Ready or not, election season is upon us. Early voting for the 2024 primary–sorry–starts in just 42 days.
As the ads ramp up and mudslinging begins, we looked back at historical campaign finance contributions for six state-level incumbents who represent most of the Cape Fear region.
Challengers who filed last month are just now forming their finance committees, so there’s no data to crunch for them yet. For this analysis, we parsed all available election donation records for incumbents. On name recognition alone, these sitting officials almost certainly have an advantage heading into the primary.
The largest combined contributions tended to come from party organizations or the candidates themselves, though influential families and political action committees (PACs) kicked in across sectors like real estate, health care, construction, and energy.
The Assembly's Johanna Still digs into financial records, get details in this week's edition of The Dive: Bucks and Ballots
Plus, WHQR's Ben Schachtman takes a look at the social media firestorm that raged this week around allegations against the owner of Edward Teach Brewing:
On Saturday afternoon, my phone started steadily vibrating, and it kept buzzing all the way through Sunday night–a string of messages and social media tags, all calling my attention to a Facebook post from a woman named Madonna Nash.
The post detailed an unpleasant experience–to put it mildly–that her daughter, Asia, had several weeks ago while performing at Edward Teach, a brewery in downtown Wilmington. Nash alleged that the brewery’s owner, Gary Sholar, had physically and verbally assaulted her 20-year-old daughter, screaming and at one point throwing chairs. Her post painted a truly disturbing picture of Sholar as drunk, abusive, and homophobic. Commenters chimed in, many sharing their own unsavory experiences with Sholar.
A lot of people seemed to want news coverage, in the hope it would inspire a community boycott of the brewery or some other form of accountability for Sholar’s alleged actions.
I didn’t run a story that day, for a lot of reasons, some of which I posted online to let people know I wasn’t just ignoring them. For one, though I spoke to Nash, I hadn’t talked to Asia, any witnesses, or Sholar.
I certainly understand why someone might need time to process a traumatic experience before going to the police. And I also understand the points a lot people made online about the myriad horror stories of women that the criminal justice system has ignored or abused. My faith in law enforcement is far from unconditional. But if it were someone I knew, like a friend or my sister, I would encourage them to go to the cops.
While I was making a case for taking a beat and doing my due diligence, my ethical dithering, as one friend called it, became a moot point. Nash’s post went viral. With nearly 1,000 shares and hundreds of comments as of yesterday, the post reached deep into the local music and service industry scene.
A host of local restaurants, bars, and taprooms responded by dropping Edward Teach beer. Some held figurative fire sales, some just took it off the tap. Another local brewery that carries only its own beer but still wanted to weigh in posted bluntly: “Fuck this place.”
(Sholar also owns the brewery’s sister companies, third-party logistics firm Summit Logistics and equipment manufacturer Summit Industrial, but it’s not yet clear whether the boycott extends to those.)
The local businesses’ response freed WECT from having to dig into the murky water of reporting on the original incident and allowed them to instead just run an article on the boycott. And it made a splash–but probably not as big as Nash’s original post.
People often turn to the news to hold people accountable. But in this case, it’s hard to imagine even the most fleet-footed digital reporter moving as swiftly, and striking as decisively, as online outrage.
Sholar never responded to requests for comment, but on Wednesday evening, four days after Nash’s post, Edward Teach put out a statement on social media, saying the brewery does not “tolerate bad behavor in our establishment from our patrons or our staff.” It didn’t mention Sholar or the specific allegations.
“As we are sure you can appreciate, not everything you read online is accurate. Please know that Edward Teach Brewery takes negative feedback seriously,” the brewery wrote. “Rest assured that we are doing all we can to help those involved in the brief and unfortunately, misconstrued incident two months ago to move forward respectfully and harmoniously.”
Commenting was turned off on the post.
BS: Alright, Johanna Still, thanks for being here.
JS: Thanks, Ben.
BS: So in this week's edition of The Dive, you took a long term comprehensive look at campaign finance,
JS: We decided to take a long range view of each of the incumbent candidates all time financial donations. So basically, what we were able to do is combine multiple years worth of data and rank the donors by, you know, the total amount that they've given to each of our incumbent candidates. And so, from doing that, you can look at themes, see some donors that popped up frequently, see some kind of sectors that seem to have a big interest in our local politics.
BS: Some of the top candidates here, our State Senator Michael Lee, State Senator Bill Raven, and Representative Deb Butler, tell me a little bit about what their overall war chest fundraising looks like.
JS: This part makes sense, right. So the Senator Mike Lee, he has been – he ran a campaign in 2007, f0r the 2008 Senate race, he lost that race. But he has had the longest, I guess, political track record among the candidates and incumbents that we looked at. So his war chest was the biggest, right, because he had the largest total donations, he's and then comparatively, representative Charlie Miller had the smallest. A lot of them donate it to themselves – and they rank in their own top five, which is interesting. The totals include loans, so perhaps they loaned a bunch of money to themselves, or maybe even a family member, gave them a loan. For Mike Lee, his mother was one of his top donors, $800,000 over since 2007. But the party organizations themselves were kind of really the kicker here for each of the candidates, the parties in, especially if a race is competitive, will dump a bunch of money into the local race - and Michael Lee certainly sits in what I would say is probably the most competitive seat – to, you know, pop up advertising and what have you, to ensure that their candidate has success.
BS:Yeah, there was certainly a lot of reporting about the 2022 race between Senator Mike Lee and challenger Marcia Morgan, from the Democratic Party, where over $3 million was raised collectively. And a lot of that came down from the state because both sides thought that this was a race that they could win.
JS: There's also quite a bit of business interests. So a lot of business families are donating, Duke Energy is a big donor, NC Realtors is a big donor – money pumped in representing anesthesiology organizations, which I thought was really interesting.
Also, in our issue, we talked about something that has really just set social media on fire this week. Ben, you took a stab at why this is such a sticky issue, and why the media coverage of it has been probably just a little strange for a typical reader or listener.
BS: So we are talking about allegations, and I want to be clear that these are allegations, made by the mother of a musician who had performed at the Edward Teach brewery in wowntown Wilmington. We've got some of the details on The Dive, I don't need to go into them here, but the mother of the performer posted this on Facebook in a group for musicians. And it went completely viral. And it was very difficult to get a hold of the owner of Edward Teach. Eventually, some people were able to get a hold of the of the – I believe the manager. And Edward Teach posted something on their Facebook page that didn't really touch on any of the details. And so it was kind of a nuclear hot potato for media to report on this story. They were trying to figure out how much they could say without sliding into the world of of libel and slander.
And before anyone could report anything, this viral Facebook post went so far that other establishments around the greater Wilmington area that were serving Edward Teach’s beer started boycotting it. And so that's kind of what the media glommed onto and reported that because – that's a fact. And you don't have to worry about allegations, you can call those those restaurants, and those bars, and they will confirm that they are in fact no longer serving that beer. And that's why the reporting on it really focused on kind of the fallout and not the actual event. So for more on that story, I think we will we'll just have to wait but for now, Johanna Still thanks for being here.
JS: Thank you