Mike Clampitt will advance to the November General Election with a convincing victory over a pair of challengers.

The Republican primary in House District 119 — Jackson, Swain and Transylvania counties — now unfolds against a backdrop of unresolved disaster recovery and rising voter frustration with a legislature that has struggled to deliver a state budget but still found time to strip powers from incoming Democrats and gerrymander another Republican congressional seat at the behest of President Donald Trump. 

Western North Carolina’s next election cycle is already shaping up amid a volatile mix of entrenched incumbents, disaster recovery fallout and deepening national divides, with competitive races stretching from the U.S. Senate on down to county-level offices. 

While marquee statewide contests appear to be headed toward familiar General Election matchups, cracks are emerging down the ballot, where public trust and institutional legitimacy are demanding attention from voters now more than any other time in recent memory. 

Marianna Black Library in Bryson City was an outdated facility by 2010, so staff commissioned a feasibility study. On Sept. 10, the library held a groundbreaking for its $7.1 million expansion and renovation, 15 years down the line.  

In a move more than a half-century in the making, the Town of Canton has announced the pending purchase of a key parcel of land where it plans to construct a new, state-of-the-art flood-proof wastewater treatment plant — ending a long chapter of dependence on a private system operated by the now-shuttered Pactiv Evergreen paper mill and setting the stage for a bold economic redevelopment of the historic site.

Ellen Pitt has dedicated the last two and a half decades to combatting drunk driving in Western North Carolina, and the one of the latest fronts in that fight involves her quest to get courts to use continuous alcohol monitoring bracelets for defendants in “high-risk” DWI cases. 

When Hurricane Helene slammed into Western North Carolina in late 2024, public attention focused on damaged homes, washed-out roads and the rigid bureaucracy meant to help with recovery, but the widespread physical damage was closely followed by a slow-moving economic catastrophe unfolding among the region’s small businesses, farmers and local governments. Now, eight months later, help may finally be on the way. 

Republican Mike Clampitt, currently serving his fourth term as District 119 House Rep., tells The Smoky Mountain News he plans to run for reelection in 2026 despite recent health concerns. In April, Clampitt announced that he had been diagnosed with a rare, serious form of blood and bone marrow cancer known as Myelodysplastic syndrome. 

It’s been a few weeks since I wrote a column for this space. Instead, we’ve been fortunate enough to print your opinions. 

I take it as a sign of a newspaper’s health relative to its relationship with readers when we have a lot of letters to the editor or guest columns coming to my inbox.

On March 6 Jackson County Representative Mike Clampitt filed a local bill in the North Carolina House of Representatives to make the Jackson County Board of Education election a partisan race. If the bill passes, partisan elections for the school board would begin with the 2026 election.