Name: Sydney J. Batch

Age: 47

Party affiliation: Democrat

Campaign website: https://www.sydneybatch.com/

Occupation & employer: Family Law Attorney – Batch Poore & Williams

Years lived in the area: 15 Years

1. What in your background qualifies you to represent the people of your North Carolina district effectively? What would you cite as your three biggest career accomplishments? 

My background has given me the opportunity to understand the needs of North Carolina families from both sides of public service: as an attorney and social worker working directly with families, and as a legislator working to turn those experiences into meaningful policy. As a family law and child welfare attorney, I have spent over two decades helping families navigate some of the most difficult moments of their lives. That experience has given me a firsthand understanding of the challenges facing children, parents, and working families across our state.

My three biggest career accomplishments are serving in both chambers of the General Assembly, first in the North Carolina House of Representatives from 2019 to 2021 and then in the North Carolina Senate beginning in 2021; becoming the first Black woman to lead the North Carolina Senate Democratic Caucus; and building a career centered on advocating for families and children.

I am proud of the work I have done in the legislature, but I am equally proud of bringing my experience as an attorney, social worker, and small-business owner into that work. Those experiences continue to shape how I represent my constituents and fight for a North Carolina where every family has the opportunity to thrive.

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?

The three most pressing issues facing the next General Assembly are the rising cost of living, strengthening our public schools, and access to affordable, high-quality child care.

Cost of living: North Carolinians are working hard but still struggling to keep up with the rising costs of housing, health care, energy, and many other basic needs. The General Assembly should pursue policies that make housing more affordable, lower the cost of health insurance premiums and energy, and expand paid leave so working families do not have to choose between a paycheck and caring for themselves or a loved one.

Education: We must continue investing in our public schools and the people who make them successful. That means building on the progress of previous legislation by providing competitive salaries that help us recruit and retain teachers and school personnel, investing in classrooms and school infrastructure, and ensuring students have access to the support they need to succeed, including school counselors, psychologists, social workers, and other mental health professionals.

Child care: Affordable, accessible child care is essential to the success of North Carolina families and our economy. The state should invest in child care providers and the workforce that supports them, expand access to affordable care for families, and ensure that parents can remain in the workforce without being priced out of quality care. Child care should be treated as the essential infrastructure it is for working families and our state’s economy.

3. Federal cuts to Medicaid are expected to cost the state $50 billion over the next decade, according to the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services. How would you address Medicaid funding to maintain coverage for the millions of North Carolinians enrolled?

Medicaid is a lifeline for millions of North Carolinians, including children, seniors, people with disabilities, and working families. We cannot balance the state budget on the backs of the people who rely on this program for access to health care.

The General Assembly should maximize every available federal dollar and pursue every opportunity to protect and strengthen North Carolina’s Medicaid program. I have already worked to do that. I was a primary sponsor of the Medicaid SUD Services Rate Adjustment Act, which would invest $15 million in recurring state funds each year to increase Medicaid reimbursement rates and expand coverage for substance use disorder treatment while drawing down an additional $27.4 million in federal Medicaid funds annually.

As we face significant federal cuts, we should continue looking for sustainable state funding and opportunities to leverage federal resources while protecting coverage and access to care. We also need to recognize that Medicaid cuts do not make people’s health care needs disappear. They shift costs onto families, hospitals, providers, and local communities.

My priority will be keeping North Carolinians covered, protecting access to care, and ensuring that our Medicaid dollars are used effectively to support the people who depend on them.

4. The General Assembly has voted to put a constitutional amendment on ballots that, if passed, would put a cap on property tax increases. Do you support the amendment? Why or why not?

I do not support the constitutional amendment. I fully agree that rising property taxes are a major concern, particularly for seniors, working families, and longtime homeowners who may be seeing their housing costs increase faster than their incomes. But a constitutional cap is a blunt instrument that will have serious consequences for local governments and the services our communities rely on everyday.

Property taxes are an important source of local revenue. These taxes pay for police and fire departments, schools, infrastructure, and other essential services. Communities have different needs and different economic circumstances, and local governments should have the flexibility to respond to those local needs. A constitutional amendment would make that much more difficult to do so.

Instead of imposing a one-size-fits-all cap, I believe the General Assembly should look for targeted ways to provide property tax relief to North Carolinians who need it most, while ensuring that local governments have the resources necessary to provide essential services.

5. How would you address the rising costs of housing, childcare, and basic necessities facing North Carolina families?

North Carolina families are feeling the substantial squeeze from rising costs, utility bills, groceries, gas, housing, child care and nearly every other basic necessity. Too many North Carolinians are living with paychecks that have not kept up with the cost of living and inflation, and no matter how hard families are working, and they are working incredibly hard, it’s just not nearly enough to get ahead, let alone get by.

To fix this, we need to work to lower the costs families face every day while also creating opportunities for wages to keep pace. That means protecting families from unreasonable utility rate increases, expanding access to affordable child care and housing, supporting investments that create good-paying jobs, and making sure our state budget puts working families in a position to get ahead. 

6. Climate disasters are intensifying: Hurricane Helene devastated Western North Carolina in 2024, Tropical Storm Chantal flooded the Triangle in 2025, and coastal erosion threatens the Outer Banks. With much affordable housing located in flood-prone areas and FEMA resources stretched thin, what is your plan for climate resilience and disaster relief?

Resilience starts before the disaster. Hurricane Helene made clear that Western North Carolina had been neglected for far too long and that we cannot wait until a disaster strikes to decide how we are going to respond. Communities across our state deserve proactive preparation, whether they are in the mountains, the Triangle, or along our coast.

North Carolina should maintain and regularly update the state reserves we have for emergencies and be prepared to deploy those resources quickly when communities need them. We should also invest in resilient infrastructure, disaster planning, and affordable housing that takes future flood and storm risks into account. The goal should be to reduce the damage before a disaster occurs, not simply rebuild after it does.

We also need to make sure communities can access state and federal recovery resources without unnecessary delays and families who have lost their homes, businesses, or livelihoods should not have to navigate unnecessary and cumbersome bureaucracy to get the help they need.

The most effective disaster response is one we have planned for in advance. We should be proactive, disciplined, and ready to use the resources available to us to protect North Carolinians and help communities recover when disaster strikes.

7. The General Assembly recently passed a new congressional redistricting map. This marks the state’s seventh congressional map since 2016. How do you view the most recent redistricting? And do you support independent redistricting processes, or do you believe the legislature should retain this power? 

The power of a voter should never be determined by a politician or party. When district lines are repeatedly redrawn by the legislature, especially outside the normal decennial redistricting process, it can undermine voters’ ability to choose their representatives and create uncertainty about whether communities will have a meaningful voice in who represents them. 

I support an independent redistricting process because the people who draw the lines should not have a vested interest in the outcome of the elections those lines create. Redistricting should be transparent, fair and centered on voters and their communities, not on protecting political power. Our democracy works best when voters choose their representatives, rather than representatives having undue influence over which voters are in their districts.

8. North Carolina ranks near the bottom nationally in teacher pay. How would you address teacher compensation, and what will you do to ensure a budget passes that adequately funds education?

Teachers are the foundation of our schools, trusted leaders in our communities, and the people giving their blood, sweat, and tears everyday to shape the next generation of North Carolinians. At a time when we know our state is leaving our teachers behind, we cannot keep asking them to do more and more while giving them wholly inadequate paychecks, especially in light of the skyrocketing increase in the cost of living. If we want to recruit and retain great educators, their value must be reflected in their compensation. This is especially true for our veteran educators, many of whom currently make less than new teachers.

One of the specific areas I have worked to tackle this issue is through ensuring that our schools have the support staff they need to succeed. Teachers cannot carry the weight of our education system alone. We need to invest in the counselors, teacher assistants, school psychologists, social workers and other professionals who also help keep our schools afloat. I will continue engaging, as I always have, in the true bipartisan efforts to support a budget that not only allocates enough funding for our educators, but reflects their actual value to our state. 

9. North Carolina currently has a 12-week abortion ban with certain exceptions. Some legislators have proposed further restrictions. Do you support the current law, believe access should be expanded, or would you support further restrictions?

I believe decisions about pregnancy and reproductive health care should be made by patients in consultation with their health care providers, not dictated by politicians and strict legislation. I have consistently supported efforts that protect that principle, including sponsoring the Codify Roe and Casey Protections Act and the Protect Reproductive Health Act. Those bills would have protected access to reproductive health care, protected patients from interference when seeking care, protected access to contraception, and ensured that people helping someone access care are not unnecessarily criminalized.

I also opposed North Carolina’s 12-week abortion ban because it places unnecessary barriers between patients and the health care they need. During debate on the law, I raised concerns about requirements that make accessing care more difficult, particularly for working and rural women who may already face significant logistical and financial barriers.

We should be making it easier for families to access the care they need, and I will continue working to protect the ability of patients and their doctors to make these deeply personal decisions.

10. Federal legislation will ban most hemp-derived THC products, like Delta-8, by December 2026, threatening North Carolina’s hemp industry. Meanwhile, recreational marijuana remains illegal and medical marijuana bills have stalled. What is your position on hemp regulation and would you address the upcoming federal ban, if at all?

Right now, North Carolina has a billion-dollar industry with almost no rules, and a legislature that has spent years refusing to write any. That is a failure of governing, full stop. I support regulating hemp-derived THC, not banning it. But to do that, we need a real plan with critical protections like age restrictions, mandatory testing, and accountability for the industry. 

When it comes to the federal ban, North Carolina should be pushing Congress to fix what it broke. This ban was originally slipped into a government funding bill without a hearing, and it takes effect on a split timeline. The people this ban is going to hit hardest are North Carolina farmers who planted a legal crop in good faith, and the small retailers who built businesses around it. Banning the regulated-adjacent market does not make the product disappear, it only moves it to people who do not test, do not card, and do not answer to anyone.

11. Iryna’s Law eliminates cashless bail, requires mental health evaluations for certain defendants, and attempts to restart the death penalty by requiring alternative execution methods if lethal injection is unavailable. The law also accelerates death penalty appeals. Where do you stand on the death penalty and these criminal justice reforms?

The family of Iryna Zarutska, and all families dealing with the aftermath of violence, deserve and should expect a serious response from their government.

And for about twenty-four hours last year, there was some hope we might get one. In the days following the tragedy in Charlotte, there was real, bipartisan work happening on pretrial release and mental health evaluations that could have made a difference. Then, Senator Phil Berger dropped in a last-minute death penalty amendment nobody had seen. As I said on the Senate floor that day, and as I still believe now, a decent bill was hijacked and muddied for political gain.

The way Republicans wrote the law sets up several core problems that may only make the situation worse. It restricts judicial discretion without giving judges better information, and it orders mental health evaluations without funding a single additional bed, clinician, or court position to perform them. Senate Democrats offered amendments on the floor to pay for it all, but every one of those efforts was voted down by the Republican supermajority.

And when it comes to the death penalty, I do not support restarting executions in North Carolina. This state has a long and shameful history of sentencing innocent people to die including men like Henry McCollum and Leon Brown who spent thirty years on death row for a crime they did not commit. Nothing in this law reduces that risk. If anything, it increases that risk by compressing capital appeals into a two-year window, so, the next time this state gets it wrong, there may not be enough time to catch it.

If we are serious about preventing the next tragedy, as we say we are, we should fund crisis care, fund our courts, and we stop legislating by amendment in the middle of the night.

12. Tech companies are investing heavily in North Carolina data centers, bringing tax revenue but also consuming significant electricity and water resources. How should the state balance data center investment with environmental protection and community concerns?

Every month, people across North Carolina can see in real-time that their power bill keeps going up, while massive corporations that use more electricity than a small city are paying less.

That is the real issue here. We know that a single data center can use millions of gallons of water a day, and the grid upgrades these facilities require are expensive,and are being put on the back of our families. 

And it seems that communities have figured this out faster than the legislature has. Roughly a dozen local governments across North Carolina passed moratoriums on data center development, not because they are against technology, but because they were being asked to approve projects with no real information about what those projects would consume and no assurance they would not be stuck with the bill. That is what happens when the state refuses to set basic rules and regulations: local officials end up doing it themselves, piece by piece, one county at a time.

So my position on this is pretty straightforward. Data centers must pay their own way. That includes the full cost of the generation, transmission, and infrastructure required to serve them, and doing so publicly so ratepayers can see the terms. Mandatory reporting of electricity and water consumption, responsible water consumption so these facilities are not evaporating drinking water during a drought or diverting water from local water supplies, and local governments maintaining the authority to say no or to say yes on their own terms are a few specifics we could pursue today. Any company that cannot build here under those conditions was never bringing North Carolina a good deal in the first place.

13. Give an example of an opinion, policy, vote or action you changed based on constituent feedback. If you have not yet held elected office, describe a time when you changed your position on an issue after listening to those affected by it.

I do not believe that the job of an elected official is to show up with all the answers already in their head, and some of the clearest examples from this past session come from issues that appeared in my inbox by the hundreds, sometimes thousands. Issues like hemp, shrimp trawling, AI data centers, and so on. 

And the volume of responses I get don’t just tell me how people feel, it helps me better understand the effects and unintended consequences of policy proposals for the people who weren’t in the room when a bill was written. On every one of those issues, what I heard helped shape how I approached the legislation, what I pushed for through amendments or in committee hearings, and in some cases whether I thought the underlying approach was right at all.

I’d say it this way. Constituent responses are not just some checkbox I run at the end of the process. They are how I build and inform my position in the first place. Any legislator who tells you their mind has never been changed by the people they represent is telling you they are not listening to the people who elected them.

14. Are there any issues this questionnaire has not addressed that you would like to address?