On Saturday, I was out knocking doors in my hometown of Taylorsville. Homecoming is always an emotional experience, and this was no exception. I ran into an old favorite teacher of mine who was out volunteering for the Democratic Party alongside me. I knocked on doors where the folks who lived there knew exactly who I was because I was Gayle and Denise’s boy. At one point, I went up to an older fellow I didn’t know who was selling things in a parking lot and he told me, “I’m a Republican, but I ain’t voting for Trump!”
Leave it to Alexander County to restore my faith in democracy, right?
Taylorsville isn’t exactly a bastion of Democratic strength, or even one of the swingy suburban counties that our party has started winning over the last six years. In fact, more than 78% of Alexander County voters chose Donald Trump in 2020—and even then, only about 20,000 people voted in the whole county. Most of the other campaigns on your ballot aren’t bothering with somewhere like Taylorsville.
But I am, because there are people there, and they matter.
On the one hand, when you’re running statewide, a vote for Democrats in Taylorsville is worth just as much as a vote for Democrats in Raleigh. But more importantly, red or blue isn’t baked into a county’s soil. Democrats have lost ground in our rural counties because we stopped showing up and we stopped giving the people here a reason to believe in us. The formula to taking our state back and being able to reliably win North Carolina again doesn’t pencil out if we don’t put up better margins in Republican areas.
And you can’t complete something if you never start it.
We’re one week from election day, and there are a lot of reasons why it’s so important for our party to take back the Treasurer’s office. We need a Treasurer who will stand up for our retirees and state employees, who won’t play politics with the Local Government Commission, and will fight to use our tax dollars to help ordinary people. But it’s also about a lot more than that. It’s about showing our party a path forward.
If we win, it means our strategy works, and it means we can get future campaigns on board with it. It means we can start building a party that understands we have to show up in rural communities because our party will be able to see that it’s the right thing to do—both morally and in terms of strategy. And that's the ballgame. That’s the light at the end of the tunnel.
Taking the majority in the legislature and on the Council of State runs through rural North Carolina, and when we flip the Treasurer’s office, we’ll show everyone the way.
But to make that happen, I need your support. There is one week left, and vanishingly little time to get our message out and make our voices heard. Anything you can give will help us mobilize and reach every community ahead of election day—and when we reach every community, we’ll win.
