The top candidates in the 4th Congressional District Democratic primary have high profiles in Orange and Durham Counties. Valerie Foushee, the 69-year-old two-term incumbent, is the highest-profile member of an Orange County political dynasty, and has served the area at nearly every level of government over the last three decades. Her challenger, Durham County commissioner Nida Allam, has made herself a fixture of Durham politics and activism since her first election in 2020.
But in order to win the March 3 election—which will all but decide November’s general election result in ultra-blue District 4—they’ll need to win over voters in Western Wake County who are less familiar with both of them, too.
The candidates share many progressive priorities, but the differences in their governance and communication styles are evident in how they have approached Wake County. Foushee, a political veteran who shies away from self-promotion, has relied on a deep bench of local surrogates to introduce her message and experience. Allam, an aggressively anti-corporate candidate with a penchant for selfie-style Instagram videos, is capitalizing on issues playing out locally—most notably a proposed data center—that connect with the populist message she and the more outspoken wing of the Democratic Party are pitching.
The district’s boundaries have changed significantly since Foushee and Allam’s first matchup in 2022. It still includes all of Durham and Orange counties, but Republican legislators redrew it in 2023 to add in portions of Western Wake and eastern Chatham counties, replacing parts of several more rural counties where voters had overwhelmingly favored Foushee. The end result of all that gerrymandering? About 22% of Foushee’s 2022 voters have been drawn out, compared to about 5% of Allam’s.
The bulk of NC-04 voters, about 43%, live in Durham. Orange and Chatham counties account for another 20% and 7% of the district’s electorate, respectively. The relatively new Wake County slice houses the remaining 30%—roughly 173,000 registered voters, 136,000 of whom are Democrats or unaffiliated (and therefore eligible to vote in the primary).
If (if!) Durham and Orange voters behave as they did in the 2022 primary, then an INDY analysis of the election results suggests Foushee and Allam would basically tie in that part of the district—setting up Western Wake to potentially cast the deciding votes.
The Western Wake segment of NC-04 covers parts of Cary, Apex, Morrisville, Holly Springs, and Fuquay-Varina—some of the fastest-growing towns in the entire state. Decades of population growth have shifted that suburban electorate to the left. Last year, Democrats dominated the town council elections in once-purple Cary and ousted incumbent mayors in Holly Springs and Fuquay-Varina, two former Republican strongholds.
The population growth has also brought more diversity to Western Wake: about 42% of Morrisville’s population is Asian, and about a quarter of all Cary residents were born outside the U.S. Western Wake voters have elected some of the first and only Asian Americans serving in the state legislature: Senator Jay Chaudhuri and Representatives Maria Cervania and Ya Liu. An emerging local political action committee dedicated to championing Asian American candidates, MOVE NC PAC, helped elect Chinese American town council members Bella Huang in Cary and Sue Mu in Apex last year.
“I’ve had the pleasure of becoming very familiar with local Wake County elected officials and residents, including the flourishing immigrant communities, during my short time representing them,” Foushee wrote in an emailed statement to INDY. She noted that Wake County residents have the same concerns as the rest of the district, but that her office’s “timely assistance with immigration casework” has been a top priority for voters.
In recent months, Chaudhuri and Liu have partnered with Foushee to raise her profile in Western Wake.
At a January event organized by Liu in Research Triangle Park featuring Foushee, Chaudhuri, and California congressman Ted Lieu, the legislators drew parallels between their experiences breaking glass ceilings as Asian Americans and Foushee’s history as the the first Black woman to serve in most of her roles—including as an Orange County commissioner and in her state House, state Senate, and now U.S. House seats.
“I think that it’s really, really important to have those conversations between different communities when we live in a moment where so much of what we see with [the federal] administration is trying to divide communities and separate us from each other,” Chaudhuri said at the event.
Rounding out Foushee’s long list of Wake endorsements are state senators Gale Adcock, Sydney Batch, and Lisa Grafstein, state representatives Cervania, Cynthia Ball and Allison Dahle, Fuquay-Varina mayor Bill Harris, Morrisville mayor pro tempore Satish Garimella, four county commissioners, and four school board members.
Although she has the official backing of fewer elected leaders in Western Wake’s immigrant communities, Allam is also pitching herself to that population, with whom she has a lot in common: her Indian and Pakistani immigrant parents raised her in Brier Creek. She said her campaign is generating a “groundswell of momentum” from voters in Western Wake, including “hundreds of immigrants.” She added that hers is the only campaign actually knocking on doors to turn out “voters that Democrats traditionally write off.”
“The issue of immigration is personal to me, because I see what this painful and xenophobic rhetoric is doing to tear apart our families and instill fear in our immigrant communities,” Allam said at a January candidate forum in Cary. After federal immigration agents targeted the Triangle last year, she stressed that she would “invest very heavily” to reach first-time and immigrant voters.
“There’s so many Indian and Chinese Americans and other immigrant communities that are struggling because they’re being targeted and living in fear,” Allam told INDY at the time. “They’re walking around with their passports now.”
Allam is endorsed by NC Asian Americans Together and national groups including the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Muslim American Public Affairs Council, and Indian American Impact. She has fewer endorsements from political figures in Wake than Foushee, with the notable exceptions of Mu, local Democratic Party chair Wesley Knott, and state representative Julie von Haefen, who likes Allam’s outspoken style.
“I’m looking for somebody that is going to be loud about their values and about the things that they’re fighting for,” von Haefen, who represents southwestern Wake County, told INDY. “The district … could use somebody who’s a little more bold in their outlook on fighting against what the Trump administration is doing.”
Knott personally endorsed Allam back in December, breaking from the tradition of party chairs staying neutral in primaries (the party itself has not endorsed in the race). Speaking with the INDY that month, Knott said Foushee exemplifies a “risk-averse” and “carefully-calculated” brand of Democratic politics that’s utterly failed to inspire voters.
“I believe [Allam] has better ideas and would be a better leader for our party and help build a progressive movement that is needed within the Democratic Party,” Knott said.
While Foushee is drawing on her local relationships, Allam has adapted her anti-corporate message to perhaps the most hot-button local issue for Wake voters in NC-04: a data center proposed for a 190-acre site in Apex. On a recent Saturday morning, she threw together a press conference in Apex to protest the data center—and lambast Foushee’s support from a PAC that is backed by Anthropic, one of the world’s largest AI companies.
“The oligarchs and out-of-state development companies who are proposing to build an AI data center in our community call it construction, but we see right through it,” Allam said at the press conference. “We know it’s destruction of our jobs, of our environment, and our communities themselves.”
The data center proposal is extremely unpopular among locals, who have wide-ranging concerns about water and energy use, noise pollution, rising utility bills, traffic, and artificial intelligence more generally (though no specific use for the proposed data center has been announced). Nearly 5,000 people have signed a petition opposing the Apex data center, and another 250 have signed an open letter promoted by Allam’s campaign calling on the candidates in NC-04 to take a stance against it and reject “donations or Super PAC support from the big tech lobby, especially AI executives and companies.”
Although it will ultimately fall to the Apex Town Council to approve or reject the proposed data center, Allam supports a national moratorium on data center construction until it can be regulated.
Foushee has, characteristically, shown less outrage—she says Congress should regulate data centers, but until then, it’s a local decision.
“Plainly, I don’t support a new data center in the heart of our district,” Foushee told INDY. “I’ve heard from residents, listened in on council meetings on this issue, and met with local leaders to hear their perspectives. But as someone who has served in local government, I trust our local leaders to listen to our community and make the right choice, and do not want to be a thorn in the side of town council members and mayors.”
The Anthropic-backed Jobs and Democracy PAC has, as of publishing, spent $280,000 on a television ad in support of Foushee. The spending is part of something of an intra-industry civil war between OpenAI and Anthropic, which is positioning itself as the more ethical AI company and calling for industry regulations as both companies simultaneously plan massive buildouts of data centers around the country.
Anthropic may be spending on Foushee thanks to her recent appointment as co-chair of the new House Democratic Commission on AI And the Innovation Economy. She told INDY that she plans to use her position “to ensure that data centers and big tech are held accountable for their energy expenditures, land use, and environmental impacts as Democrats retake the majority.”
“I do not coordinate with Super PACs in any way in accordance with the law,” Foushee wrote. “My voting record in Congress and efforts to overturn Citizens United demonstrate clearly that no contribution has ever influenced my vote.”
Allam has consistently criticized Foushee for benefiting from corporate PAC spending since their 2022 matchup became the most expensive congressional primary in state history, due to outside spending. This cycle, both candidates have benefitted from outside spending, as INDY reported earlier this month. A week before Election Day, outside PACs have spent nearly $1.6 million on mailers and advertisements to influence voters.
Of all the corners of NC-04, that money might be best spent in Western Wake, where many voters are still forming opinions of the candidates.
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