First-term state Sen. Sophia Chitlik won reelection Tuesday in the Democratic primary for North Carolina Senate District 22, fending off a challenge from former Durham City Councilmember DeDreana Freeman with 65.6% of the vote to Freeman’s 34.4%. In the solidly blue district, which covers much of Durham County, the primary effectively decides the general election.
Freeman watched the results come in at Hi-Wire Brewing in her neighborhood, Golden Belt, with a small group of supporters. She told the INDY she felt proud of pulling a third of the vote without much institutional support.
“I feel good about being here on my own, without the endorsements, and saying what I wanted to say,” Freeman said.
This election marks Freeman’s third consecutive electoral loss, after a narrow council reelection defeat in November and a third-place finish in Durham’s 2023 mayoral race. Some of the voters who backed Freeman in those races weren’t in the pool this time around; District 22 doesn’t share exact boundaries with Durham’s municipal boundaries, and a sizable chunk of Ward 1, which Freeman represented on City Council in a more southern part of the city, falls outside the district. In the precincts that were in play, Freeman carried parts of east and downtown Durham, but Chitlik won the rest of the district decisively.
Chitlik was not immediately available for comment on the results, but in a statement released around midnight she thanked voters and laid out priorities for her next term.
“I’ll keep pushing with energy and urgency to lower costs for working families, strengthen our public schools, expand affordable housing, and make North Carolina the best place in the country to raise a family,” Chitlik wrote.
Despite ideological agreement between Chitlik and Freeman, the primary raised big questions about how much weight voters place on legislative output versus community roots, the impact of digital communication, and how much baggage from outside the policy arena shapes how voters see their candidates.
Chitlik, 36, entered the race with just over a year in office but a dense résumé of legislative activity, including a child care facility regulation amendment that became law and dozens of sponsored bills on things like worker protections and eviction record sealing. She personally fielded more than 500 constituent phone calls and over 1,400 emails in her first year and used social media as a consistent communication channel with the people she represents: sharing community safety resources when federal immigration agents came to the Triangle, posting explainer videos about the legislative process, and flagging inclement weather updates.
Freeman, 48, pitched herself as someone whose background mirrored the district’s needs better than Chitlik’s. A Black mother of three who grew up in subsidized housing as the oldest of 10 children, she argued that her lived experience gave her an equity lens Chitlik couldn’t match and that her eight-year-record on Durham’s city council—where she was known for siding with aggrieved constituents and casting dissenting votes on development—made her the candidate who would actually fight for working people. Rather than authoring legislation, Freeman said she hoped to focus on the state budget if elected to the General Assembly.
Freeman, who grew up in the Bronx, moved to Durham’s Golden Belt neighborhood in the mid-2000s and spent years organizing there, including leading the effort to get the area designated as a historic district. She went on to work at the Durham Children’s Initiative, serve as president of the Inter-Neighborhood Council, and sit on the planning commission before winning a City Council seat in 2017.
Chitlik, a California native, moved to Durham in 2017 after stints in the Obama administration’s Department of Labor and at an education nonprofit, among other roles. She had a thin local political profile before her first run for office in 2024, which drew some voter criticism. But Chitlik spent her freshman term building relationships with constituents and colleagues on both sides of the aisle in the General Assembly, and that groundwork appears to have carried over into how voters evaluated her on Tuesday.
Both candidates entered the race carrying what some voters saw as liabilities beyond their policy positions. Freeman has continued to deal with fallout from a 2023 incident in which she was recorded cursing out a fellow council member and, by some accounts, took a swing at him. She has denied hitting anyone and has called the allegations a product of misogynoir, but the episode has dogged her public image.
Chitlik, meanwhile, faced criticism from some local progressives for not publicly calling for a ceasefire during Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, and voters also raised questions about an ongoing federal case against her husband’s company, American Efficient, which is facing hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for alleged fraud. Chitlik told the INDY last month that she has “always been in favor of the release of all hostages and a permanent ceasefire that affords safety and dignity to all people in the region” and that the FERC case has no bearing on her role as a state legislator.
The two candidates’ campaigning approaches diverged sharply. Chitlik ran a robust, high-energy campaign, pairing her active social media presence with in-person town halls and a broad coalition of institutional support. She secured over a dozen endorsements from elected officials and groups like Planned Parenthood, the Sunrise Movement, and the Durham Committee on the Affairs of Black People’s PAC—the last of which had backed Freeman in her council reelection bid months earlier.
Freeman, who drew far fewer endorsements than her opponent, campaigned largely through the community forums and neighborhood circuits she’s worked for years. She also maintained a more limited media presence throughout the race. That’s been her approach throughout her career—Freeman has said she views public documentation of her work as performative—but it may have cost her reach: Leading up to the primary, several voters told the INDY that they admired Freeman’s council record but had no idea she’d entered the state Senate race.
Fundraising was another front where the two candidates’ campaigns looked different. Chitlik raised $69,737 between July 2025 and mid-February 2026, per her year-end and first-quarter filings. Freeman raised $11,002 during the same period—less than one-sixth of Chitlik’s haul.
Campaign finance has historically been a flash point for both candidates, though in different ways. Chitlik drew scrutiny during her first run, in 2024, for heavy self-funding and out-of-state donor networks, with less than half of her money coming from in-state donors who weren’t family members. Freeman, meanwhile, was significantly outraised in her last council race and remained so this cycle, though she has framed the disparity in part as a choice, telling the INDY that courting big donors isn’t compatible with running to represent the working class.
Chitlik’s family has continued to put money into her campaign—between the 2024 primary and last June, she and family members contributed $34,000—but her recent filings look markedly different from the ones that drew criticism two years ago. The $69,737 she raised this cycle came entirely from North Carolina donors, with the bulk from nonfamily Durham residents and institutional backers like the N.C. Democratic Party and the N.C. Nurses PAC.
Freeman’s biggest contributions this cycle came from Organizing Against Racism Durham and the Building Leaders Among Community PAC. The rest of her funding was made up of mostly midsize individual donations from Durham residents.
For Chitlik, winning reelection validates the model she’s been building since she unseated longtime state Sen. Mike Woodard in 2024: pairing progressive values with legislative hustle and a communication style that keeps constituents informed between election cycles. For Freeman, the result suggests that grassroots credibility built over nearly two decades in Durham wasn’t enough to overcome a well-funded, well-connected, well-endorsed incumbent—particularly when questions about her temperament had eroded her standing with voters who might otherwise have been her natural base.
Whether Freeman runs for office again remains to be seen; this loss may well mark the end of a political career that seemed to carry major momentum just a few years ago. Asked about what’s next, Freeman told the INDY at Hi-Wire that she wants to help build infrastructure to support future candidates in Durham who will prioritize working-class residents.
Chitlik will face Republican nominee Lakeshia Alston in November.
Results are unofficial until certified.
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