Laura Fjeld: a smart Democrat in a Congressional district far too sensible for her novice Tea Party opponent.
North Carolina's freshly-gerrymandered 6th Congressional district, running just below the Virginia border in NC's central Piedmont and Triad area (
map) was engineered by the Republican super-majority of North Carolina's state legislature in 2013 as a safe Republican haven for octogenarian incumbent Howard Coble, a doddering fixture of local politics. But with Coble's announcement of his intention to retire at the end of this term all hell broke loose among NC-06 Republicans.
Most observers considered Rockingham County District Atty. Phil Berger Jr. (R) a shoo-in for the Republican nomination to replace Coble, based largely on Berger family ties (his father is the powerful president pro tem of the NC state senate). And indeed, Berger won the most votes in first-round voting (34%, versus 25% for second-place Mark Walker, a politically inexperienced Southern Baptist minister), but was forced into a run-off with Walker...who proceeded to surprise pretty much everyone in the state by beating Berger handily (taking 60% of the vote in an extremely low-turnout run-off in which Walker's parishioners powered a small but decisive GOTV effort).
So what does this inside-Republican-baseball snapshot have to do with Democratic challenger Laura Fjeld? Plenty -- if you consider the opportunity to flip a Republican House seat Democratic this November to be important. Read why below the fold.
Laura Fjeld (pronounced "Fyeld"), like her Republican opponent Walker, is also a political newcomer. Still, she comes to the race with otherwise impressive credentials: most recently as Vice President and General Counsel for the seventeen campus University of North Carolina system and, before that, as an attorney in two of North Carolina's most prominent law firms. Her husband, Jon, is the Director of the Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at The Fuqua School of Business at Duke University.
Fjeld's issues in this campaign include strong support for public education -- particularly important here in North Carolina which, according to the NEA, leads the nation in public school enrollment growth but also in the rate of decline in teacher salaries, with the average teacher's salary ranking a shocking 46th in the nation. Fjeld also supports increasing the minimum wage, observing that "There are 700,000 workers in North Carolina who would greatly benefit from an increase. Most are women who are supporting a family." Her other issues include pro-choice, pro-ACA, environmental protection and anti-billionaire-subsidy positions that she consistently frames in a smart, nuanced way designed to speak to the self-interest of (rather than turn off) voters in this admittedly conservative district.
Still, the Cook Political Report rates NC-06 a "Solid Republican" race for 2014 based solely on past presidential voting history (there has been no public polling in this race so far). So does that mean that Fjeld's candidacy is a forlorn hope? Hardly. First off, Cook's analysis can't fully take into account the implications of the fact that several outlying bedroom communities for Duke University suddenly found themselves ejected from David Price's (D) Democratic district into the new NC-06, upping Fjeld's base here.
Secondly, thanks to the long, bruising Republican primary between Walker and Berger, Fjeld entered the race in July with six figures worth of cash on hand, versus just $23,000 for her opponent, Walker. The Fjeld/Walker race hasn't attracted any outside PACs to weigh in with dark money (yet, anyway), so Fjeld is that rarity among Democrats today, a candidate playing on a level financial field. She's endorsed by EMILY'S List, the NC AFL-CIO, her district's local of the International Association of Firefighters, and a host of major names in NC politics.
Finally -- and this is the crux of the matter -- Walker is a rabid tea party loon whom Fjeld has begun to successfully paint as "too extreme" for the good sensible folk of NC-06, and she's right. Walker wants to impeach Obama, replace the federal income tax with a huge federal sales tax, repeal Obamacare, 'reform' entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security, and cut EPA regulation to enable more intensive production of coal, oil, and natural gas. He opposes "the lavish entitlements that are devastating to the family" and seeks to "restore and rebuild the family by reducing the number of American families dependent on taxpayer funding." More generally, he seeks "to return to Reagan’s 'Shining City on a Hill.'" Walker's only significant endorsement is from FreedomWorks. And although Walker is an NC resident of many decades now, NC state online voter data reveals that Walker couldn't even be bothered to vote in an election prior to 2010.
Slate's David Weigel recently caught an old Walker Facebook post in which the tea-partier wrote: "I had the privilege of spending an hour with an African American male who grew up in the inner city" and went on to whitesplain, "These communities don't choose this lifestyle, they simply have never experienced anything else. In other words, they've been educated to believe that the federal government is designed to provide for every aspect, need or want of their lives." Walker also adamantly opposes a path to citizenship.
Fjeld and her campaigners are smart enough to understand how to explain to voters how Walker's extremist positions would devastate their lives if put into action. And NC-06 is a comparatively inexpensive media market, making it feasible to conduct that kind of educational campaign here. But while inexpensive it may be, free it's not. That's where your donation to Laura's campaign could make an out-sized difference.
It's do-able: let's flip this thing. Donate!
