Laurie Buckhout speaks to volunteers in Rocky Mount (Photo: Lynn Bonner)
Before launching into a short pep talk, Laurie Buckhout greeted the 40 or so campaign volunteers gathered at a Rocky Mount hotel with hugs.
“This is my energy right here,” Buckhout said as she circled the room.
All the hugging may seem incongruous to voters introduced to the retired Army Colonel through her campaign ad that features explosions and Buckhout in combat gear. But Buckhout said bonds formed in combat engender a lot of hugging.
“We’re all out there fighting together, and the bonds that you make with your soldiers, especially in combat, are so tight, there’s a lot of hugging,” she said. “You really get that close out there. And the bond of trust is so great.”
Buckhout, a Republican and first-time candidate, is running to represent North Carolina’s first congressional district. Buckhout faces first-term Democratic Congressman Don Davis of Snow Hill. Davis is a former state senator and U.S. Air Force veteran. Libertarian Tom Bailey is also running.
The district stretches across all or parts of 22 counties in eastern and northeastern North Carolina and includes counties in the state’s Black Belt. The district’s median household income is far below the state median, and a higher percentage of its residents live in poverty compared to the state overall.
Democrats have represented the district in Congress for more than a century. Since 1992, when former Congresswoman Eva Clayton won the seat, the district has had a Black representative.
This year, the GOP has targeted the seat for a pick-up. Republicans in the legislature drew new boundary lines that removed the city of Greenville and its pocket of Democratic voters from the district and added more Republican-leaning counties.
The Cook Political Report calls the district a toss-up.
Kay Wildt does not live in the district but wants so badly for a Republican to win that she planned to go door-to-door using her cane.
“She is a Republican and the Republican platform is the platform that is best for America,” said Wildt. The website for the North Carolina Federation of Republican Women lists Wildt as its president.
In last spring’s primary, Buckhout had the support of a Republican leadership super PAC when she defeated Sandy Smith, a candidate who had run for the seat in 2020 and 2022.
Last week, the National Republican Congressional Committee announced it was spending $725,000 on Buckhout ads that, with contributions from her campaign, would support a $1.45 million ad buy.
Campaign finance reports through the middle of the year show Davis outraising Buckhout and with more money left to spend. Davis had raised $3.1 million for the campaign through June 30, and had $2.6 million left to spend, while Buckhout had raised $2 million and had $600,000 left.
Military life
Buckhout grew up in a military family, and said she didn’t mind the rootlessness that’s part of the life of an Army brat.
She attended James Madison University in Virginia on an ROTC scholarship and decided to make the Army her career.
“As time went by, the idea of service just continued to appeal to me,” she said. “Every year, as I was serving, it just very much felt like the right thing to do.”
She retired from the Army in 2010 and founded the Virginia-based cyber security and electronic warfare company Corvus Consulting. The company was sold in 2019.
“We stayed up near the Pentagon after I retired because my kids were in good schools,” she said. “My youngest son really wanted to graduate from his high school up there, which he did in 2020.”
Buckhout and her husband had been at Fort Bragg, now Fort Liberty, during their military careers and planned to return to North Carolina, she said.
Property records show they bought a house in Edenton in 2021.
Policy priorities
Like many Republican candidates, Buckhout makes illegal immigration and southern border crossings a centerpiece of her campaign.
She told volunteers in Rocky Mount that immigration is her top issue, followed by the economy, energy independence, and support for working families and farmers.
“We have to close the border,” she told them. “You know one of the biggest scourges out here is fentanyl. It’s touching every family in some way or another.”
She described Davis as “riding the fence.”
“That’s what he’s going to do,” she said. “He’s painting himself as a moderate, but we know at the end of the day he has endorsed (Vice President Kamala) Harris. He endorsed (President Joe) Biden.”
Davis has built relationships with congressional Republicans and is one of the House Democrats who most often votes against his party. His “ideology score” calculated by GovTrack clusters him with Republicans and to the right of all Democrats and about two dozen GOP House members.
Asked in an interview about improving the district’s economy and attracting good-paying jobs, Buckhout first talks about energy policy, lowering gas prices, and controlling federal spending.
The most important thing a member of Congress can do to attract jobs is to advocate for the district, she said.
“A congressman should be out there wooing companies to come down and see what a great place we have to build jobs, to build factories, to build businesses,” she said. “They should be talking to every representative of every industry out there, getting them to come down.”
One controversial issue on which the candidates differ significantly is abortion rights.
Though she has stated that she favors exceptions in some situations, Buckhout describes herself as “pro-life,” has endorsed the U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal of the Roe v. Wade ruling and is endorsed by anti-abortion groups.
Davis says on his website that he favors codifying Roe v. Wade into federal law and “firmly believes that a woman’s health decisions should remain private between her and her doctor.”
The shadow of Mark Robinson
Buckhout and other Republican candidates are dealing with the fallout of a CNN report that tied GOP candidate for governor Mark Robinson to anti-Semitic, racists, and sexuality explicit posts on a pornographic website. Photos of Buckhout and Robinson posing together were scrubbed from her X account soon after the bombshell report. But they continue to shadow her on the platform, with critics posting the photos in the replies to her posts.
Asked before she headed out to door-knock in late September if she would vote for Robinson, Buckhout said. “I’m going to vote down the ticket.”
Robinson denies posting the comments from about a dozen years ago.
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