LAURINBURG — North Carolina’s southern border used to be dotted with Democratic lawmakers representing rural districts in the General Assembly.
But over the past decade, Democrats have been hard-pressed to win over voters in rural areas, especially in the Border Belt area, including Scotland, Richmond and Robeson counties.
Now, Scotland Rep. Garland Pierce is the last Democratic lawmaker in the General Assembly representing the rural stretch between Charlotte and Wilmington.
Will the midterm election make room in the Democratic Party, and in the Statehouse, for Pierce? Or have Republicans sealed the rural vote?
If Pierce wins reelection, a familiar face will return to the Legislature who has shown a willingness to work with Republican lawmakers and represent a bellwether district that is more moderate on social issues. If his Republican opponent Ralph Carter wins the seat, an economically-disenfranchised community will have a voice aligned with the majority party plus a victory that will embolden the GOP’s stranglehold on rural districts.
“Between the growing numbers of unaffiliated voters in the region and the ongoing challenge of who can best represent them and fight for positive change, it has certainly made it much more challenging for longtime standard bearers,” said former Democratic state party chair and Scotland County Rep. Wayne Goodwin.
Goodwin said neither political party can lay claim to tightly-contested districts such as Scotland County.
“Fortunately, Rep. Pierce, being well-respected and a long-standing lawmaker who has worn many hats throughout decades in the area, is someone who has been able to ride out the wave of change,” he said. “It’s going to take a combination of candidates that know the area and know the voters.”
Contested rematch
Despite his lifelong ties to the area, Pierce’s chances at reelection are a toss-up. His winning percentage over the past 10 years has dwindled roughly two points each cycle.
His race in 2024 against Carter, an orthopedic surgeon, was tight. But Pierce prevailed with 52% of the vote despite a $350,000 contribution from the NC House Republican caucus to the Carter campaign. Can he do it again this November?
The accolades are there: He’s a front-row, 11-term incumbent, the second-longest serving Black lawmaker in the House; he is respected by Republicans and Democrats alike. He’s also the lawmaker who will quickly hop on a conference call to ensure that one of his constituent’s electricity is turned back on.
Pierce, a pastor at Bright Hopewell Missionary Baptist Church with over 40 years in ministry, has been an enabling vote on controversial issues such as abortion rights and youth transgender surgery. And he has voted for Republican-drafted budgets.
“Most people will tell you Garland Pierce shows up,” John Easterling, a lobbyist who hails from Laurinburg, said. “It’s a style of politics that has been long forgotten.”
Rep. Mary Belk, D-Charlotte, said she always sees a group of people outside of Pierce’s office at the General Assembly — often constituents who make the two-hour trek to get some facetime with their representative.
“He’s always willing, always able to give a report,” said Jeremy McKenzie, the Richmond County Democratic party chair who worked on two of Pierce’s reelection campaigns in the early 2010s. “He has done yeoman’s work for Richmond, Scotland and Hoke county.”
“He knows the community; he knows the people,” said Gene McLaurin, a former state senator from neighboring Richmond County. “If somebody says Garland Pierce isn’t working hard, they don’t know Garland Pierce. He’s going to be there whenever he can. That counts for something.”
Changing of the guard
Rep. Ben Moss, R-Rockingham, was elected to the Richmond County Board of Commissioners in 2010, becoming the first Republican on the board in over a century. In 2020, a slate of Republican candidates shifted control to Republicans. Since 2022, Republicans have maintained 7-0 representation.
“On the national stage, Democrats have gotten so far away from what you would a few years ago called the common man, just the average working individual that’s trying to make a living,” said Andy Grooms, a Richmond County commissioner since 2020 who works as a silica miner. “It’s tricked down through all of politics, state, local, city, all of it.”
On the campaign trail in 2024, Scotland County Commissioner Ed O’Neal said the draw of President Donald Trump pulled voters to downballot candidates that were pitching a similar message of economic prosperity.
“They wanted a business mindset to approach the problems of government and the problems they see in the broader world,” O’Neal said. “We’re not here to fight social issues … Right now, we have a lot of complex issues: funding, data centers, loss of factories. We really have to be thinking about ‘How do we change in this new world?’ I think the Democrats have not kept up on those issues, and Republicans are trying to say this is a war of better ideas for creating an economy and benefiting people.”
Scotland County, a tier-one county that previously had the highest property tax and unemployment rate in North Carolina, flipped to a Republican-controlled commissioner board in 2024 when they won three of the four available seats. All of the newly-elected candidates were business owners.
“Although we never talked about it in those terms, each one of us wanted to approach problems that we faced with some rigor from a business point of view and think outside of the box, without doing what we’ve always done,” O’Neal said.
Among the major changes from the new board was the consolidation of the Health Department and Department of Social Services. The move created easier access for residents and avoided duplication of service and time, O’Neal said.
A long-standing priority for the new board was to drop the property tax rate to invite greater opportunity for economic development growth. At a rate of 99 cents per $100 of assessed value, Scotland County couldn’t compete with neighboring counties. In July, the board voted to lower it to 69.9 cents. The county went from being ranked 100th to 77th.
Pierce was the sole ‘No’ vote in June on Senate Bill 474, a property tax reappraisal moratorium on certain counties, including Scotland County.
“It’s going to take a lot of fiscal discipline and increased sales tax revenue; several things to come together in a positive way to maintain that tax rate,” O’Neal said. “We’re certainly going to try … a lot of counties can just throw money at problems because their tax base is so wide. We have to be smarter.”
Those two changes wouldn’t have happened under a Democratic board, O’Neal said. Other attempts for change under Republican leadership have failed; those include an effort to privatize the county’s emergency medical services to save money and a multi-county push to secure funding for a jail where the costs for operations would be split.
“There’s always been a yearning that things stay the way they were,” O’Neal said. “Even when change is good, it can be difficult. We can change our county and make it better, but we’re not going to do it by just doing nothing … These are the kind of things that can change the way we do government.”
The messaging of fiscal discipline, combined with its successful implementation, has resonated with voters in Richmond County as well, Grooms said. When he was in office, the board’s fund available balance hovered around 5%. The rainy day fund has since increased to 50% of its operating expenses, plus the county has dropped $20 million of debt and reduced the property tax rate by an additional 10 cents.
“It’s been a hard road of hope,” Grooms said. “That probably would not have got done, especially with Democrats nowadays because they’ve got their focus on other areas. I’m extremely proud of the six years I’ve been in there and seen that.”
Both Grooms and O’Neal said there’s been a greater focus on economic development initiatives under Republican leadership. McLaurin, who served as the mayor of Rockingham in Richmond County and now chairs the Economic Development Partnership of North Carolina, doesn’t believe Republicans have a stranglehold on attracting new business to the state.
“On the local level, people like former Richmond County commissioner Richard Conder, who was a banker, and David Burns, who was a longtime Scotland County commissioner, were very business-minded,” McLaurin said. “Economic development, truly, is not a partisan issue. It’s a team sport and we’ve all got to work together. I would not agree that one party is more pro-economic development than another.”
Neighboring Robeson County delivered one of the strong electoral flips to Trump in 2024. Forty percent of its residents are Native American, mostly members of the Lumbee Tribe, which has shifted dramatically to supporting the Republican Party following the president’s push for federal recognition. The demographic change bleeds into Scotland County, where 13% of its residents are Native American.
Across Robeson, Scotland, Bladen and Columbus counties, registered Democratic voters have decreased by at least 15% over the last five years. Registered Republicans have grown more than 20% in each of those counties during that span, and unaffiliated voters continue to have the largest net gains in the state than either party.
In Richmond County, from 2016 to 2022, the Republican Party grew 23% while Democrats lost 15% of their registered voters. “That tells y’all where the mindset is of everybody,” Richmond County Republican Party Chair Jerry Austin said at the time. It was a bellwether county at times a decade ago, voting for local Democratic candidates while favoring national Republican candidates.
Scotland County GOP member Charles Brown said there was a core group of around five members for most of the 20-year history of the group. Now, they regularly have 30-40 attendees.
“There are people who have moved into our county from New Jersey, New York, from California,“ he said. “That have come here and joined us because of the issues that we support.”
Competitive House race
Both candidates say their Scotland County bona fides are strong. Longtime residents recognize Pierce as the former brown-uniformed UPS delivery man; Ralph Carter has been a familiar physician for decades.
Pierce is the veteran politician with an affable smile who has pastored his community through intense violence and heartbreak; Carter is a newcomer to politics whose interest was piqued by COVID-19 lockdowns and has testified before the Department of Labor and Department of Environmental Quality over pandemic protocols and water issues respectively. Pierce is a U.S. Army veteran; Carter served in the Air Force.
The Republican messaging has been working in his district, Pierce says. Despite national headwinds favoring Democrats, he knows that his race will likely be within one percentage point amounting to a few hundred votes.
“A lot of things I do I don’t advertise,” Pierce said following an afternoon of putting up campaign signs. “Those who are elected are well-aware that I was a driving force on an issue. That’s why they called me or stopped by my office in Raleigh. I have relationships that make a difference and have been able to deliver … Some people may say they can do this or do that — I’m not knocking anybody. If you don’t have relationships, you can get them, but it takes time. You don’t learn that stuff overnight.”
Being a lawmaker for 22 years means a long public record of voting history that voters can scrutinize. Pierce says there are some more principled votes in his history, but he’s been best positioned to meet the needs of his district. His seat is highly-coveted for Republicans because once they have it, Pierce said, it will be near-impossible to claim back.
“Rep. Pierce has been able to withstand those challenges thus far, fighting for the best interests of his district, which is not always what his political party wants him to do,” Goodwin said.
Democrats cut from the same cloth as Pierce are a dying breed at the General Assembly.
This past election cycle, he saw three of his more moderate Black Democratic colleagues successfully primaried following some of their go-along-to-get-along votes with the majority party. “There’s still a few, but not many,” Pierce quipped.
Carter believes there’s significant momentum this year. As manufacturing jobs have left the county over the last 30 years, he’s seen the slow attrition of voters from the Democratic Party. He said it’s demographically inevitable that rural Scotland County will follow local politics and elect a Republican to the Legislature.
“We’re just the last tree to fall,” he said. “It’s time for us to flip this district.”
The property tax reduction, which Carter supports, was a key factor in getting Great Southern Wood-NC, Inc. to invest $40 million in constructing a lumber treatment manufacturing facility at the Laurinburg-Maxton Airport, he said.
A major framing of the race for Carter is the cleavage in the national parties’ allegiance toward faith and family. His opponent may be a well-respected pastor, but the political party he is affiliated with has become increasingly toxic to those with strong religious beliefs, Carter said.
“The Democratic Party has become secular to the point of being hostile to Judeo-Christian values of rural North Carolinians,” Carter said. “There’s the opening. People find themselves increasingly uncomfortable with that.”
In 2024, the Carter campaign raised nearly $600,000, three times the amount of the Pierce campaign. In what is anticipated to be a downyear for Republicans, Carter hasn’t received and isn’t expecting the same level of support as that funding is steered toward protecting incumbents.
“I don’t think money is driving this,” he said. “It’s back to Judeo-Christian values and how unfortunately [the Democratic] Party has shifted.”
Town Hall support
Three Democratic lawmakers from Charlotte — Laura Budd, Terry Brown and Mary Belk — traveled to Laurinburg in August to tell residents about what’s been happening at the General Assembly and express their admiration of their bespectacled colleague.
For Pierce, local support requires a 93-mile trek from a caravan of politicians from one of the fastest-growing areas in the country to one of the most hollowed out in the state.
There was a candid moment of frankness with the 30 residents willing to spend a few hours learning more about their state government — Scotland County may not be getting what it needs because there is a D next to Pierce’s name. Millions of dollars went to Robeson and Richmond; Scotland received a paltry $500,000.
“They don’t want to do nothing to make me look good,” Pierce said. “There’s a reason why it didn’t happen — politics and politricks.”
He added that he understands and respects the dynamics at play, but penalizing a Democratic district means that Republican voters are disenfranchised as well. “It’s ludicrous and it don’t make sense.”
Rep. Terry Brown said it would be easy for Pierce to get more funding by voting more often with Republicans and betraying his constituents.
“It’s very easy to toss folks a couple of scraps,” he said. “We need to reach a point where Scotland County doesn’t just get scraps, but deserves a seat at the table eating good.”
While Pierce hasn’t always fit the mold and has been willing to break with his party at times, all three lawmakers said Pierce is uniquely qualified to represent his district and it’s important that he keeps his seat.
The brutal reality of politics isn’t lost on anyone.
“This district has been left behind for many years in terms of attracting state money because Garland Pierce is a member of the minority,” O’Neal, the Scotland County Commissioner, said. “I do think that Ralph Carter will be probably more effective in attracting [investment] so long as Republicans are the majority party in the state.”
“Will being in the majority party help Scotland County? Absolutely,” Carter said. “Unfortunately, that is the truth. The Legislature plays that game on both sides … I think I will have the relationships and unfortunately part of that is because [I will] be a part of the majority party.”
So what happens if rural voters stick with the minority representative?
“First of all, we’re not quite sure what the General Assembly is going to look like when we get back,” Pierce said. “If it tightens up the way it should tighten up, then you are going to have to work with everybody. The governor will have more veto power, and if it gets close like some suggest it will, we will have more bargaining power.”
“Don’t assume it’s going to be like that because we don’t know. The Republican Party could be in power, but if it’s a close vote difference, that can make a big difference.”
Editor’s note: This article was originally published by NC Insider/State Affair.