1. Buncombe County state Senator Terry Van Duyn, who came in second in the crowded Democratic primary field for lieutenant governor, has announced that she won't request a run-off against state House representative Yvonne Holley of Wake County, who came in first but failed to get the 30% to avoid a run-off. Five strong and diverse candidates ran in that primary and fragmented the vote accordingly.
Getting to know Holley, I crib this profile from PamsPicks.net (minus all the active links):
Holley announced her candidacy on February 27, 2019. She’s a Baby Boomer born in 1952. She grew up in Wake County, was a front-line elementary student in the desegregation of the Raleigh school system, excelled and went to Howard University. She spent her entire working career in state government, retiring as a state procurement and contract agent. She ran for and easily won her seat in the NC House (District 38) in 2012 and has never gotten less than 79.9% of the vote in any of her reelections.
Holley has not been “a mover and a shaker” in the House. She represents an older style of politician — reverent of institutions, a calming presence, standing respectfully but with a spine made of hardened steel. She’s very much in the moderate tradition of her father, J.D. Lewis, the first African-American TV broadcaster in the Raleigh/Durham market and Director of Minority Affairs for WRAL-TV (which had also been the editorial home until 1972 of one Jesse Helms). J.D. Lewis “is remembered today as having contributed significantly to the positive dialogue between polarized sectors during an epic time in the nation’s history” (Holley’s website).
Her Campaign: Holley states a platform of affordable housing, economic development, food security, reliable public transportation, and strong support for public education. She offers a too barebones website (which unaccountably doesn’t provide links to her Facebook and Twitter accounts), but she makes a good video impression and should do more.
2. Last Saturday at the Watauga County Republican Party convention, Karen Lerch resigned as chair of the Watauga GOP one year into her two-year term. The resignation appears to have come as a surprise to the party. She announced her resignation "at the end of the event," and the vice chair, Melissa Searcy, did not take over the chairmanship:
Nathan Miller, N.C. GOP Fifth District representative, said that at the March meeting of the Watauga County Republican Party, people can send their nominees to the party’s executive committee, then they will likely be voted on. Miller said that depending on the “executive committee’s prerogative,” the final vote could be held off until April. (Watauga Democrat)
Judging from the report in the local newspaper, the Watauga GOP will be making a major push for the AppState student vote: "John Moncrieff, president of the ASU chapter of Turning Point USA, said that most college students are apolitical and that the Republicans need to reach out to them. Moncfieff also that he and his group will hit ASU hard with 'Trump flags everywhere' in the next year."
Trump flags everywhere. Yeah. That'll do the trick.
Turning Point USA, incidentally, is a far right org aimed at turning the mushy heads of college students toward the charms of fossil fuels and the National Rifle Association. The Anti-Defamation League refers to it as an "alt-lite" organization. Its leaders mainly operate by stirring up outrage at "liberal excesses" like Black Lives Matter and #metoo.
3.Have you heard? Trump continues to twist the knife in poor Jeff Sessions' back. Trump has endorsed Tommy Tuberville for the US Senate in the upcoming Republican senatorial primary run-off in Alabama. Tuberville finished first in the primary with 33.4% of the vote to Sessions' 31.6%. They're both vying for the nomination to face Democratic Senator Doug Jones.
Poor Sessions! He's been reassuring Alabamians that he's a loyal Trumpist even while Trump continues to disdain him. Just how much groveling are Republicans willing to do in the autocracy they've created?
Incumbent Democrat Terry Van Duyn is stepping down to run in the March primary for lieutenant governor. The most recent redistricting reduced Republican voting strength in District 49 even more than it was already, so it's rated "Likely Democratic." The primary between three Democratic contenders will likely decide who ultimately takes the seat, though there is a Republican in the race (see below).
Democrat Julie Mayfield might justifiably take the honors of "frontrunner." She declared her candidacy almost a year ago -- last March. She's a 53-year-old Gen-X-er born in 1967 andsince 2015 a member of the Asheville City Council and one of the foremost leaders of MountainTrue, an environmental advocacy nonprofit. She helped co-found MountainTrue in 2015, the same year she made it to the city council. MountainTrue was a merger of environmental advocacy groups in Henderson, Jackson, and Macon counties and has become the official home for both the French Broad Riverkeeper and the Watauga Riverkeeper.
Julie Mayfield got her law degree from Emory University in 1996, which apparently fueled an inherent gene for pro bono and public good advocacy. She directed the Turner Environmental Law Clinic at Emory University School of Law where she represented environmental groups, civic associations, and individuals in public interest environmental law cases. From 2003 to early 2008, she was Vice President and General Counsel for the Georgia Conservancy. She arrived in Asheville in 2008 and by 2011 she was appointed by Governor Bev Perdue to the Mountain Resources Commission, where she served until the legislature dissolved the Commission in 2013. She also served on the North Carolina Conservation Network board for six years, chairing it for two.
On the Asheville City Council, she's pushed a new program for down-payment assistance for prospective homeowners and she's shown a commendible curiosity about how the Tourism Development Authority spends tourism tax revenues. Prior to MountainTrue, Mayfield worked for Amnesty International USA and for the Atlanta Community Food Bank and for the Georgia Justice Project. She advocated for people caught up sometimes in a meat-grinder of law enforcement, which accounts for Mayfield's active participation in rewriting the use-of-force rules for the Asheville City Police, a policy-rewrite that Mayfield says has led to a 61% reduction in use-of-force incidents.
She's been endorsed, incidentally, by Terry Van Duyn.
Democrat Travis Smith is a 36-year-old millennial who was born in Canada, immigrated here 11 years ago, and presumably became a citizen, but I can find no evidence that he's ever voted in any election including in the 2016 presidential year when he said he phonebanked for Bernie Sanders. He works as an IT consultant for Salesforce.com.
Here's his introductory video message:
Democrat Ben Scales is a 55-year-old baby boomer born in 1964. He also announced his candidacy in March of 2019. Like Mayfield, Scales is also a lawyer and has run unsuccessfully twice for Buncombe district attorney, once as an unaffiliated candidate. Scales came out early for the legalization of marijuana and staked out other progressive positions: "Health care is a right, climate change needs rapid solutions now, education is for everyone, gender is a spectrum, immigrants are welcome, domestic violence won’t be tolerated, women are equal, agriculture and innovation is vital, elections should be fair and voter registration automatic, the cash bail system, mass incarceration and the war on drugs must end."
He says that "As an attorney, he has represented the underrepresented, often pro bono, such as protestors and activists associated with Occupy Asheville, Asheville Black Lives Matter, Southerners On New Ground, and Veterans for Peace." He's been particularly active as an attorney for victims of domestic violence. He's a do-gooder in the venerable Democratic tradition and apparently a pretty decent guitarist.
Republican Bob Penland is a 77-year-old resident of Candler, NC, who was born in 1942 at the tail-end of the Silent Generation. He has no campaign infrastructure whatsoever that we can find, and hence no accessible biography.
One of the crowded Democratic primary races in North Carolina next March will be the contest for lieutenant governor. There are five declared candidates already, profiled below, with more very possible once the filing period opens in December.
..........
Terry Van Duyn, a state senator (District 49, Buncombe County) since 2014, was the first Democrat into this race, announcing back on December 10, 2018. She's a boomer, born in 1952, and one of three boomers in this primary (pitted against two millennial black men -- see below). Van Duyn grew up in Chicago, earned a degree in economics from the University of Illinois, and moved to Asheville with her husband and two children in 1992. She became a schools activist as well as a political organizer. She was appointed to her Senate seat following the death of Senator Martin Nesbitt and was elected minority whip in her first term. She was last reelected in 2018 with over 63% of the vote. In March of this year she introduced the act whereby North Carolina would ratify the dormant Equal Rights Amendment, an initiative which Senate President Phil Berger immediately consigned to death by strangulation in the Rules Committee. Her endorsements (touted on her website) include State Auditor Beth Woods and former Attorney General Rufus Edmisten, and I can't help supposing that she's the anointed one among the Democratic Party establishment, based on her status in the senate. But despite an obvious head start for networking prominent Democratic Party leaders across the state, she had been out-raised by fellow candidate Bill Toole by July (see below). From the evidence posted on her Facebook page, she seems to be getting around the state a little more energetically than her rivals for the nomination.
Her Campaign
While the Lieutenant Governor of North Carolina doesn't deliver the mail, or much of anything else, the office can be a steppingstone to something more dynamic. Van Duyn's website is perhaps the most completely built-out of any of her rivals, though when I last visited, there were broken buttons on the homepage. Since the lieutenant governor is primarily a way-station for politicians headed on up, she's got to convince Democratic voters that she's a good bet for governor down the line. A strong video presence will help that impression.
..........
Yvonne Lewis Holley announced her candidacy on February 27, 2019. She's a boomer also born in 1952. She grew up in Wake County, was a front-line elementary student in the desegregation of the Raleigh school system, excelled and went to Howard University. She spent her entire working career in state government, retiring as a state procurement and contract agent. She ran for and easily won her seat in the NC House (majority-black District 38) in 2012 and has never gotten less than 79.9% of the vote in any of her reelections. She's not been "a mover and a shaker" in the House. She represents an older style of black politician -- reverent of institutions, a calming presence, standing respectfully but with a spine made of hardened steel. She's very much in the moderate tradition of her father, J.D. Lewis, the first African-American TV broadcaster in the Raleigh/Durham market and Director of Minority Affairs for WRAL-TV (which had also been the editorial home until 1972 of one Jesse Helms). J.D. Lewis "is remembered today as having contributed significantly to the positive dialogue between polarized sectors during an epic time in the nation’s history" (Holley's website).
Her Campaign
Holley has a too barebones website (which unaccountably doesn't provide links to her Facebook and Twitter accounts), but she makes a good video impression and should do more:
Allen Thomas Jr. announced his candidacy on March 5, 2019. He was elected to the Hoke County Commission (Raeford) in 2014, the youngest at the time ever elected in that county, and he was reelected to another four-year term in 2018. A millennial born in 1987, he emphasizes his toughness, his fighting spirit, and attributes it to a hard-knocks upbringing by an elementary schoolteacher mother and a drug-addicted father. While Thomas was a student at East Carolina University in 2008, his father became a fugitive from the brutal stabbing death of his mother, which became a life passage for Allen Thomas that few have experienced and fewer still have successfully navigated. Thomas rose above the tragedy and has clearly determined to do good in this world. After his mother's murder he chose to go public about domestic violence and work with communities to prevent it. He earns his living as a youth counselor for the NC Department of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. As a county commissioner and following Hurricane Matthew, Thomas successfully advocated to allocate $100,000 of county funds to go to food vouchers for victims while the federal government diddled for weeks to approve disaster food stamp benefits. He became locally famous in Pitt County soon after his announcement of candidacy last March when he held off multiple home-invaders (they may have been squatters he surprised in the act) in a second residence he leases in Greenville. The details were covered by the Fayetteville Observer. Thomas recorded the entire event on his cell phone, which he shared with the reporter. Makes for good reading!
His Campaign
Thomas announces on his website a statewide "car giveaway" campaign to provide affordable transportation to the working poor who often can't get jobs because they lack a vehicle. "Thomas grew up in a home with one car. He remembers waiting for his father to return home so that he could go to his little league baseball game. Tears rolled down his face as he realized that he would miss the game because he didn’t have transportation" (Thomas website). It's an interesting gimmick because it does help individual people but also shines a light on "the many issues facing everyday people." So far the Thomas campaign is mighty thin on social media. He has a Facebook page but no Twitter. He has a long way to go to catch up with his better known competitors. For example, for much of the bio sketched above, I had to dig deep into secondary sources because his official bio omits most of it.
..........
Bill Toole, until recently a Charlotte environmental lawyer with Robinson Bradshaw Hinson -- he took a leave from his firm and announced on March 14, 2019. He's another boomer, born in 1959. He grew up in Winston-Salem, earned his law degree at Wake Forest, and served a term as city councillor in Belmont, a Gaston County suburb of Charlotte, from 2009-2013. He was also the chair of the Gaston County Democratic Party. Not surprisingly, environmental protections are high on his priority list, and he may be unique among lieutenant governor candidates for talking about the crisis of global climate change. Also the rare candidate for publicly advocating for the legalization of cannabis. He touts himself as "the progressive" in the race, a bold claim meant to negatively define Terry Van Duyn. In July Toole was leading the pack on fundraising -- $308,331, although $100,000 of that was a loan from the candidate himself. He became prominent while fighting the "corruption" behind a proposed toll road in Gaston County, which he describes in this video:
His Campaign
Toole has been running the most aggressive social media campaign of all the candidates I've surveyed, with a very active Facebook page, peppered with video, and a Twitter account. He's got the money to break open statewide, getting his name known widely, which is what it will take since the lieutenant governor doesn't really have a policy constituency (as such).
..........
Chaz Beasley announced his candidacy on March 21, 2019. A millennial lawyer trained at Harvard and Georgetown Law School, Beasley became a success in Charlotte with the Alston and Bird law firm in the high-octane world of finance and debt management for corporations and financial institutions. He's serving his second term in the NC House, representing the south Mecklenburg District 92. He's originally from our neck of the woods. He was raised by a single mother in Alexander and Catawba counties, graduated from Newton-Conover High School as valedictorian.
The office of Lieutenant Governor is notoriously un-demanding, so the Beasley academic brilliance might be more enervated than energized by the office. Beasley is running on steppingstone ideas: "...expanding affordable health care and working to create more high quality jobs." Etc. Standard Democratic boilerplate. He did introduce and was chief sponsor for HB393, "Modernizing Sexual Assault Laws," which makes it illegal to tamper with someone’s drink or to have sex with an incapacitated person even if the person was responsible for causing that condition. It passed the House unanimously -- a feather in the Beasley hat. Beasley's reforms eventually passed the Senate too this year, after getting importantly expanded in scope. Governor Cooper signed the omnibus bill into law on Halloween as "The Right to Revoke Consent and Modernizing Sexual Assault Laws." Beasley has also been the lead sponsor on the complete repeal of HB2, and he's introduced bills on workforce rights and affordable housing finance. He's reform-minded, no doubt about it, which might productively become the identity of his candidacy. He has his eye on the jail bond industry and introduced a bill to investigate how it operates and at whose expense.
His Campaign
Beasley has both Twitter and Facebook, but neither contributes much to an impression of the candidate. While upping his game on social media, he needs a video presence. When he gets on camera, why not build the persona of a millennial reformer who's had success but still must fight hard against hostile forces and age-old inertia? Lieutenant Governor is a vanilla job, but you don't have to be a vanilla candidate to get there.
NC Senator Terry Van Duyn is not running again in 2020 for her Senate seat (District 49) because she's running for Lieutenant Governor. District 49 is considered "strong Democratic." It covers all but the southernmost portion of Buncombe County and most of Asheville. It's a prime opportunity for the right Democrat to join the circus in Raleigh. So you can expect a rush of contenders.
The right Democrat may well be Julie Mayfield, since 2015 a member of the Asheville City Council and one of the foremost leaders of MountainTrue, an environmental advocacy nonprofit. She helped co-found MountainTrue in 2015, the same year she made it to the City Council. MountainTrue was a merger of environmental advocacy groups in Henderson, Jackson, and Macon counties and has become the official home for both the French Broad Riverkeeper and the Watauga Riverkeeper.
Julie Mayfield got her law degree from Emory University in 1996, which apparently fueled an inherent gene for pro bono and public good advocacy. She directed the Turner Environmental Law Clinic at Emory University School of Law where she represented environmental groups, civic associations, and individuals in public interest environmental law cases. From 2003 to early 2008, she was Vice President and General Counsel for the Georgia Conservancy. She arrived in Asheville in 2008 and by 2011 she was appointed by Governor Bev Perdue to the Mountain Resources Commission, where she served until the legislature dissolved the Commission in 2013. She also served on the North Carolina Conservation Network board for six years, chairing it for two.
Most recently, MountainTrue came out strong against the petition by the Town of Beech Mountain to the Army Corps of Engineers to be allowed to hoard more water from Beech Creek: "Instead of fixing their leaky water pipes, the Town of Beech Mountain is trying to get the Army Corps of Engineers to change the permit that determines how much water it is required to release from its Buckeye Reservoir to support stream life downstream in Beech Creek." Bad municipal infrastructure shouldn't take it out on Mother Nature.
MountainTrue looks financially healthy. It's now offering grants to "kids, teens and families" all over the mountain region who'll be actively engaged in "policy and project advocacy, outreach, and education, and on the ground projects." It intends to feed the grassroots of environmental activism and make a difference. I take that as the stamp of Julie Mayfield's character.
On the Asheville City Council, she's pushed a new program for down-payment assistance for prospective homeowners and she's shown a commendible curiosity about how the Tourism Development Authority spends tourism tax revenues.
From the article about her announcement of candidacy in March of this year: Prior to MountainTrue, Mayfield worked for Amnesty International USA and for the Atlanta Community Food Bank and for the Georgia Justice Project. She advocated for people caught up sometimes in a meat-grinder of law enforcement, which accounts for Mayfield's active participation in rewriting the use-of-force rules for the Asheville City Police, a policy-rewrite that Mayfield says has led to a 61% reduction in use-of-force incidents.
Mayfield Not the Only Democrat Already Running
Ben Scales beat Mayfield's announcement last March by a single day. Scales is also a lawyer and has run unsuccessfully twice for Buncombe district attorney, once as an unaffiliated candidate. Scales came out immediately for the legalization of marijuana and staked out other progressive positions:
"Health care is a right, climate change needs rapid solutions now, education is for everyone, gender is a spectrum, immigrants are welcome, domestic violence won’t be tolerated, women are equal, agriculture and innovation is vital, elections should be fair and voter registration automatic, the cash bail system, mass incarceration and the war on drugs must end."
Remember the late March scandal when the wife of the youngest member of the NC General Assembly from Transylvania County had to take out a protective order against her abusive husband? Ben Scales was the lawyer who helped the wife win that protective order.
There are now two Democratic candidates who'll be running for NC Lt. Gov., and there'll probably be more before we get to December 2, 2019, the opening of filing for the 2020 general elections.
First, Cal Cunningham. And now Terry Van Duyn. She's currently Democratic Whip in the NC Senate, representing Buncombe County.
J.W. Williamson was the founding editor in 1972 of the Appalachian Journal: A Regional Studies Review, which he edited until July of 2000. He has taught college classes in Appalachian history, cultural politics, and literature, and he has lectured widely on the pop-culture history of "Appalachia" in the American consciousness. His books include Interviewing Appalachia, Southern Mountaineers in Silent Films, and Hillbillyland: What the Mountains Did to the Movies and What the Movies Did to the Mountains. He has won the Thomas Wolfe Award given by the Western North Carolina Historical Society, the Laurel Leaves Award given by the Appalachian Consortium, a special Weatherford Award given by Berea College, and the Cratis Williams-James Brown Award given by the Appalachian Studies Association.
The views expressed on WataugaWatch are solely those of J.W. Williamson or individual contributors and are not necessarily shared nor endorsed by the Watauga County Democratic Party nor by any other adults of sound mind in this or any other universe.
