s just harder to reach people in rural communities. They’re critical members of our coalition, but they’re more spread out, and the infrastructure isn’t there to reach them as easily as you can reach urban and suburban voters.
It’s absolutely worth it to try, but the logistics are just harder! Our resources are limited, and it requires a lot of them. TV is harder when you’re hitting at least three different media markets, if not four. Knocking doors is harder when volunteers have to walk two or three minutes just to get between houses. And every event you do is about making the choice between being able to talk to ten voters in Beulaville or fifty in Raleigh.
But we’re committed to our strategy – we’ve got the evidence we need to know that it’ll pay off, we just know we have to work a little harder to fund it. Wesley isn’t giving up on voters in the rural east, and if you aren’t either, then he and I would both be honored if you could contribute $25, $50, or whatever else you can afford today! This race is going to take all of us pitching in, but I know we can do it together.
