Kate Barr’s Losing State Senate Campaign Is All About One Issue: Gerrymandering

By Matt Cohen

Throughout Democracy Docket’s 2024 Candidate Q&A series we’ve featured an array of pro-democracy candidates up and down the ballot in key races — from U.S. Senate candidates to state Supreme Court justices. The candidates we spoke to all are running in extremely close, crucial elections across the country and it’s anyone’s guess if they’ll win come Nov. 5. 

That’s not the case with Kate Barr, who’s running for a seat in the North Carolina state senate. Barr is running in the state’s 37th district, which is one of the most gerrymandered districts in one of the most gerrymandered states. 

Simply put: there’s no chance Barr will win her election. 

But that isn’t stopping Barr. In fact, it’s become the tenet of her losing campaign, which is simply to raise awareness of the negative impact of gerrymandering in her state. She’s going to lose, but she’s raising awareness of why — and raising hell — in the process. 

Responses have been edited for style and clarity.

Your entire campaign is built around the reality that you probably won’t win this election. Why run in the first place?

I’m going to amend that to say certainly won’t win. I’m running because I fundamentally believe voters deserve a choice. And even when the deck is stacked so heavily in favor of one candidate — as it is in our gerrymandered district and across our gerrymandered state — we still benefit from having two names on the ballot. That’s how you get incumbents that have to come home and defend the choices they’ve made and try and earn their jobs back. So basically because I think the voters deserve a choice. 

This is the first time you’ve run for public office. Did you ever see yourself running for anything like this? 

Gosh, no. In 2016 when [former President Donald] Trump won, I sort of thought, “Well, anybody can be an elected official.” But I didn’t really think it was gonna be possible for me. I have two young kids, a six-year-old and an eight-year-old. Both of them have their own share of health concerns. A lot of life reasons that it just was going to be hard to think about running for office. 

And then through the years, my rage about gerrymandering built. And so when this seat and this opportunity came up and I knew I could run a truly honest and transparent campaign about gerrymandering and about the effect it’s having on our elections, I was like, “I guess we just got to do this.”

Do you plan to run for public office again, maybe for a seat or another position that may be a little bit more winnable? 

I do not plan to do that. My plan is to help other candidates run like this in gerrymandered districts across the state, and maybe someday across the country. I really think every single voter would benefit from having more competitive voting districts. So that’s what I’m passionate about. I think I can do more good working outside of Raleigh than I can inside. 

North Carolina has seen its fair share of anti-voting and anti-democracy laws pass in recent years — like S.B. 747 and S.B. 749— thanks to the Republican majority in the General Assembly. How have these harmful policies and laws affected you or your community?

I want to address two parts of this question. First, there is a sensational documentary called Slay the Dragon. I think you can get it on Amazon Prime or Netflix. We’ve done a couple of screenings of it as part of the campaign. It’s about gerrymandering in Wisconsin, Michigan and North Carolina. And one of the things that it does very clearly is draw a line from REDMAP, which was started by Republicans in 2010, to gerrymandered districts, to the suppression of voter rights, to the election of Trump in 2016. So there is a very strong connection between gerrymandering and our loss of rights as voters. That’s the big picture. 

Then when you talk about gerrymandering’s impact on our communities and in our backyards, it’s everywhere. The state legislature in Raleigh determines all kinds of things about how our communities work — how the roads are funded, how town governments are allowed to write ordinances about what can be developed and what can’t and what requirements towns can put on developers. One of the most interesting ones we’ve seen in North Carolina is the Republican supermajority has chosen to lower state income tax, state corporate tax and state franchise tax. Even though we’re a growing state, we’ve lost $224 million in tax revenue. That’s not great because our towns and communities rely on those tax dollars to fund things like our public safety —  fire, police, water, infrastructure improvements. Things like that. 

And town governments, the only way they can raise money for those needs is to jack up your property tax. So we have actually seen tremendous property tax increases in North Carolina. One of the counties in my district, their property tax has gone up 28%. And that’s because Raleigh is supposedly lowering their taxes, but what they’re really doing is taking money out of our communities and forcing us to pay more property tax to cover those losses. 

The New York Times did a really, really great article that connected the housing and building lobby to relaxed building codes in the western part of our state, which then led to many of these houses sliding down mountain sides during Hurricane Helene. And we see that the housing and building lobby spends twice as much money on Republican candidates as they do on Democrats. And so it’s like a cozy little arrangement that has actually really impacted people’s lives and maybe has even resulted in some folks dying. 

That’s terrible. If the maps in North Carolina weren’t so gerrymandered, people could elect lawmakers who would pass laws to make arrangements like that criminal. 

Yeah. It ought to be criminal.  We’d at least be able to hold them accountable for the bad laws they passed. 

Among many other ways Hurricane Helene has impacted North Carolinians is that it’s impacted millions of people’s ability to vote. And yet state Republicans don’t want to accommodate these extreme circumstances to ensure everyone can vote. Do you think this extreme stance will push more people in your state to vote for Democrats, or at least not vote for the GOP?

I think generally you gerrymander maps, or you sort of put your thumb on the scale to try and keep power when your ideas aren’t popular. If you have popular ideas, you don’t need those kinds of shenanigans because people will choose you. That said, I also think there are a lot of folks who feel left behind by the Democratic Party and with good reason. In our state, the Democratic Party got really invested in urban and suburban areas and really forgot about some of those rural voters who have been a part of the party for decades. We screwed it up and we need to do a better job reaching them. 

There are also folks who are pretty entrenched in their views when it comes to conspiracy theories and rigged elections and things like the ways that we’ve had to flex our voting systems in order to accommodate voting in Western North Carolina this cycle. It’s necessary and it’s the right thing to do. But it also can be easily twisted to feed the narrative that Democrats are manipulating the voting systems.

Basically what’s happening in this answer is that we are so close to the election. We’re like two weeks out and I am so nervous and I don’t even want to say out loud that I think people might be voting more Democratic because what we really need is to just show up and find out. 

I think your answer really taps into a lot of the anxieties that people have going to the ballot box this year. A lot of people, particularly in the rural parts of the state, aren’t really thinking in terms of the two-party system, voting either Democratic or Republican. They’re thinking more that they want to vote for the person who’s going to best help their interests.

I think the Democrats have better ideas and better plans to help folks in the rural parts of our state. We just have done a really dreadful job of getting the word out there. I think this year, in particular, I’ve seen that change a lot. And so I’m hopeful, but I’m also super nervous. 

Besides running to raise awareness of North Carolina’s severely gerrymandered maps, what issues are central to your campaign and why? 

This campaign is really fundamentally about fair maps. I hope one of the things that we’re doing is demonstrating a different way to communicate with voters and a different way to reach voters. I believe that folks want to see authentic candidates. The benefit, I suppose, of running a campaign that can’t win is that I am just myself. Like, this is what you get. My campaign sign is a hot pink sign, because I love hot pink — that kind of thing.

I actually think we would really benefit from candidates running with less concern about convincing every single voter and more concern with presenting their ideas, having a reasonable exchange of ideas with their opponents and letting the voters choose. So that’s part of it. 

And we have to show up where voters are instead of expecting voters to come to us. So that means I’m on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook. I just got back from a civics class in Statesville where we were talking about gerrymandering. It’s the job of a candidate and of a state Senator or state representative to work hard to find their constituents and to learn what their constituents want.

I also absolutely believe in abortion as healthcare and reproductive freedom. I believe that we should be able to send our kids to school without fear of them being shot and that there are a lot of steps we can take to prevent gun violence that we just aren’t taking. And perhaps near the top of my list, I believe we need to pay teachers more. North Carolina used to have one of the best public school systems in the country. And we can be back there but we have to appropriately allocate our budgetary dollars in the public schools instead of sending them all out to charter and private schools. 

The thing about gerrymandering, to me, is I believe everything I care about is possible if we have fair maps. I believe if we have competitive districts that many of the things that I just talked about will come to pass in our state legislature because we also see that the majority of North Carolinians want those things. It’s just because of the way that gerrymandering drives candidates and politicians to the extremes in order to prevent a primary. Because the primary, in a gerrymandered district, the primary is the real election. And so Democrats can’t vote in Republican primaries. There’s no incentive to be a moderate Republican in your primary. You need to be farther to the right so that you don’t get outflanked. 

As a result, we see more extreme policy coming out of Raleigh than what people say that they want, what voters say that they want. That’s all. I can’t tease it out from gerrymandering. That’s the core, but there are a lot of other things that I think are important. 

I think you are absolutely correct. Thank you for walking me through your campaign, Kate. I’d say good luck, but you won’t need it. I hope you are at least having a hell of a party for election night. 

I’m the least stressed candidate coming into election night. We absolutely are having a party. I have a bottle of vodka with the words “fascist tears” written across the front, just sitting in the freezer ready to go.