A Closer Look at Lesser-Known Candidates
Emily Cobb and Jasper Everingham | November 3, 2022
Midterm elections are on Nov. 8 and the Bonner Leaders Crew is taking steps to increase political literacy on the Warren Wilson College (WWC) campus. Mia Thompson, Sabine Costello-Sanders and Rylee Langdon, who are on the Bonner Leaders Political Advocacy Committee, put together meeting times to gain a better understanding of where candidates stand. They and members of the Echo crew spoke with Michelle Lewis and Matthew Hoh, N.C.’s Independent and Green Party candidates for the U.S. Senate.
Also on the ballot will be Cheri Beasly (D), Ted Budd (R) and Shannon Bray (Libertarian party), although Bonner Leaders Crew was unable to set up interviews with Beasly, Budd or Bray.
Beasly is the first Black woman to serve as a judge on the N.C. Supreme Court and is running a grassroots, no PAC campaign. Endorsed by President Obama, she is driven by “the pursuit of justice and fairness, and a relentless refusal to see it abandoned.”
Budd, endorsed by President Trump, is currently a member of the U.S. House of Representatives and is running on a pro-gun, laissez-faire platform.
Bray, who has never held elected office, is running on a number of nationalist conservative policies around border security and foreign policy.
Both Hoh and Lewis’s values closely align with democratic ideals although both candidates also emphasized how they were running for parties outside of the two-party system.
“I really am looking to play the role of a bridge builder,” Lewis said. “That has been a huge portion of my work over my lifetime.”
While Lewis said that she would use her senate seat to build bridges, Hoh said he would use his to disrupt the status quo.
“I don’t intend to work with any majority; I will not caucus with either party,” Hoh said. “My allegiance is to the people of N.C. who put me into office and not to either party, either majority leader, the white house, the money behind it all, et cetera.”
Lewis’s campaign slogan is “Bringing North Carolina Together.” To her, that means making sure there are equitable opportunities, making sure people have a living wage and creating a stable economic system for everyone in N.C. Like Hoh, Lewis wants to focus on helping communities in N.C. rather than any political party.
“Crime divides communities, drugs divide communities,” Lewis said. “When you look at those things that are contributing underlying factors, often those things are tied to economics.”
Hoh noted how even a single senator can force their voice to be heard and emphasized that he sought to be a “disruption’ in the U.S. Senate.
“There will be no surprises when I stop things in the Senate,” Hoh said. “When I do justice [like] Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema do, no one will be surprised. Just as Manchin does it for the oil and gas industry, for the coal industry and Sinema does it for Wall Street, I’ll do it for working families.”
Lewis is also a candidate who is wanting to make a change to the bipartisan system. She feels as if the current system does not represent her. This is why she decided to run as a write-in candidate unaffiliated. She said that by running unaffiliated, she could truly represent the people of N.C.
“I did not want to attach another label on myself,” Lewis said. “There are so many labels that we already have. When you begin to attach additional labels to yourself, I just do not think it helps you.”
Hoh also cast himself as a true emissary of the people of N.C., stating his belief that both the Democrat and Republican parties are out of touch to a degree that he is not. Hoh promised to be a force for change exterior to either party.
“The establishment, the parties in power, the system, for lack of better words insulated themselves,” Hoh said. “You can have something like occupy [Wall Street], you can have something like the George Floyd protests, the Black Lives Matter movement [that] goes back to 2014… and what have we seen in terms of tangible change?”
Hoh promised to be different. Stressing the importance of legislative action to back social movements, Hoh said he could use his position to create lasting change.
“As we see, we can have 25 million people get in the streets after George Floyd was killed, and what does that actually change?” Hoh asked. “If there's not a political component to it, if there's not an electoral component to it, what actually changes?”
Lewis, formerly a police officer, decided to run for office after the killing of Andrew Brown, a Black man who was shot by police. Lewis participated in the protests and was involved in conversations with the Attorney General, Josh Stein, about the incident. Lewis said that this opened her eyes to recurrent problems regarding law enforcement in the Black community.
“Since I left law enforcement, it has been really important for me to advocate for people in communities and to work on helping law enforcement know how to work better in communities,” Lewis said.
While Lewis is no longer on the force, she wants to make improvements to the law enforcement system such as mental health care, adequate training and adequate pay.
Contrasting Lewis’s primary focus on social reform, Hoh emphasized the environment as a key issue. He expressed repeatedly that he is very willing to disrupt the congressional process for a range of issues, including environmental reform.
Speaking passionately about the environmental reform he believes needs to happen, Hoh blamed Washington, D.C. for not taking enough action to stop the climate crisis.
Hoh said that if elected, he would aim to take on climate problems in both the nation as a whole and in North Carolina specifically. He pointed to his party’s Green New Deal as a roadmap for how he would set his climate policy.
“This has to be treated in a way that we treat wars,” Hoh said. “The amount of money thrown at [the problem], the person power, the institutional involvement needs to be the same way. Oftentimes where the Green New Deal is described, it's described as a World War II level effort. If you read about what Washington, D.C. was like in World War II, how the whole town was transformed with one singular purpose, that's what needs to occur for the Green New Deal.”
Lewis has a background that she claims affected some of her career choices, like spending portions of her adult life working in environmental fields, as well as her interest in improving farming practices and educating farmers to be more environmentally conscious. Lewis started working for the National Park Service when she was 14 in a program called Youth Conservation Corps. She was hired into a permanent job in the Park Service her freshman year of college at 17.
Lewis mentioned smaller practices that could be made when it came to the environment, like “working with farmers to help farmers come up with better solutions in their communities.”
Lewis — because she is a write-in candidate — has more of a stance when it comes to the current electoral system in the U.S., and struggled to effectively navigate it. For example, Lewis said she was originally told that she did not have to pay filing fees, even though she tried to. However, due to her not paying them, she said the N.C. board of elections tried to keep her from being able to effectively run by not listing her information. Because of this, she experienced difficulty receiving signatures and support from the public.
“The system is convoluted,” Lewis said. “This will be a campaign that will change ballot access laws in the state. I already had the state legislator reach out to me and say, you know, on the other side of November, we want to talk to you about how ballot access laws need to change for the state.”
Lewis is also passionate about mitigating the opioid crisis. She lives in the Outer Banks, where there are some of the highest addiction and overdose rates. Lewis wants to set up a network of care centers that are spread all across N.C. to combat addiction.
“People need to be able to be connected with family while they are in treatment and in that time after because the support network makes all the difference in the world in whether or not a person succeeds,” Lewis said.
The current healthcare system in the U.S. is also something Lewis is unhappy with. Lewis and Hoh both said they would prefer a more universal healthcare-based system and are frustrated with the lack of adequate healthcare and affordability.
“[The Green Part believes] health care is a human right,” Hoh said. “If we believe something as a human right, then that cannot be denied to anybody, simply because of costs, because of money, because of bills that have to be paid.”
Lewis said she does not identify with either bipartisan stance on reproductive healthcare when it comes to abortion.
“Women should have access to abortion,” said Lewis. “But I am not in favor of abortion as birth control. Both men and women need to have adequate access to birth control.”
Lewis has seen a change in politics and the country as a whole and wants to step in. For Lewis, the best way she can do that is by running in elections. In her eyes, this will inspire others to run, change the two-party system in the U.S., create the change she desires and improve communities throughout N.C. While Hoh avoided acknowledging the possibility of his defeat entirely, using phrases like “when I win,” Lewis is unphased by the idea of losing.
“I am gonna run again and train other unaffiliated people to run for office,” Lewis said.
Students can use a voter lookup form located on the MyWWC website to check their registration as well as find the street address for their residential building. Transportation Crew is providing shuttles to early voting locations on Nov. 5 and same day voting shuttles on Nov. 8.