Farmer Jamie Ager, the Democratic nominee in North Carolina’s 11th Congressional District race, said Thursday that alleged misconduct by his Republican opponent, Rep. Chuck Edwards, is “sad for the country” and “not the story of leadership.”
Ager made the remarks in an interview with BPR after a rally in Asheville that marked the Democratic nominee’s first major event of the general election.
Edwards is facing a House Ethics Committee investigation for alleged inappropriate conduct toward two female staffers.
“It’s sad for Western North Carolina,” Ager told BPR. “It’s sad for the country. I hate to see these things in our politics, because we need leadership. That’s not the story of leadership.”
Edwards has denied the allegations. His campaign did not immediately respond to BPR’s request for comment.
The 11th District includes most of Western North Carolina. Edwards has represented the district since 2023.
The race is one of the most closely-watched in the country as Democrats seek to retake the House. The nonpartisan Cook Political Report rates it as a “Likely Republican” win.
National Democrats have rallied behind Ager, who owns Hickory Nut Gap Farm in Fairview, even before he won his party’s nomination in March. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee named Ager to its “Red to Blue” program, which supports candidates the organization hopes will win Republican-held seats.
Last month, House Majority PAC, a Democratic super PAC, announced that it has made $4.3 million in digital and TV ad reservations in the Greenville-Spartanburg-Asheville media market, a signal that Democrats in Washington view the race as competitive.
At Ager’s Thursday night rally at Asheville Yards, local bluegrass bands – some of which included the candidate’s friends and family members – played in front of a crowd of several hundred people.
At one point, two dancers with the Green Grass Cloggers performed traditional Appalachian clogging for the crowd. At another, Ager himself picked up a guitar and joined the band for a rendition of a song with the lyrics, “we’re all in this thing together,” written by his late cousin David.
After the performances, Ager addressed the crowd. He said he plans to focus on three priorities if elected to Congress: Hurricane Helene recovery, the affordability crisis and tackling corruption in Washington, D.C.
He made no mention of the ethics investigation facing Edwards in his speech, but he sharply criticized the two-term lawmaker for his handling of Helene recovery, particularly as municipalities across the region have faced funding shortfalls due to the slow pace of federal reimbursements.
“If there’s one job for a member of the U.S. House of Representatives when you’re in a position of all the levers of power in Washington, D.C., it’s to get the money into your community to where it needs to be to get people back on their feet,” Ager told the crowd “And we had a representative who failed us on that job. He didn’t do it. He sat back and watched. We need a leader in this community who’s going to fight for Western North Carolina, and that’s what I plan to do.”
While the Edwards campaign did not respond to a request for comment, the congressman posted on his Facebook page Friday morning that “more relief is on the way for Western North Carolina.”
“Almost $60 million in FEMA Hazard Mitigation funds are headed to WNC this week,” Edwards said in the post. “I’ll keep pushing until every community across NC-11 has what it needs to rebuild.”
Edwards also spoke Monday in Asheville at an event hosted by the National Council on the Arts and posted Thursday about a meeting he attended on tax policy with local small business leaders.
While Democrats and the Ager campaign have not made the allegations against Edwards a focal point of the campaign, Kelly Sheehan, who co-hosted Ager’s rally at Asheville Yards, noted that Edwards’s predecessors – former representatives Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.) and Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) – also faced multiple ethics probes.
“The last three Republicans that we have had represent the 11th District of Western North Carolina in Congress have all been under ethics violations and ethics investigations,” Sheehan told BPR in an interview.” And so, I think that tells you that it’s time to elect a Democrat to go to Washington.”
