Update: After this story published, Allam issued a statement conceding the race and her campaign confirmed she is no longer seeking a recount.
When Durham County Commissioner Nida Allam finally took the stage around midnight at an election night party at the Fruit in Durham, her supporters had spent hours eagerly waiting for a result that never came.
Incumbent Rep. Valerie Foushee had taken an early edge around 8:30 p.m. when results from early voting and mail-in ballots were posted. As Orange, Chatham, and Durham counties reported votes over the next three hours, The New York Times website (projected onto the big screen at the Fruit) showed Foushee’s purple bar still slightly outpacing Allam’s teal.
Around 10 p.m. a representative for the People’s Alliance, the Durham PAC that cohosted the watch party, took to the stage to declare victory in several downballot races. The DJ went home to walk the dog. Reporters started getting restless.
Finally, by 11:45 p.m., only Wake County still had a few precincts to report. And Allam’s path to victory seemed to have all but closed. When all precincts reported results, Foushee had 61,537 votes to Allam’s 60,335.
“What a night, y’all,” Allam said from the stage.
As expected, Foushee won Orange County while Allam won Durham County. Voters in the portion of the district that lies in Chatham County favored Foushee, while voters in Wake County went for Allam.
With the vote difference falling within the 1% margin, Allam said she would be exercising her right to call for a recount. As Allam spoke, Foushee’s team sent out a brief press release from her private watch party in Hillsborough, thanking her constituents for giving her a third term.
That recount—pending provisional and overseas military ballots—will be officially announced in the coming days. But 1,200 votes is a lot to make up in a recount.
For Foushee, even a slim victory over Allam is something of a vindication—she beat Allam in a race for the same seat four years ago, and Allam has argued that Foushee would not have won if outside groups had not spent millions to back her. This year, the candidates received roughly equal amounts of outside support, albeit from very different sources.
Foushee has served at nearly every level of local government since her first election to the Orange County school board in 1997. That deep experience, and her willingness to put her head down and do the work, made up the backbone of her pitch to voters.
“Nobody else has the experience, nobody else has developed the relationships, nobody else knows this district better than me,” she told the INDY in a December interview.
While Allam dominated the campaign conversation on social media, Foushee sold herself as a background operator who wasn’t interested in self-promotion. “My goal is to be successful in achieving the goals of the district, and so I have developed a way of doing that that may not get me noticed by the media, because you don’t see me standing on steps with a microphone or megaphone.”
Nationally, Foushee’s reelection deals a blow to the David Hogg-, Bernie Sanders-, and Zohran Mamdani-affiliated wings of the party. Hogg’s organization, Leaders We Deserve, and others that are dedicated to electing younger, more outspoken Democrats, spent over $600,000 to support Allam. A group of Mamdani supporters spent over $1 million on ads and mailers for her as well. And in February, Sanders stopped by a packed Durham convention center to stump for Allam.
Since 2022, advocates in the district, including Allam, have sharply criticized Foushee for her support of Israel even as her messaging slowly moved away from that support and toward expressing concern for the people of Gaza and she swore off money from her largest pro-Israel supporter.
Foushee, like most politicians, receives campaign donations from a variety of PACs affiliated with corporations and interest groups. Allam, who has rejected corporate support, contrasted Foushee’s funding to her own Sanders-style messaging around holding corporations accountable. Last week, Allam’s campaign was handed more ammunition when a PAC associated with Anthropic, one of the country’s largest AI companies, spent $1.6 million on Foushee.
Allam’s outside donors this year spent over $2 million on advertisements across TV, radio, social media, and mailers. The two had roughly the same amount of outside support.
Both Allam and Foushee are progressives, and their voting records in Congress would look very similar. Foushee gambled that, in the second Trump administration, Democratic voters would stick with a proven leader rather than a younger candidate who tends to be more vocal on social media. Allam argued that Democratic voters want to see a representative who is more willing to push back against Trump. When federal enforcement agents showed up in the Triangle last fall, Allam filmed agents, posted on social media, and held a press conference at the county courthouse.
That difference in style was apparent most recently in their approach to an unpopular proposal for a data center in Western Wake County. Allam quickly came out in support of Sanders’ national data center moratorium, and her campaign helped circulate a letter from residents that asked candidates to reject funding from tech companies.
Foushee initially said that it was a local zoning decision and would be up to the Apex Town Council. She later clarified that she was against the data center but did “not want to be a thorn in the side of town council members and mayors.”
In a December interview, Foushee described her political career as part of her belief in public service: “Seeing a need, and wanting to give back to a village, a community, that had given to me.”
And even in the era of social media trends and outrage farming, she said that she would stick to her own tried-and-true style of service.
“I am grateful to have had the opportunity to serve,” Foushee said at a final campaign stop in Durham over the weekend. “I serve because I was ordained to serve. Make no mistake about it, this is not something I do for performance. It is not something I do because it’s flashy.”
Results are unofficial until certified.
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