Name as it appears on the ballot: Jonah Garson
Age: 35
Party affiliation: Democrat
Campaign website: jonahgarson.com
Occupation & employer: Attorney, Parry Law, PLLC; Chair, Orange County Democratic Party (inactive status for campaign)
Years lived in North Carolina: 28
1. What in your background qualifies you to represent the people of North Carolina effectively? What would you cite as your three biggest career accomplishments?
The people of North Carolina are terribly represented by the current GOP majority, which has exercised a vice grip on our legislature and obstructed progress for the past 12 years. We’re fortunate that here in NC House District 56, we’re almost certain to elect a Democrat to succeed Rep. Verla Insko who will stand up for democracy and against the tide of bigotry and hate from an ascendant illiberal right.
We all know what policies our communities need to thrive. Good, affordable healthcare for all, including reproductive and mental healthcare. Quality public education, from early childhood to Higher Ed. Meaningful criminal legal reforms and reimagining of public safety. Immediate climate action. Affordable housing in every community. And a vibrant, thriving democracy where every vote counts and everyone has a voice.
The question is: what can our next state representative do, here in our very Democratic district, to effect those changes?
Two things, in my view. First, it’ll take a savvy understanding of the ins and outs of the General Assembly to try to find bipartisan consensus and get deals done in the current political environment. I’m the only candidate in this race who’s worked in Raleigh — I worked for two progressive giants of the legislature, Rep. Paul Luebke and Sen. Ellie Kinnaird, from 2009 to 2011. I worked on the campaign of former NC House Speaker Joe Hackney. And I’ve had close friends and mentors in the legislature ever since. I am familiar with how the NCGA works (and doesn’t). I know the committee structure and the state budgeting process. I have the state legislative policy experience necessary to hit the ground on running on day one.
But second and more important: if we want to finally win those progressive policies, we need legislators who are experienced grassroots organizers, who know how to effectively build Democratic power to break the NCGOP’s vice grip on our state and win back the legislature. That’s been my fight over the past 12 years, since my political coming-of-age working in 2010, when the NCGOP ran Project Redmap to seize control of legislatures across the country and Democrats lost everything. I’ve worked shoulder-to-shoulder with grassroots organizers, community leaders, and candidates across the state to shift the balance of power in Raleigh and win functioning democracy.
There are many accomplishments in that fight that I’m proud of. Three I’d highlight:
• I led and supported boots-on-the-ground organizing efforts to elect Democratic legislative candidates across the state and developed the infrastructure in red districts to help Democrats win in the future. I’ve done this as a field coordinator for dozens of state legislative candidates, helping campaigns have meaningful conversations with voters at doors, and as a leader of the Orange County Democratic Party. In 2020’s unprecedented pandemic election cycle, our county party adapted our organizing models, supplementing our deep canvassing with phone calls, postcards, text banking, lit drops, and more. Our get-out-the-vote efforts in Orange County helped boost Democratic turnout to keep Gov. Cooper in office, and, through the organizational efforts of the County-to-County Campaign, helped elect Democrats running in swing districts, like Rep. Ricky Hurtado in eastern Alamance County. In a very tough cycle for Democrats, we helped deliver in key races through support of intentional and focused organizing.
• After GOP operatives attempted to steal the 2018 election in the 9th Congressional District through absentee ballot fraud targeting Black voters and Lumbee voters and poor voters, the courts called for a special election in September 2019. I was Voter Protection Director for the Democrats in that race. While the Democratic candidate, Dan McCready, lost by a narrow margin, I’m proud of our efforts to ensure that thousands of voters, including voters in historically marginalized communities in southeastern North Carolina, had their votes counted, their voices heard, and felt a renewed sense of integrity in their local democracy.
• When I left my hometown Chapel Hill to go to law school in New York shortly after the GOP took control of our legislature, I stayed close to the fight for North Carolina’s future. While there, I helped found and lead Team4NC, a community of organizers and activists and donors–expat Tar Heels and other folks savvy to the Battleground NC fight–to effectively support legislative candidates and democracy-building organizations in NC. We did a lot of work I’m proud of, but I’m particularly proud of our “North Carolina’s Next” event in the summer of 2018, where we supported three amazing women leading the fight to flip the House: now-Sen. Sydney Batch, who wound up winning her race by 1,000 votes; Rep. Rachel Hunt, who won by 72 votes; and Erica McAdoo, who lost by 300. I believe the phone calls, postcards, and dollars we marshaled helped give those candidates a much-needed boost.
I believe that that experience and commitment in building Democratic power to flip the legislature is what we need in our next state representative heading into the critical 2022 election cycle, and what we need going forward to prevent the GOP from entrenching their control over the NCGA for yet another decade.
2. What do you believe to be the three most pressing issues facing the next General Assembly? What steps do you believe the state should take to address them?
• Democracy reform: For the past decade, North Carolina has been ground zero for voter suppression, map-rigging, and for attacks on American democracy generally. We need to flip that script and lead as a state in America’s democratic revival. This means, among many other things: working to finally enact redistricting reform to prevent racial and partisan gerrymandering and to ensure meaningful political representation for every community; introducing automatic registration for all voting eligible North Carolinians, including those turning 18; fighting against voter ID requirements and other attempts to disenfranchise voters of color and poor voters; expanding the right to vote and participation in our democracy through greater access to voter registration, early voting, and vote-by-mail, and by working to introduce ballot drop-boxes; and increasing funding and training for county boards of elections.
• Ensuring good, affordable healthcare as a right: I will work tirelessly to finally expand Medicaid for the hundreds of thousands of North Carolinians who cannot afford private health insurance, yet who have been denied access to quality healthcare services by North Carolina’s GOP leadership for the past decade. I’ll also fight for big increases in funding for behavioral healthcare and addiction support/recovery programs, including programs based in our public school systems. Beyond that, we need to address existing inequities in our current healthcare system by supporting community-based healthcare programs designed to address social determinants of health. We will also need to fight to protect reproductive healthcare and abortion as a right, to lower the cost of prescription drugs, and to expand access to and advocacy for the COVID-19 vaccine across all of our communities.
• Championing public education: I believe that every North Carolinian has a constitutional right to high-quality education (and I believe that “high-quality” is the best common-sense interpretation of our constitution’s mandate to provide “sound, basic” education). We deserve great public schools that serve all students equitably and where teachers are properly valued and empowered. This means fully funding our public schools; raising educator and staff pay dramatically; introducing and fully funding universal pre-K; creating new, state-funded programs to recruit and retain Black teachers and other teachers of color; championing greater funding for school social workers, psychologists, and counselors; defeating inequity-exacerbating and demoralizing teacher “merit-pay” schemes; introducing universal school lunch and other nutrition programs; and ensuring that all of our public colleges and universities can operate in the best interests of their students, free from destructive political interference. Especially as we recover from the pandemic, we will also need to make major investments in summer and afterschool programs, peer-to-peer coaching, and in-school behavioral health resources. Our children have had a traumatizing and disruptive two years, and our public schools have an important role in helping them heal.
Exacerbating our current challenges is a history of racially inequitable policymaking. As Representative, I will approach every policy question with an equity lens, challenging myself and my colleagues to ensure that policy responds to the needs of communities of color and other historically-marginalized communities. In doing so, I’ll be informed by relationships I’ve developed through years of organizing and policy work, including relationships developed as an executive committee member of the Chapel Hill-Carrboro NAACP, to make sure that these communities are centered in driving the policy agenda and in the organizing efforts critical to winning that policy.
3. To what extent do you support municipalities exerting local control over issues such as regulating greenhouse gas emissions, criminal justice reforms and police oversight, and passing development-regulating ordinances?
As a general matter, with the GOP legislative majority failing to address many of the most pressing issues faced by North Carolinians, forward-thinking cities and towns must have the ability to act– whether it’s being able to obtain NCDOT financing for bike-walk projects, developing public broadband, or passing local non-discrimination ordinances. But there are contexts where local control is inappropriate, and produces bad policy– for instance, the criminalization of poverty in local ordinances across North Carolina (which criminal legal reform legislation signed into law by Governor Cooper in September, 2021 helped address),
4. Do you support raising North Carolina’s minimum wage, and if so by how much? If not, what other initiatives would you take to support low-income families in North Carolina?
As the son of a former labor organizer, I was raised believing that strengthening workers’ rights is key to building a strong middle class and fighting racism and poverty. Here in North Carolina, we must start by raising the minimum wage to at least $15/hour, indexed to inflation. I will introduce legislation year after year, session after session, until workers get the support they deserve. And the tipped minimum wage is a legacy of slavery that absolutely needs to be abolished.
But a decent minimum wage isn’t the only protection working families in our state need. We must start by repealing so-called “right to work” laws and enshrine the right to bargain collectively. We’re seeing a growing union organizing movement across our country, at Starbucks stores and Amazon warehouses and employers large and small, as workers realize that collective power is the only way to stand up to corporate abuses. North Carolina should be a leader in protecting workers’ rights.
We should also restore unemployment benefits, at a minimum, to the level and eligibility at which they existed prior to the legislature’s draconian cuts in 2013. It’s important to keep the Trust Fund solvent, but not on the backs of workers who lose their jobs. Employers, and especially the largest and most profitable employers in our state, should shoulder that burden. And now that the fund is in good shape, we certainly need to restore benefits that have been cut.
Every worker in our state needs guaranteed paid sick and family leave. We need a broad definition of “family” in our leave statutes that includes siblings, grandparents and grandchildren, recognizing the reality that workers are tasked with caring for a broad range of family members.
And given how much of our state’s economy is driven by agriculture, we need intentional policymaking to protect farm workers, many of whom earn very low incomes and are highly vulnerable to workplace maltreatment and abuse. Many farm workers have joined the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, or FLOC, which has won key victories in securing basic job protections not always provided to agricultural laborers. We must support the work of FLOC and ensure their right to continue to organize. There are a number of additional ways we can empower agricultural workers, including by adequately funding legal services – and in particular the Farmworkers’ Unit at Legal Aid of North Carolina. As a Representative, I will look to my former colleagues in labor law practice with close ties to FLOC, and work with current FLOC leadership, to help advance an agricultural workers’ agenda for North Carolina.
Finally, we need to develop and fund more programs to connect people in low-income and frontline communities with the green jobs we know are critical to addressing our climate crisis. This includes building out existing, successful programs: As Representative, I’ll work to empower contractors in low-income and frontline communities to participate in our state’s Guaranteed Energy Saving Contracting Program, and expand the program to include solar installation as a covered service. We need to make sure that the economic benefits of our clean energy transition accrue to our most vulnerable communities across the state.
5. With rent, property taxes, and home sale prices all rising, what, if anything, should the state legislature do to address this growing affordability crisis?
I believe that housing is a human right, and that the only way we’ll guarantee that right to everyone is with intentional and vigorous state policymaking.
Building sustainable, affordable communities prioritizing climate action, environmental justice and equity requires a multifaceted, integrated approach: dramatic increases in direct state investment in affordable housing, market policies to incentivize affordable housing supply, active transit (bike and pedestrian) infrastructure, integrated mass transit infrastructure, inclusionary zoning policies, local rent controls to fight tenant displacement, and better labor laws.
As a legislator, I will fight to restore investment in our North Carolina Housing Trust Fund to at least pre-2010 levels, prior to the GOP majority slashing appropriations by ⅔; I will vociferously advocate for the repeal of the legislative prohibition on local jurisdictions passing rent control measures; I will work with local leaders for inclusionary zoning measures and policies that move local jurisdictions beyond single-family-home-only zoning; I will fight for North Carolina to follow the lead of other states in creating new, state-level low-income housing tax credit programs to subsidize the development of affordable rental housing; and I will champion new state appropriations aimed at supporting the unhoused, including money for housing, wrap-around support services, and social worker-lead crisis response teams.
Across North Carolina, local jurisdictions are often forced to use property taxes to fill in the gaps where the state is failing to fund core public services and goods–the GOP legislative majority’s failure to adequately fund public schools is a case in point. High property taxes are not just a concern of homeowners across our community, but also of renters, who often indirectly absorb the costs in their rent. And of course, reliance on property taxes to fund our schools and other core public services exacerbates enormous educational disparities based on property wealth — communities that don’t have the same home and commercial property values that we do are simply unable to marshal the revenues to adequately fund their schools. Shifting away from property taxes and toward state revenues for school funding will improve educational equity and lower taxes in communities like ours.
I also believe that our affordable housing crisis is an income and wealth inequality crisis, and that we can’t look at the housing crisis in a vacuum. Simply put, housing becomes more affordable when people have more money to spend. Raising wages and increasing job security and benefits for lower-wage workers will make more housing units affordable for more families in our state.
6. Do you believe that the state government has an obligation to prevent the impacts of climate change? If so, please state three specific policies you support to address climate change.
Yes. To protect our environment and meet the moment in this climate crisis, we’re going to need system-level policy change—not just individual action, but transformative policy change that rebuilds our state’s entire energy, transportation, and utility infrastructure, that is grounded in environmental justice and equity, and that intentionally centers North Carolina’s frontline communities. Many of the solutions we need are at the national and transnational level, but there are still many ways that states can lead the way. Three specific policies I will support:
• Requiring that Duke Energy take into account a diversity of clean energy models and inputs as it formulates its precise decarbonization plan pursuing the aggressive decarbonization goals set forth in the recently enacted HB 951. Natural gas cannot become the new default, given the high carbon costs of natural gas production when accounting for required extraction and transportation infrastructure.
• More consumer/rooftop-solar-producer-friendly net metering regulations designed to incentivize residential rooftop solar and the restoration of up-front incentives for panel installation.
• Ensuring that the massive influx in infrastructure dollars from the federal government’s recent infrastructure bill is used to support mass transit and bike-walk infrastructure in all communities, and not just new road projects and highway expansions.
7. Would you support an independent process for drawing new legislative and congressional districts?
Yes, absolutely. This is an existential issue to the health of our democracy, and a top priority.
8. Does the General Assembly have a constitutional obligation to comply with the state Supreme Court order in the Leandro case to fully fund public schools and give every child in North Carolina a sound basic education?
Yes. It’s an obligation we’ve been failing to live up to for far too long. Perhaps the best evidence is Judge Lee’s recent, deeply-considered Leandro ruling, finding that NCGOP legislative leadership has continued to starve our public schools of resources to the tune of billions. North Carolina ranks 41st in the nation in K-12 school spending and 45th in school funding, and our teacher and staff pay remains terrible ($35,000 for starting teacher pay is unconscionable). And this underfunding is felt most acutely in low-income school districts serving students of color, where there’s inadequate property wealth to make up for the abysmal state funding of schools through property tax revenues.
I believe the single greatest barrier to adequately funding our schools is political will. We were running a $6.5 billion dollar surplus going into last year’s “long session.” The problem is that we have an illiberal right ascendant in the GOP which is in fact hostile to public education, and which is working intentionally to starve our public schools of the resources they need to thrive, then running the same tired, deeply cynical playbook of pointing to the public institutions they’ve weakened, and leveraging their weakened state to argue for further disinvestment.
I hope we can forge bipartisan consensus on the need to better fund our public schools, and I will fight to make this a priority in every budget cycle. Ultimately, though, I believe that fully-funding our public schools is going to take powershift. We need more legislators from blue districts who see organizing for powershift as part of the core responsibilities of the job.
9. The U.S. Supreme Court may issue a ruling this summer that guts, or even overturns, Roe v. Wade. As a state lawmaker, would you support legislation that limits or prohibits abortion in North Carolina, or punishes/criminalizes abortion providers or patients?
No. As Representative, I will fight to defeat any new legislation undermining abortion rights. The right to an abortion should be guaranteed, without interference from politicians and regardless of a person’s background or ability to pay.
I will vehemently advocate for the repeal of recently-enacted anti-abortion laws, including pretextual restrictions on where abortions can be performed and by whom; dangerous restrictions on abortions to protect the health of the pregnant person; mandatory, state-directed “counseling” designed to discourage abortions and a 72-hour waiting period for receiving abortion care; a ban on the use of telemedicine to care for patients using oral medication for abortion; and insurance restrictions that broadly deny coverage for abortion care. With Roe under attack and state legislatures at the front of the fight for abortion rights, I will also continue my work to elect pro-choice Democrats statewide.
10. Should North Carolina expand Medicaid? Where do you stand on increasing the number of slots for the Innovations Waiver for special needs individuals?
As discussed above, expanding Medicaid is a top priority. The lives we’ve lost, the people whose health has failed, as a result of our Republican legislative leadership’s unwillingness to do so, is an unconscionable tragedy that must be remedied as soon as possible. The federal government has provided enhanced Medicaid matching dollars during the pandemic. We need to get this done, this year.
With regard to the Innovations Waiver, I will work to dramatically increase the number of slots for the Innovations Waiver (and dramatically reduce the Registry of Unmet Needs waitlist, which currently has wait-times of 17+ years) so that more individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities can receive the resources they need to thrive in a least restrictive environment, and ideally in their home communities. I will also work to advance legislation to ensure that the Innovations Waiver/Registry of Unmet Needs system is serving all communities equitably, knowing that as it stands now, the information needed to access the system fails to reach many families.
11. Do you support reforming North Carolina’s marijuana laws? Do you support full legalization? Please explain your position.
Yes–I support full legalization. The criminalization of cannabis is morally wrong, and the enforcement of low-level drug laws has been targeted particularly toward poor people and people of color, devastating communities, and especially harming Black communities. Criminalization also makes no economic sense.
As Representative, I will work to legalize recreational cannabis in North Carolina, bringing hundreds of millions of dollars into our state’s economy and ending decades of punitive policy. I will also ensure that any legalization efforts are equitable, that communities that have borne the brunt of over-policing of low-level drug offenses see the most benefits from the new industry. I’ll also work to seal or expunge criminal records related to cannabis possession, and to secure the commutation of sentences for those currently serving time for possession.
12. Are there any issues this questionnaire has not addressed that you would like to address?
I think a critical question we need to answer is, “What will it take to make these ideas a reality?” I suspect there won’t be much difference between me and my opponent as far as policy goes. But in addition to being right on the issues, we need a legislator with a plan to win the fight on those issues. I believe it will take a full-time, headlong commitment to organizing, to building power and flipping seats, to win any of the points I’ve just described, and that’s the commitment we need from our next state representative. It’s what I’ve done for the last twelve years, as an organizer and a party chair and a field director. It’s also how I’ve run my campaign for this office — we’ve knocked over 26,000 doors here in the community so far, brought in over 125 volunteers, and we’ve been powered by small-dollar donations from over 500 donors.
Once the primary is done, we’re not going to let up. We’re going to take this same energy, this same Democratic power in Orange County, and hit the road. We’ll go to competitive districts from Alamance to Cabarrus to Guilford, all across the state, using our people power to help Democrats win in November, while we work at the same time to set up a new constituent services office here in our home community to connect folks with resources they need to thrive.
If we want to win on the issues that matter, we need to organize grassroots political power in our community and across our state. I’m the only candidate in this race with a track record in that work. I’m the only candidate whose campaign is built on those principles. And I believe I’m the best candidate to carry that work forward as our next state representative.
