Target One for Ending the Republican Super-Majority in the NC Senate

 

Weeks ago the Democratic Minority Leader in the NC Senate, Sydney Batch, identified Lisa Stone Barnes in Senate Dist. 11 (Nash, Franklin, and Vance counties in north-central NC) as the prime target for ending the Republican super-majority in the NC Senate. Batch and other top Democrats, including Associate Justice Anita Earls, were on their way to a campaign roll-out in Rocky Mount to anoint and give their blessings to the Democratic candidate they think can take out Barnes -- mega-church founder James Gailliard, who previously served two terms in the NC House in an overlapping Nash Co. district following the Blue Wave of 2018. 

That was the first time I heard that Barnes was Dems' best shot at flipping a Senate seat and ending the Republican super-majority.

Then, in one of the most bizarre moments during the December candidate-filing period, Barnes's fellow Republican Senator Amy Galey of Alamance traveled north to Rockingham to beg Sheriff Sam Page not to file against Sen. Phil Berger, because (Galey wrote in a several-page letter that became public) if Phil Berger is distracted by a nasty primary, he won't be able to funnel money and other help to three vulnerable Senate Republicans, namely Lisa Stone Barnes (and two others I'll get to presently in subsequent posts). Amy Galey happens to be a Majority Whip in the Senate, a true lieutenant to Phil Berger's president pro tempore. So it's practically Republican establishment gospel -- Lisa Barnes is in trouble.

Which is surprising to this admittedly far-off observer. Barnes has looked like an immovable institution in Nash County. Her husband Johnny Barnes owned and operated the biggest multi-county sweet potato growing operation probably on the East Coast (and incidentally used migrant labor -- a bracero died of heat exhaustion on his farm in 2024). Always well turned out (Republican country club chic) and infallibly attracted to business interests and the connections that come with them, Lisa Barnes rose on civic volunteerism. Her political ambition also asserted itself. She won a seat on the Nash County Commission in 2012, followed in 2018 with beating incumbent Democrat Bobbie Richardson for an NC House seat, the only blue-to-red flip in 2018 in the whole state in what was otherwise a blue wave year. Lisa Stone Barnes was suddenly a genuine Republican princess in the General Assembly.

She spent only two terms in the NC House before she saw an opening to run for the NC Senate in 2020, where she's now in her third term. 

But into every life the rain must fall. First, in late 2024, a Superior Court judge placed Barnes Family Farms Corp. into receivership after it defaulted on $40 million in loans from Rabo AgriFinance, a unit of Netherlands-based Rabobank which specializes in agriculture financing. "The court-appointed receiver takes over the businesses, with wide-ranging duties that include paying utility bills and insurance premiums, obtaining bank and other documents, changing locks and negotiating the sale of assets. The Barnes can’t interfere with the receiver, who is authorized to seek help from the sheriff’s offices in Nash, Edgecombe and Wilson counties."

Then an unkinder cut just six months later. Johnny Barnes died in July 2025. He was only 61.

Despite the heaviness of losing financial and emotional props which might deter most of us, Lisa Stone Barnes showed up on the first day of candidate filing -- December 1st -- to make her run for reelection official and coincidentally become the Number One target for every Democrat in Raleigh and elsewhere in what may turn out to be Blue Wave 2026. She has always projected pro-business moderation while following her Republican crowd to vote for every anti-abortion measure that comes down the pike, but you won't find MAGA spikiness or trumpist braying on any of her social sites. Whether the fines for violating migrant-labor laws charged to Johnny Barnes seriously damage her pro-business image -- that's an open question.

James D. Gailliard (D)

James Gailliard is impressive by several metrics, and he's been running against Barnes since last July. He is the founding pastor of Word Tabernacle Church in Rocky Mount, a genuine megachurch "serving thousands of families from ten North Carolina Counties and six Virginia counties. In 2013, Word Tabernacle was named amongst the 100 fastest growing churches in America." Gailliard is a native of Philadelphia, a graduate of the Central High School for Boys and Morehouse College in Atlanta, where he was an honors student. He worked in corporate America before feeling called to the ministry.

Gailliard's civic volunteerism and leadership are a match to Barnes's. He was named the 2016 Distinguished Citizen by the Rocky Mount Chamber of Commerce, and most recently was recognized with a Lifetime Achievement Award from President Joe Biden. Gailliard is the founder Chair of The REACH Center, Inc.; a member of the Board of Trustees, Elizabeth City State University as well as the Board of Preachers, Morehouse College, his alma mater; and he is the former Chairman of the Board for the North Carolina Legislative Black Caucus Foundation. He was also named to the Board of Visitors at NC Wesleyan College.

He posted on Twitter a sort of apologia for his combination of religious/political activism: "If pastors avoid politics, we aren’t being neutral—we’re being negligent. The Bible speaks to laws, land, labor, and leadership. To ignore policy is to ignore people—and that’s the opposite of shepherding." And only naturally, he started a podcast, Until All Thrive, last July.