North Carolina congresswoman Alma Adams was sitting in a campaign meeting at her headquarters in Greensboro, North Carolina, in early February, planning for what should have been an easy primary win. No Democratic challengers had declared their candidacy in time for the 15 March election. Victory was all but guaranteed.
Before the meeting ended, one of her staffers interrupted with some unexpected news. A panel of three federal judges had ruled that the 12th district’s congressional map – which resembled a serpent slithering across central North Carolina’s cities – was unconstitutional due to racial gerrymandering. The district would need to be redrawn, the judges said. It was a win for racial justice, legal observers said. But the map redrawing that followed – the latest episode in a decades-old legal saga over the district lines – wasn’t a win for voter enfranchisement this election, in this deep blue district where the primary is likely to decide the race.
When state lawmakers two weeks later redrew most of the state’s districts, the 70-year-old black Greensboro lawmaker discovered her home was nearly two hours away from the new Charlotte-centric district.
The odd timing for the 2013 lawsuit’s ruling meant North Carolina’s congressional primary was postponed three months until 7 June – the latest blow in a place where redistricting has long disenfranchised voters. Hundreds of absentee voters had already cast ballots.
Six other candidates who hadn’t filed by the initial deadline joined the rescheduled race, launching attacks that decried Adams as a carpetbagger.
On Tuesday, Adams ultimately won 42% of the vote in a seven-person Democratic primary. As many predicted, the 12th district’s congressional primary, like the rest of the state, saw only 7% of total registered voters head to the polls.
In March, with Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders still competing for the Democratic nomination in North Carolina, 17% of registered voters cast ballots, and broke the record for early voting turnout. By the time of the rescheduled congressional race, it became the primary nobody was watching while Clinton was clinching the Democratic presidential nomination in several other state primaries.
“If I get 10%, I’ll be ecstatic,” Michael Dickerson, the elections director for Mecklenburg County, which includes Charlotte, said before the race. He expects up to 70% voter turnout in November’s presidential election.
Voters didn’t even meet Dickerson’s already-low expectations. Only 37,400 people of 520,000-registered voters cast ballots in both the 12th’s primaries, according to Mecklenburg’s board of elections figures. Because Democrats outnumber Republicans by more than a two-to-one margin in the deep blue district, Adams’ victory this week could very well send her back to Washington DC in 2017. If she’s victorious in the fall, she’ll need to tip her hat to the mere 2% of total registered voters who saved her seat.
“It’s been an unusual series of events,” Adams said. “Residents were very confused about whose district they were in. Sometimes, the end result is that people get discouraged and they don’t bother to vote.”
Adams first joined Congress after two decades in the North Carolina general assembly, while making her living as an arts professor. She won the 12th district seat in 2013 by securing much of the vote outside of Charlotte. The 100th woman elected to Congress, she hustled throughout her freshman term, serving on four congressional committees, and advocating on issues like education and women’s rights.
But the unexpected redistricting shifted the race’s focus from her results to her residency. Adams last April moved to Charlotte’s fourth ward even though North Carolina law doesn’t require members of Congress to live in their elected district. Despite the move, a local television crew filmed Adams stopping by her Greensboro home, later airing a segment that raised questions about whether she actually lived in Charlotte.
Adams’ two biggest challengers, both Mecklenburg County residents long entrenched in local politics, slammed her as a Charlotte carpetbagger. State representative Tricia Cotham, a Democrat from Matthews, published a Facebook post that accused Adams of “intentionally deceiving Mecklenburg County voters” for continuing to live in Greensboro. State senator Malcolm Graham, a Democrat who has lived in Charlotte since 1981, said her last-minute decision to register as a Charlotte voter broke “the spirit of the law” regarding residency requirements for voting registration.
“A house is not a home,” Graham says. “She may have an apartment in Charlotte. But Charlotte is not her home.”
During recent months, Adams said, she had to pull “double duty” in representing her current district in five different counties, which is still in effect through the end of the year, and campaigning hard in the new Mecklenburg-only district.
Ultimately, Adams garnered 42% of the vote, while Graham and Cotham received 29% and 21% of the ballot respectively. At a victory party, Adams credited her win to running a campaign that talked about the issues, rather than slinging mud at her opponents.
“Well, what can I say?” Adams said to her jubilant supporters on Tuesday night, wearing a formal blue hat, one of the 1,022 in her ever-growing collection. “You turned this mother out.”
