At 10:30 a.m. on a warm October day, Reeves Peeler is greeting early voters at Chavis Park Community Center.
Peeler and his volunteers have spent the past few months canvassing Raleigh, knocking on about 10,000 doors and speaking to an estimated 15,000 people. Now, in the final days of the campaign, he’s logging several hours at the polls each day, trying to intercept as many voters as possible.
He’s betting that the grassroots strategy will buoy him—a progressive community organizer with a year on the Raleigh Planning Commission under his belt—to victory in a field of five opponents, including two popular incumbents.
Armed with a stack of black-and-red flyers, Peeler, 38, stakes out a spot on the sidewalk near the entrance to the polling site. He’s pinned a campaign button to the front of his pale blue shirt and cuffed the sleeves above his elbows. Turnout is a bit slow this morning, and no line has formed outside—just a steady trickle of people making their way down the path one by one, every couple minutes. As they pass, Peeler offers them a flyer and a handshake.
“Hey sir, I’m Reeves, I’m running for Raleigh City Council,” Peeler says as an older man approaches. Peeler’s voice is deep and Southern-accented. The man stops.
“Reeves benefits a lot from being a good old boy from Raleigh,” quips Michael Altman, Peeler’s campaign manager and a sophomore at NC State University, who is watching the interaction. “Just because of his identity, voters are going to listen to what he has to say.”
Peeler’s strategy to oust either Jonathan Lambert-Melton or Stormie Forte—the sitting at-large council members—hinges on his ability to appeal to many different audiences.
He can work the “good old boy” angle to his advantage when it suits him, finding common ground with affluent, home-owning Raleighites who share his distrust of big developers and unchecked urban growth.
But Peeler’s core base of support is working-class residents, renters, and young voters. The central focus of his campaign is housing affordability and tenants’ rights. He’s spoken about the need for municipal campaign finance reform, fare-free public transit, and raising city workers’ pay. And he supports adopting a Gaza ceasefire resolution, a litmus test for many in Raleigh’s pro-Palestinian activist community.
At Chavis Park, Altman and I sit down on a nearby bench and watch Peeler do his thing with the voters. Some rebuff him, walking past as if he’s not even there. Others accept his flyer with a tight-lipped smile, never breaking their stride. Many are friendly and seem pleasantly surprised to be meeting the candidate face-to-face. A select few engage Peeler in conversation, election-related and otherwise.
“Have you ever watched Scandal?” one woman asks him. He shakes his head, he hasn’t.
“You look like the president!” she tells him. Altman and I burst out laughing, because it’s kind of true. Peeler, looking confused and mildly embarrassed, redirects the conversation to the election.
More than one member of Peeler’s pickup soccer league, the Raleigh Rockers, stop by to cast their ballots. Peeler greets them enthusiastically and tells them he’s excited to get back to playing soccer when the campaign ends.
Other conversations are more substantive. Peeler tells voters he wants to create more housing in Raleigh that regular people can afford—something he says he’d accomplish by adding new zoning rules that prevent teardowns of existing affordable properties and limit short-term rental housing, like AirBnbs, in high-demand areas. He also wants to create a tenant advisory board, which would make recommendations to council on zoning issues that affect renters.
Most of all, Peeler promises to make big, corporate developers build more affordable housing in Raleigh. State law limits the city’s power to do this—it cannot add affordability requirements to the zoning code or impose rent control measures—but Peeler says as a council member, he would lobby the general assembly to change that.
In between sidebars with voters, Peeler tells me about growing up in Raleigh.
For most of his childhood he lived with his parents and two younger siblings on Craig Street, on the edge of the historic and expensive Hayes Barton neighborhood. His father worked for the state labor department, his mother as a mediator. His parents bought their family home in 1988, when Craig Street was “just a regular street.”
“I was really lucky to grow up where I did,” Peeler says. “It was a diverse street. And over the years it has significantly gentrified.”
Peeler attended Broughton High School and NC State University, then moved to San Luis Obispo to get an MBA at California Polytechnic State University. After a few years out west—including a stint as a union organizer in San Francisco—he returned to his home state to work for a political campaign and then for Down Home North Carolina, a rural political organizing project.
In June 2023, Peeler was appointed to the planning commission, a 10-member volunteer advisory board that makes non-binding recommendations to the city council on planning and zoning issues. Most of the other members are urban planners, architects, or business leaders.
“I bring the perspective of what the citizens who are going to live, play and work [here] want and need,” Peeler says.
While serving on the planning commission, Peeler says he realized it’s common for developers to call up city council and planning commission members and bargain with them to try to get their projects greenlit.
“That’s not a good way to do it,” he says. “It incurs favoritism. It incurs unfair campaign donations. None of it’s transparent, and it actually hurts the developers, because then if they’re the favorite of a certain councilor, they’re working on different terms than another guy.”
When Peeler first entered the at-large race, he drew inspiration from Nate Baker, the first-term Durham city council member who was the top vote-getter in that city’s 2023 election after running a strong grassroots campaign. Peeler admired Baker’s deep bench of campaign volunteers and his enthusiasm about building an inclusive city with green infrastructure.
But as Peeler’s campaign continued, he realized running for office in Raleigh is fundamentally different from running in Durham.
“We have more top-end wealth in Raleigh, and there’s probably overall greater inequality,” Peeler says. “There’s more luxury development pressure. Our zoning code paves the way for big houses to be built and small ones to get torn down way faster than other places. And because of Raleigh’s history as a strong economy, a state capital, lots of jobs, great schools, people move here more from out of state.”
Peeler says all that pressure and growth translates to more expensive campaigns, often funded by wealthy or corporate donors who can give up to $6,400 to their candidates of choice each election cycle. In that climate, Peeler says it’s harder to run a grassroots campaign.
Peeler’s campaign doesn’t accept corporate donations; he’s raised about $25,000 this election cycle, almost entirely from small-dollar donors.
Melton has raised more than $161,000 this election cycle, including $6,400 donations from former council members Nicole Stewart and Bonner Gaylord, local developer Joseph Stancil, and John Kane, the prominent developer who donates thousands of dollars annually, mostly to GOP candidates.
Melton tells the INDY he’s “a proud progressive Democrat” and “proud to have garnered a wide range of support for [his] race.” He notes he’s received many individual small-dollar donations this cycle and used his campaign funds to support other Democrats running statewide, including a $6,400 donation to the Democratic candidate for state superintendent Mo Green. (Kane has donated $3,000 to Green’s opponent, Michele Morrow, and hosted a fundraiser for her in April).
Forte has raised about $61,000 this election cycle.
Peeler supports limiting individual donations to Raleigh campaigns to a few hundred dollars or so, following the lead of Chapel Hill and other cities nationwide.
For all the energy and ideas fueling his campaign, Peeler is still an underdog in this race against Forte and Melton, and it’s hard to gauge how serious a challenge he actually poses. As Election Day nears, some local campaigns have hired polling firms to assess their chances. Peeler hasn’t—and he says he’s happy not knowing.
“I managed campaigns and love the data and the numbers and all that,” Peeler says. “But at this point, it’s great to not have them, because we can go home at the end of the day and focus on turning people out, getting people excited.”
Chloe Courtney Bohl is a corps member for Report for America. Reach her at [email protected]. Comment on this story at [email protected].
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