While he appeared to have come up short on election night, now that all votes are in, Democratic state Rep. Terence Everitt has bested Republican Ashlee Bryan Adams in state Senate District 18. With all provisional ballots from Wake and Granville Counties now tallied, Everitt leads Adams by 134 votes.
Everitt claimed victory on his X account Saturday afternoon.
“I am deeply humbled and incredibly grateful to the voters of Senate District 18 for their trust and confidence in me. It is an honor to have earned your support, and I look forward to continuing to serve the people of NC- just in a new office… maybe not in the basement.”
Everitt is referring to an incident last year in which then-house speaker, now congressman-elect Tim Moore moved Everitt’s legislative office to a janitor’s closet in the basement after Everitt asked the Wake County district attorney’s office to investigate Moore for allegedly having an affair with a state employee.
Everitt, who has served in the state house since 2019, has been a target of the GOP for the past few election cycles. He ran for the Senate District 18 seat, representing northern Wake and Granville Counties, this year after Republicans redrew his current state House District 35 to make it much harder for a Democrat to win.
Republican Mike Schietzelt, a political newcomer who is a military veteran and works as a litigation attorney, won in that house district this cycle against Evonne Hopkins, a family law attorney who owns a law practice in North Raleigh. Schietzelt took just over 50 percent of the vote to Hopkins’s 47 percent.
During Everitt’s tenure in the state house, he has advocated for preserving access to reproductive rights, government transparency, public education, and criminal justice reform. In the past legislative session, Everitt co-sponsored a bill to codify the reproductive freedom protections of Roe v. Wade and introduced legislation to make lawmaker’s documents public record, ensure that there’s a nurse in every public school, and clarify the law around felons’ voting rights.
Everitt’s opponent Adams, a former nurse who now runs an event planning business in Wake Forest, said on her campaign website that she would “champion fiscal conservatism and the importance of strong familial bonds.” She ran on a boilerplate GOP platform promoting school choice, limited government, and “conservative values.”
A Libertarian candidate, Brad Hessel, also ran, winning just over three percent of the vote.
The margin of votes separating Everitt and Adams is narrow enough that Adams may request a recount, but it’s unlikely to change the result.
Everitt’s win leaves the Democrats one seat short of breaking the GOP supermajority in the state senate. Democrats have already broken the Republican supermajority in the house.
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