After losing the mayor’s race last fall in a city that knows him well, Mike Woodard is hoping that Durham voters will at least let him hold onto his seat in the state senate this election cycle in the face of a challenge from Sophia Chitlik.
But ahead of the Tuesday primary, which will effectively decide the general election in the solidly blue Senate District 22, the 10-year incumbent is facing some of the same challenges he dealt with while running for mayor against Leonardo Williams.
Chitlik has received endorsements from two prominent Durham PACs (the People’s Alliance and the Durham Committee on the Affairs of Black People) and a number of current and former elected officials including former Durham city council member Jillian Johnson, former Durham mayor Steve Schewel, and Durham county commissioner Nida Allam. And while Woodard benefits from name recognition, his decades-long voting record also makes him more of a target for policy-based nitpicking than Chitlik, a fresh-faced, progressive-coded candidate without much of a political history to scrutinize.
This is Chitlik’s first time running for elected office. She moved to Durham in 2018. Her platform, which broadly centers around women’s rights, healthcare equity, and childcare, invokes her experience as a parent, her philanthropic work, and stints working as an Obama campaign staffer and later in the Obama administration’s labor department. While Chitlik’s past work experience isn’t particularly detailed, her campaign platform lays out a progressive’s wishlist of goals around supporting public school students and teachers, supporting workers and families, increasing affordable housing, caring for the environment, and protecting reproductive rights and expanding access to health care. Chitlik has done her homework, but if elected, she would join the ranks of dozens of metro-based Democrats in the General Assembly perpetually struggling to advance progressive bills in the grip of a Republican majority or supermajority.
But the biggest issue of the race hasn’t shaped up to be about Woodard’s record, Chitlik’s lack thereof, or even where the candidates stand on certain things. The Senate District 22 primary has become mostly about where they’re getting their money.
Seventy-seven percent of the money that Woodard has raised ahead of the primary has come from PACs, according to his most recent campaign filings. This follows an upward trend in PAC donations to Woodard’s state senate campaigns in recent years, as Bull City Public Investigators reported last week.
PACs are also supporting Woodard via independent expenditures. Outside spending isn’t included in campaign finance data, but given that, by the INDY’s count, the Affordable Healthcare Coalition of North Carolina, Mainstreet Merchants for a Better NC, and several other PACs have sent out at least 10 pro-Woodard mailers recently, it’s likely that special interest groups have collectively spent at least $100,000 promoting his reelection bid.
Chitlik’s campaign has sent out six of its own mailers, and the People’s Alliance has sent out a mailer as well, so her visibility on that front is actually comparable to Woodard’s. As far as modes of PAC support go, the manpower and ground game that Durham PACs bring to the polls is nothing to sneeze at either.
Woodard’s proportion of direct PAC contributions is higher than that of other local state senators’ campaigns, too. Graig Meyer, for instance, a state senator running for reelection in Orange County, and who has endorsed Chitlik, has received just three percent of his contributions from PACs this cycle.
The contributions reflect how he works with special interest groups to pass bills, he says.
“My record is pretty clear, whether it’s energy or transportation or healthcare—the fields I tend to work in the most, being a ranking member on all of those committees,” Woodard says. “The PACs want to support the people who are on the committees as they have seniority and understand the issues.”
He also says that historically, he hasn’t needed PAC donations to fund his campaigns and typically uses any PAC money he receives as his caucus contribution.
“That helps us in the swing districts,” Woodard says.
Chitlik, who has not received any direct contributions from PACs, sees a bright line between herself and Woodard as far as funding goes.
“What you’ll see is that my campaign finance reports are reflective of a pretty large grassroots campaign to put a progressive in this office,” she says.
Chitlik has received $189,142 from around 250 individual contributors and from a loan she made to her own campaign, according to campaign finance reports.
Woodard has raised just under $60,000. Of that, $13,741 money has come from around 90 individual contributors and the rest has come from PACs. He has also has an outstanding loan balance in the amount of $19,810 from a series of loans he made to his campaign in 2018 and has yet to pay himself back for. Woodard entered the election cycle with $48,212 on hand.
It’s hard to know exactly how many of Chitlik and Woodard’s contributors are based within the district, as donations of $50 or less don’t disclose a name or address. Based on available data, Woodard’s individual donor makeup is proportionately more local than Chitlik’s. Sixteen out of the 24 PACs that made direct contributions to Woodard are also based in the Triangle.
Chitlik has criticized Woodard for his PAC donations on social media, in newsletters, and in mailers, including in one mailer that poses headshots of herself and Woodard against blue and red backgrounds, respectively. A checklist on the blue side features one of her campaign mantras: “funded by real people.”
In turn, Chitlik has received criticism (from voters, not from Woodard) for receiving a large proportion of her individual contributions from a small group of people who, while real, are also either members of her own family or out-of-state figures with no clear ties to Senate District 22 or North Carolina.
Some highlights from the out-of-state slate: Massachusetts-based investor Jeffrey Swartz, who in 2011 sold the family business he’d inherited—Timberland, the boot company—for $2 billion, donated $3,599 to Chitlik’s campaign; Swartz’s sons, Daniel and Noah, contributed $3,600 each; Laura Lauder—a New York-based philanthropist and the spouse of Estée Lauder’s venture capitalist grandson, Gary Lauder, who happens to be the largest investor in ShotSpotter technology—contributed $2,500; Elizabeth Naftali—a philanthropist and real estate investor who last year came under scrutiny when Business Insider reported that she’d purchased an expensive painting from Hunter Biden around the same time that Joe Biden appointed her to a federal commission—donated $2,500; and Elizabeth “Ellie” Burrows, a meditation instructor whose father, James Burrows, created the show Cheers, contributed $2,500.
As far as family contributions go, Chitlik’s husband Benjamin Abram and her in-laws have donated a combined total of $16,800; Chitlik’s father Paul has contributed $1,100; and Chitlik herself has donated $42,650, including $24,650 in in-kind donations and $18,000 from the loan.
The campaign money Chitlik has acquired via family wealth and wealthy out-of-state donors—some of whom, it appears, are billionaires—accounts for more than 45 percent of her total funding.
In the eyes of most District 22 constituents, neither PACs nor family members and faraway philanthropists are ideal pathways to office. So voters aware of the campaign finance profiles in this race might end up being swayed one way or the other by the way in which the candidates have presented themselves in relation to their funding. Chitlik has adhered to Durham’s preferred zero PAC fundraising method, but she has received criticism for being out of touch with Durham residents despite her messaging targeting young people and working parents. Woodard carries baggage from siding with Republicans on several key pieces of state legislation, and his PAC donations don’t exactly excite voters, but they don’t shock them either.
Chitlik does not go into detail with the INDY about how or if she knows her distant bigwig donors but says she thinks “they believe in my vision for North Carolina that works for every working family.” In order to “turn our purple state blue,” Chitlik says, “we’re gonna need to build a national network of funders and supporters of our state.”
She also says that the contributions from her family members and herself have been necessary to fight “corporate PACs who are running a shadow campaign” for Woodard.
Woodard says people are welcome to examine his legislative record if they’re concerned about PACs buying votes. He notes that campaign finance law prohibits candidates from being in contact with the PACs that send out mailers on his behalf.
“We don’t know what they’re going to say, when they’re gonna mail it, who they’re mailing it to,” Woodard says. “I don’t see it until you do or my neighbor does. I come home, and it’s the first time I’ve seen it, too.”
Editor’s note: The line about Woodard’s loan to his campaign has been clarified and Chitlik’s husband’s first name has been corrected.
Justin Laidlaw contributed reporting to this story.
Follow Staff Writer Lena Geller on Twitter or send an email to lgeller@indyweek.com. Comment on this story at backtalk@indyweek.com.
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