Second-term state Senator Graig Meyer is vacating his seat this week to take a job as executive director of the North Carolina Justice Center. Four candidates—including State Rep. Allen Buansi, State Rep. Renée Price, and state Democratic Party Vice Chair Jonah Garson—are vying to finish Meyer’s term and replace him on the November ballot.
The replacement process is admittedly a bit “squirrely,” Orange County Democratic Party Chair Lynn McGee told INDY this week.
Under North Carolina law and Democratic Party procedures, the seat will not go to a special election, but will be filled by a committee consisting of two delegates from each county in the district (Caswell, Orange, and Person). The committee will meet this Saturday in a public virtual meeting to make their pick for Meyer’s successor, and the new senator will be sworn in no more than a week later, well before the short session starts in late April.
The members of that committee are picked in regular elections at county party conventions, independent of any vacancy that needs filling. It just so happens this year that Meyer’s resignation and the elections to the committee to appoint his replacement happened in the same month, adding some contention to an ordinarily unnewsworthy process.
Delegates to the Orange convention this weekend even amended the rules to compel committee members to announce who they were planning to vote for, but none would announce a decision, McGee said.
“I know people were frustrated,” McGee said. “But you can’t waterboard someone to make them tell who they’re going to vote for.”
Local politicos had eyes on Orange County’s committee selection in particular because committee members’ votes are weighted by population. Orange’s two delegates each get 246 votes. Person’s each get 65; Caswell’s each get 38. That means the Orange County committee members, if they agree on a candidate or even if one picks up an ally in another county, can handily control the vote.
Kenneth Woods, one of those Orange County king-or queen-makers, told INDY that he would favor “someone that’s intelligent, someone that’s a leader, someone that will speak out against wrongs,” but declined to name a name. “It’s going to be a fair election. It’s going to be fair, it’s going to be open, and there’s not going to be any hanky panky from anyone.” (INDY attempted to reach Orange County’s other committee member, Bonnie Bevan, but hadn’t heard back as of this writing.)
The three Orange County candidates—state party vice chair Garson and state House representatives Buansi and Price—likely have an advantage over Kenneth Perry, who serves on several local government boards in Person County, given Orange’s massive vote share on the committee and their name recognition.
Like a lot of Orange County politics, the short campaign for this appointment feels like a fairly polite family argument: Price was elected to Meyer’s former House seat in 2022 when he ran for the Senate seat he’s now vacating, Price and Buansi serve together in the House now, Garson and Buansi previously ran against each other for Buansi’s current House seat (“Orange County Voters Face a Tough Choice: This Good Guy or That Good Guy?” reads the 2022 INDY headline about that race).
Since waterboarding is apparently discouraged, it’s difficult to say who Woods and his counterparts will pick on Saturday to fill the seat. But Garson in particular may have sought an upper hand by moving aggressively to lock down endorsements from many local Democratic Party notables and flood his website and social media with the evidence. The appointment, he told INDY, is “about fielding the best team of complementary strengths and experiences and maintaining seniority where we can for that collective progressive strength,” which means keeping Reps. Buansi and Price where they are in the House.
“I have deep relationships across all three of these counties, I know these counties, and I know rural North Carolina well from organizing all across the state,” Garson said. “When our local jurisdictions are trying to do the best with the resources they have, we just have to have a legislator who brings in an organizer’s orientation and perspective and experience.
Buansi, if he doesn’t win the Senate seat, is likely to have an easy reelection to his House seat in November. He told INDY that his Senate candidacy is built around his experience advocating for rural parts of the state, especially as a lawyer at the UNC Center for Civil and Human Rights.
“I feel like I’m uniquely situated to hit the ground running,” Buansi said, citing the need for “steady hands” amid recent upheaval in the Senate with the intra-party usurpation of Phil Burger, the state’s (until recently) most powerful Republican lawmaker “I’ve been spending a lot of time just talking with people across the state Senate district so that folks can get a feel for who I am, but also so that I can learn from them about what’s important to them.”
Price was first elected to the Orange County commission in 2012 before her election to the House in 2022 and easily fended off a primary challenger this month. She told INDY that her campaign is built on her record as a fighter for freedom and justice, even though it’s “difficult to actually make progress” in the state legislature’s Democratic minority. For example, she’s touted her bill to honor the Tuskegee Airmen, which passed unanimously in the House but has stalled in the Senate.
“We’re a long way from a judicious system here in the United States when we see people being incarcerated without fair trial, when we see women’s rights being taken away from us, LGBT rights,” she said.
Kennedy Thomason contributed reporting.
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