North Carolina woman running 'can't win' state senate campaign against gerrymandering

A North Carolina woman is running a self-described "built to lose" campaign for a state senate seat in a bid to draw attention to anti-democratic partisan gerrymandering.

Kate Barr, a 42-year-old mother of two, is a Democrat running for North Carolina's 37th Senate District, a seat she says she cannot win because it "is so gerrymandered that I don't stand a chance."

"But we deserve to have two names on the ballot," Barr says on her campaign website. "If I'm going to lose, we might as well have a little fun, raise a little hell, and shine a light on the impacts of gerrymandering along the way."

Barr's platform includes protecting abortion rights, fully funding public schools, and "common sense gun laws."

"All of those would be achievable in our purple state if we had a representative democracy instead of this gerrymandered nonsense," she asserted.

"Why am I losing?" Barr asked during a recent campaign speech covered by The Washington Post. "In a gerrymandered state like North Carolina, it means representatives are choosing their voters instead of voters choosing their representatives."

As the Post reported last month:

Barr centers her pitch on the principle of giving voters an option, even in deep-red districts where the outcome is all but predetermined. Having Democrats campaign in those conservative areas also gives a political boost to [U.S. vice president and Democratic presidential candidate] Kamala Harris in a state where the presidential race is seen as a toss-up and could prove nationally decisive if Democrats can peel off enough voters to secure North Carolina's 16 electoral votes...

Gerrymandering arrived in Barr's backyard last year when the state legislature redrew Davidson—the liberal, picturesque college town where she lives—into a state Senate district with conservative Iredell County for the 2024 election. Davidson went from being part of a district centered in Mecklenburg County—where Donald Trump lost by 35 percentage points in 2020—to being part of Iredell, which he won by about the same amount.

Last year, the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled in favor of partisan gerrymandering in what voting rights advocates called a "blatant attack on democracy."

Barr said in an opinion piece published Tuesday by the Courier that the court decided that "basically, we, the voters in North Carolina, have a right to free elections but not to fair ones."

"That's some real bullshit," she wrote.

Anderson Clayton, who chairs the North Carolina Democratic Party, told the Post that "gerrymandering is a form of voter suppression in every single way, shape, and form."

Clayton added that many North Carolina voters "go into a voting booth every November and they're like, 'Damn, I don't have a Democrat to vote for. You know that means that somebody didn't care, that my vote wasn't worth fighting for.'"

Barr said the fact that she has little chance of winning isn't the point.

"We know we can't win it, because they've made sure we can't," she told one voter, according to the Post. "But that doesn't mean we go down without a fight."