Tar Heel state had an outsized impact in Republican trifecta
NCGOP Chairman Jason Simmons, seen here at the 2024 State Convention in Greensboro last May, is responsible for nearly every aspect of party operations in North Carolina. Allison Kuhn photo
Before he was sworn in on Jan. 20, Donald Trump had a lot to say about the agenda he plans to pursue during his final term as president.
A president, however, can only do so much by himself. Fortunately for Trump, his electoral victory also included Republicans taking control of the Senate and maintaining control of the House, giving him a much easier path to making what he’s calling “America’s golden age” a reality. While the credit ultimately goes to the voters, North Carolina’s Republican Party operatives had a lot to do with how the federal government will operate in the coming years.
There weren’t many competitive races on the ballot in Western North Carolina last year, and state legislative races were likewise foregone conclusions long before Election Day, freeing up mountain Republicans to focus on bigger things — governor, council of state, and of course, president.
Trump won North Carolina by 3.7 points in 2016, but only by 1.3 points in 2020, leading many to believe the state was in play. Both Trump and Democratic candidate Kamala Harris made multiple visits to the state along with their respective running mates, Ohio Sen. JD Vance and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.
Although North Carolina Republicans didn’t get everything they wanted — Democrats broke the Republican supermajority in the General Assembly, retained both the governor’s office and the attorney general’s office while taking the lieutenant governor and superintendent of public instruction positions away from Republicans — they did deliver on one crucial goal, maintaining Trump’s winning streak in the Old North State.
And, as it turns out, Trump didn’t even need to win North Carolina, as he swept every other swing state the campaign needed to win.
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But you don’t run a national campaign thinking you can afford to lose any state.
In the end, Trump bested Harris by 3.2 points. The work to produce such a result starts at smallest subdivision of the party apparatus.
Rick Stello has served as the chair of the Haywood County Republican party since last spring, after previous chair Jeff Sellers resigned due to business obligations. A leadership change during the heart of election season is never ideal, but Stello approached the work with enthusiasm, party insiders told The Smoky Mountain News.
“It was a pretty big commitment, but I took it very seriously,” Stello said.
Son of a career Navy officer, Stello spent most of his life in Charleston, South Carolina. He attended the University of Florida on a Marine ROTC scholarship, but a nagging high school football injury derailed any possibility of a military career. Eventually graduating with a bachelor’s degree in marketing and then a master’s degree in industrial management, Stello worked briefly in finance, then in manufacturing for DuPont and finally in the construction industry.
Rick Stello. Jeffrey Delannoy photo
In Haywood County, Stello said his first goal was to recruit volunteers to make telephone calls, a tried-and-true method of voter outreach. Targeting registered Republicans as well as unaffiliated voters, around 30 or 40 people worked relentlessly not on persuasion but rather on gentle reminders about voting on or before Election Day.
“I think most people have seen enough and read enough, through TV and through the printed media, to know what the issues were at the time and still are and, we just appealed to them to take a few minutes out of their day and get out and vote, really,” Stello said.
Volunteer efforts are crucial on the local level, as most small county parties raise very little money. Stello said the HCGOP raised about $14,000, mostly through merchandising, but individual donors made contributions ranging from $5 to $2,500.
Other volunteers, around 300 of them, attended events and rallies but most importantly filled critical positions at the polls.
“That was a major push for us, to make sure we had all precincts covered on Election Day, to make sure we had the three early voting sites fully staffed and manned with greeters to hand out our voter guides, which is kind of a thing everybody looks for in Haywood County,” said Stello.
There weren’t any major problems at Haywood County voting sites, but there were a few minor confrontations during which people’s emotions got the best of them, Stello said. The party had a toll-free number to report election irregularities, but Stello said they only used it twice.
“I think all in all, considering the numbers, we had a pretty clean election, a pretty fair election,” he said.
The results speak for themselves.
On the federal level, Trump performed better in Haywood County than he did in the rest of the state. Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-Henderson) also performed better in Haywood County than he did in the rest of his 11th Congressional District overall.
On the state level, not one Democrat won Haywood County, not even the Democrats who won their statewide races; every single Republican performed better in Haywood County than they did in their final statewide tallies. Republicans also won the early vote for the first time ever, a shocking repudiation of Democrat dominance in that phase of the election.
The North Carolina Republican Party’s next organizational level above the county is the congressional district. There are currently 14 of them, each with a chair responsible for providing guidance, organization and resources to the counties contained therein.
Western North Carolina’s 11th Congressional District contains 16 counties. Its chair, Henderson County resident Michele Woodhouse, has one main responsibility — to ensure the district elects a Republican to Congress every two years.
But there’s more to it than that; the fate of congressional candidates often depends on voters showing up for statewide, legislative, judicial and local races, so making sure all counties are working toward common goals is key. Additionally, the heavily Republican 11th District needs to produce as many votes as possible, not just for its member of Congress but also to balance out heavily Democratic votes in major urban centers down east.
Michele Woodhouse, NCGOP 11th District chair, plays an integral role in coordinating county party activities. Jeffrey Delannoy photo
“Before we went into the 2024 election, I gave each one of the 16 county chairs their ‘magic number.’ It was basically an exercise in eighth-grade algebra. I took the number that they had in registered Republicans and then it was looking at census data, population changes, registration changes, what we had done county by county for Trump in 2016, what we’d done in 2020, and then gave them their magic number for 2024,” Woodhouse said. “Then Hurricane Helene hit.”
On Sept. 27, 2024, a major gulf storm pummeled the Southeast, making its way to the Great Smoky Mountains by daybreak and causing an estimated $60 billion in damage across the state.
The brunt of the destruction in North Carolina was within the 11th District. With only a few weeks until in-person early voting was to begin, some polling locations were damaged or completely destroyed, prompting state and local officials to scramble to ensure access to the polls.
“This was an area that delivered big for Trump in 2016 and 2020 and had to deliver for him in 2024. We didn’t know that the electoral college would go for Trump as strongly as it did. We really believed that without North Carolina, there was no path to victory, and we took on the race that way,” said Woodhouse. “Without Western North Carolina, there was no path to victory, not only for him but also for local races and statewide races.”
Absentee ballots were also an issue, as were voters who had to seek temporary lodging outside the county or state where they resided before the storm.
“I was on the phone multiple times every day with the legal team helping with election law reform that we needed in place, letting them know what was happening in each and every one of the counties. I also spent some time talking with my colleagues that had Watauga County and some counties that are not included in the 11th but were impacted by the hurricane, to let them know what we were doing and why we were doing what we were doing,” Woodhouse said. “The 11th Congressional District was the model for the NCGOP on how nothing can stand in the way of getting people to the polls.”
The General Assembly took action in early October for 13 designated disaster counties — most in the 11th District — expanding absentee ballot access and allowing voters to return their absentee ballots to any county’s board of elections rather than only to their county of residence. In late October, there was more action from the General Assembly, mandating additional early voting locations in Henderson and McDowell counties.
In the end, Helene may have had an impact on the 11th Congressional District, albeit minor. In 2020’s General Election, 450,145 votes were cast in the race between Democrat Moe Davis and Republican Madison Cawthorn. In 2024, the Chuck Edwards/Caleb Rudow race saw 432,523 votes cast. Edwards increased his 2022 margin of victory from 9.3 points to 13.4 points in 2024.
Haywood County, which saw plenty of damage to bridges, businesses, homes and roads but no disruptions to polling places, actually had slightly higher turnout and slightly more votes cast in 2024 than in 2020.
Buncombe County, the 11th Congressional District’s Democratic stronghold, was hit much harder by Helene than Haywood was, but voter participation there was mixed. In 2020, 153,352 votes were cast in the congressional race, but in 2024, about 2,500 more people voted. Turnout among registered voters, however, dropped from 78.26% in 2020 to 74.68% in 2024.
Like the HCGOP, the NCGOP’s 11th Congressional District operation raises little money; Woodhouse said this cycle, it raised about $8,000 but gave it all away to storm survivors.
After the storm, campaigns from both parties found themselves policing their tone — it was seen as insensitive to ask for money for political causes and some candidates even worried that putting out yard signs would be seen as somewhat callous, after so many people had lost so much.
“Everybody took a pause on that, because they knew that what we needed to do right then was serve the people of our community, and that’s what we did,” said Woodhouse. “That’s what candidates did, and we’re continuing to do that even after winning.”
Woodhouse said that in the immediate aftermath of Helene, she was on the phone with North Carolina Republican Party Chair Jason Simmons “multiple times each day.”
As chair of the NCGOP, Simmons is responsible for just about everything in the state, party-wise, and interfaces with everyone from the Republican National Committee on down to congressional district chairs like Woodhouse on down to county party chairs like Stello.
“Everything is very interconnected,” Simmons said. “We make sure that we work with our county parties, our district parties, as well as all of our national committees, whether it’s the RNC or its sister committees, with the congressional committee, and this upcoming cycle when you have senate races, the senatorial committee.”
Simmons toured Western North Carolina less than three weeks after Helene hit, mostly just to visit with storm-stricken survivors across the 11th District, but he also had an eye on election infrastructure.
Appointed NCGOP chair right about the same time Stello became HCGOP chair last spring, Simmons replaced previous chair Michael Whatley, who was elevated to the position of RNC chair at the behest of Trump.
Simmons had formerly served as the executive director of the NCGOP and has a long history of involvement with Trump. He was Trump’s state director during the 2016 campaign and went on to serve as chief of staff at the Office of Personnel Management and also as an associate administrator at the U.S. Small Business Administration during Trumps’ first term.
Unsurprisingly, Simmons’ work closely resembles that of Stello and Woodhouse.
“It’s continuing to make sure that we galvanize and mobilize our volunteers to get out the vote and engage the voters, both at their doors as well as at the polling locations, making sure that we had our volunteers — the poll workers and poll observers — to protect the ballot, making sure that the integrity of the elections was in confidence and making sure that we had a high level of confidence to that end,” said Simmons.
The biggest difference between Simmons’ work and that of Stello and Woodhouse is fundraising.
For the 2023-2024 election cycle, the NCGOP raised $10.6 million. More than $2 million of that came from individual contributors, $517,000 came from political party committees and $8 million came from political action committees. Of that, the NCGOP raised $1.7 million during the fourth quarter of 2024.
The party spent nearly all of it, including $5.6 million in operating expenditures, $2.4 million in contributions to candidates and $2.4 million in coordinated party expenditures, with $2.2 million going out the door in the fourth quarter alone.
That money helped secure important victories that had an outsized impact on the national scene.
Over the past decade or so, North Carolina has had so many revisions to its congressional maps, whether court-ordered or constitutionally mandated, that it would have been smart to draw them in pencil.
For the 2022 election, court-ordered maps ended up producing a congressional delegation of seven Democrats and seven Republicans after the Republican-dominated General Assembly drew what the court called unconstitutional maps that would have given Republicans 11 of 14 seats.
When Republicans gained a majority on the state Supreme Court, they drew 2024 maps that favored Republicans and produced a delegation of 10 Republicans and four Democrats in a state Trump won by just over 3 points — or, giving Republicans 71% of congressional seats in what is essentially a 51%-48% state.
Those maps net North Carolina Republicans six congressional seats. Currently, there are 218 Republicans in the House and 215 Democrats, with two Republican vacancies. Essentially, without the 2024 redraw favoring North Carolina’s Republicans, the Democrats would control the House and prove a major stumbling block for Trump.
Gerrymandering, however, is in the eye of the beholder.
“As we continue to see when you have legislatively and constitutionally drawn maps, Republicans can have a great advan tage in North Carolina,” Simmons said.
Federally, the 2024 General Election victories bought North Carolina Republicans exactly two years — two years in which their control of the presidency, the House and the Senate will go unchallenged until Democrats again make a run at the Senate and the House in 2026.
Woodhouse thinks they have far less than that.
“I think we don’t have two years. I would argue we have six months,” she said.
Typically, the president’s party loses House and Senate seats in mid-term elections. Now, after huge wins in 2024, it’s the NCGOP’s job to ensure that doesn’t happen.
“How do we prevent that from happening? We prevent that from happening by implementing good, immediate policies that let people know we’ve made their community safer,” said Woodhouse.
Stello’s goal is to “raise the bar a notch” in terms of organization and volunteerism while raising more money.
“Now that I’ve got an election under my belt, I know a little more on what to expect and what I should expect to do as a leader,” he said. “I’m keenly aware that, unfortunately, everything in this world revolves around funding, so we want to start our funding projects earlier and make them bigger. The other side of that coin is we need to get the people of Haywood County behind us a little bit more on a month-to-month basis, and maybe try to help them understand that we can’t fall back into complacency just because we won the big election.”
Simmons, with the responsibility for an important state squarely on his shoulders, is focused on policy as well as pragmatism.
“There’s a lot of enthusiasm on making sure that we lock in the Trump tax cuts, reduce energy costs, reduce inflation and tap into America’s greatest opportunities,” he said. “Over these next two years, if you’re giving people real, tangible evidence that America’s future is better than it was, they’re going to respond.”
