A message from your chair, November 5th, 2026

Brunswick County Democrats and supporters, volunteers, and candidates: I couldn’t be prouder of you than I am today, nor could I be happier for our state and country.

Let’s start with our nation. Did everyone wake up feeling a bit lighter on Wednesday morning? The weight of a decade of oppressive Trumpism (Biden’s term of office notwithstanding) has finally been cast from our shoulders as the American people resoundingly declared, “NO MORE!” We the people rejected Trump’s Iran War, his flagrant corruption and vanity projects, and his dismantling of our economy.

James Talarico won his Senate race, the first Democrat to do so in Texas in 38 years. Ava Hinojosa joined him, defeating the odious Greg Abbott to become the first Democratic governor in the state in 36 years. In Georgia, John Ossoff handily won re-election to the Senate, and Keisha Lance Bottoms will become the first Black female governor in our nation’s history. Voters in Ohio condemned the gross inhumanity of Vivek Ramaswamy, choosing Amy Acton to be governor, and Michigan elected Abdul El-Sayed, our country’s first ever member of the Muslim faith to the U.S. Senate. The “deeply concerned” Susan Collins at long-last got kicked to the curb, and the ghost of Lindsay Graham, in the form of his sister, was finally exorcised from South Carolina politics.

Democrats turned both the U.S. House (NBC News projects at least 259 seats for Democrats vs. 176 for Republicans) and Senate (at least 54 seats vs. 44 seats for Republicans) to a lovely shade of blue. 

Here in North Carolina, Roy Cooper trounced Michael Whatley, Trump’s pedophile-protecting swamp creature, to become our new Senator-elect. And can we all say, “good riddance” to the man perennially talking out of both sides of his mouth, Thom Tillis? Further, our state party’s plan to take back our courts in 2028 remains on track. Supreme Court Justice Anita Earls won re-election, and the three Democratic Court of Appeals candidates (Arrowood, Hampson, and Walczyk) notched victories as well. 

Perhaps most astonishingly, North Carolina, an 11-3 gerrymandered state for the U.S. House, accomplished the unthinkable. To date, NBC News has called NINE seats for Democrats and two for Republicans, with three remaining uncalled, including our own District 7. MAGA’s gerrymandering of this state was a dummymander this year. Karma is alive and well, as is our state party, led by the incomparable Anderson Clayton.

Dr. Kimberly Hardy made an incredible showing, coming within 2,425 votes of defeating David Rouzer as of the end of Election Day. No poll picked her to win in our red district, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) wouldn’t support her. But her grassroots campaign has still come within a hair’s breadth of victory. 

Kimberly’s race has NOT been called, Democrats are chasing and curing provisional ballots as I write this, and she’s entitled to a recount if, after county canvasses on November 13, the margin remains 1% or less (it’s currently 0.7 percentage points).

In yet another unexpected feat, Democrats flipped the North Carolina General Assembly House, racking up wins for 70 Democrats (vs. 49 wins for Republicans and one for an unaffiliated representative). A handful of races may trigger a recount. Republicans also lost their Senate supermajority. For the first time in 16 years, Democrats have wrested control of the state house from the GOP, despite their outrageous gerrymandering efforts. The MAGA-fueled dummymander strikes again.

We know all too well that Brunswick County is a stronghold of MAGA intransigence. For perspective: As of Election Day, Brunswick County had 28,496 registered Democrats, 61,864 registered Republicans and 60,853 registered unaffiliated (and less than 1,000 Green Party and Libertarian voters). 152,051 registered voters in all. Percentage-wise, that’s 18.74% Democrats, 40.69% Republicans, and 40.02% Unaffiliated. In 2024, our share of registered voters was 20.06%; in 2022, it was 21.86%.

Despite the increasing onslaught of Republicans and Republican-leaning unaffiliated voters moving to Brunswick, our number of county and state legislative candidates increased again this year, and they notched a bigger share of the votes than in the two previous elections.

Our 2026 candidates stood on the shoulders of the people who came before them, Davids vs. Goliaths, as James Talarico references, to continue the fight. Their predecessors laid the foundation on which we built our efforts this cycle. We applaud Bill Flythe in particular, who set the example in Brunswick for years, courageously stepping up to run for a county seat time and again when no one else would.

In 2022, our top-performing — and only — candidate for the state legislature (HD17), garnered 37.71% of the vote. We thank our former chair, Eric Terashima, for stepping into the breach at that time. In 2024, our candidate in that same race performed about the same, earning 37.73%. This year, despite fewer registered Democrats than ever, Dennis Breen scored 45.5% of the vote!

Similarly, Scott Nasiff for HD19 earned 41% of the vote in Brunswick, a 6.5% leap forward from the 34.53% scored in the same race in 2024. And in the New Hanover County portion of his district, Scott pulled close to even with 49.91% of the vote, compared to 43.81% of that vote in 2024.

For NC Senate, Rick Combes notched 45.64% of the vote this year. In 2024, our candidate earned 40.01%. In 2022, Bill Rabon for NC Senate ran unopposed, as did Charlie Miller in HD19. Outstanding progress from all three of our state legislative candidates this year!

The stats also shifted positively for our school board (Sue Duncan and Brian Rupp) and county commissioner (Sara Singer and Gary Woods) candidates. All four of them blew past that difficult threshold of 40% — each earning 43+% of the vote. They supported the school bond referendum as well, helping to ensure its passage. That 43% is impressive step forward from 2024, where only one of our four county candidates reached the elusive 40% (Tom Simmons notched 40.3% for commissioner). In 2022, the two GOP commissioner candidates ran unopposed, and our two school board candidates received 35-36% of the vote.

Our endorsed 2026 Soil and Water Conservation District candidate, Mike Barbee, secured victory as the number one vote-getter in the three-way race for two seats.

We united more than ever as a community, grew our numbers, and worked our socks off for a crop of candidates who inspired and motivated us. Thank you from the bottom of our hearts to each and every candidate who stepped forward to run for office. You gave of yourselves and your time in too many ways to count to make our communities and our environment better for all. And you did it with courage, determination, and class. 

And deep appreciation to our volunteers, the best cavalry in the state, for working tirelessly to make our county a little less red, and in so doing, contributing significantly to the victories of Roy Cooper and the judges. You knocked doors, made phone calls, stuffed thousands and thousands of literature drop bags for canvassing, wrote postcards, penned letters to your precincts, hosted and attended meet & greets and candidate forums, talked up our candidates on social media and with your friends and neighbors, poll greeted, and so much more. YOU made a difference!

We continue to push that heavy boulder, composed of hard-headed MAGA granite, up the red mountain that is Brunswick County. More and more people are joining us to move that once immovable object, adding strength and resolve to our efforts. It’s an arduous process, but with every election, we’re getting closer to the top, thanks to all of you. We WILL reach the summit — together. 

As always, with gratitude and in solidarity,

Shelley Allen, Chair

Brunswick County Democratic Party