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Democrats fight to flip 11th Congressional District seat
BY CORY VAILLANCOURT STAFF WRITER he 2018 General Election was a momentous one for Democrats still smarting from the stunning 2016 loss by one of the most unpopular presidential candidates in history to one of the most unconventional presidential candidates in history. Dems came out swinging in 2018, flipping enough seats to take control of the U.S. House of Representatives and breaking the vetoproof supermajority in the North Carolina General Assembly, but one seat they just couldn’t flip was that of N.C.’s 11th Congressional District Rep. Mark Meadows, R-Asheville. Three Democrats — Hendersonville physician Scott Donaldson, Pisgah Forest college professor Steve Woodsmall and McDowell County small business owner Phillip Price — competed fiercely for the Democratic nomination, which ultimately went to Price. Price proved the strongest competitor to Meadows since he first ran in 2012, but Price still lost in 2018 by more than 20 points during an election where Dems made gains across the board, across the country. As the 2020 campaign began in earnest, Woodsmall again took up the fight, starting his campaign in March 2019. For a long time, he was the only candidate, until Mills River music producer Michael O’Shea joined him in October. A few days later, courts demanded a remap of the district, drawing retired Air Force attorney and administrative law judge Moe Davis into the district and into the race on Dec. 2, the first day of the candidate filing period. Davis, who’d just returned to his native state after a career spent elsewhere, served for a time as the chief prosecutor in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, until his concerns over the torture of suspects at CIA “black sites” led him to resign. Price had hemmed and hawed over whether to give it another go, and on the evening of Wednesday, Dec. 18, endorsed O’Shea. Hours later, Meadows stunned the political establishment by announcing he wouldn’t seek reelection to his seat. The next day — the last day of the candidate filing period — Price jumped back into the race, joining Davis, O’Shea and Woodsmall. Since then, the four have been hitting the road across this expansive 17-county district in pursuit of the 11th District Democratic nomination that will give one of them the best chance to flip the seat — which still holds a 5 to 7 point Republican lean — in nearly a decade. As with the serious Republicans in the 8 race there are but minor differences in policy
Smoky Mountain News
February 12-18, 2020
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Steve Woodsmall
Michael O’Shea
positions among the Democrats, who’ve been listening to each other speak several times a week for several weeks now and are even starting to parrot each other on some issues. They’re also well aware of the differences among themselves; those differences are nuanced but significant and will ultimately decide who gets to face the Republican nominee in November.
“We can pass federal legislation to hold the drug companies accountable because they’re part of that problem. They never really disclosed the fact that they knew how it addictive those drugs were and they continue to really misrepresent that,” he said. Transitioning people suffering from addiction to rehab and drug courts instead of incarceration has been slow in coming. Much of rural North Carolina lacks the resources to address the issue in that way. “We don’t do enough in terms of helping people that have those addiction issues and we’re locking them up when we should be giving them medical attention,” said Woodsmall. “We could always, from the federal level, provide funding to support those kinds of programs.” Access to health care is also an obstacle to recovery for many as well as a general quality of life issue that’s been debated since long before the Affordable Care Act of 2010. “I’m absolutely the only one for universal health care, single payer. Not everybody in the race is on that page,” he said. “A couple of folks support the public option, but I’ve done a lot of research on this personally. I’ve gone to numerous presentations by health care professionals and the resounding opinion of the majority is that the dual track system, or the hybrid system as some people call it, will not work for a couple of reasons.” The first, said Woodsmall, is that preserving the private insurance system maintains the profit motive in health care, which hearkens back to his feelings about Citizens United. “The second, just from a purely business standpoint, is that if you have a dual track system, the private insurers are going to be very, very selective as to who they will accept, both in terms of for existing conditions and high risk and high cost patients,” he said. “They will only take on people if they know they can
STEVE WOODSMALL The top five or six issues among Democrats in this race are largely the same, but as a retired Brevard College professor with master’s degree in business administration and a Ph.D. in organization and management, it’s no surprise that Woodsmall takes a 30,000-foot view of all of them. “The polls show that the top issues are jobs and the economy, but when I go out and talk to people, they’re really concerned about health care,” Woodsmall said. “My personal number one issue, as it has always been, is passing a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United. The money issue really is the root cause of basically all the problems we have now.” Citizens United vs. Federal Elections Commission was a watershed 2010 Supreme Court ruling that effectively neutered the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act by allowing corporations, labor unions and nonprofits to make independent expenditures on behalf of or in opposition to political candidates. In 2002, before the Act was passed, Big Pharma made more than $19.3 million in those so-called “soft money” contributions according to OpenSecrets.org, but during the next cycle, that dropped to just $2,250. After Citizens United, that number has ranged from $2.9 million to more than $20 million over a 10-year period during which an opioid crisis has ravaged the nation.
make money from them, which is going to overburden the government system with all the high risk and high cost people.” Candidates on both sides of the aisle agree that the nation’s immigration system is badly broken, including the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) Act, which deferred deportation for children unlawfully in the United States; the Trump-ordered cessation of the program is currently on hold in courts. Perhaps the most insulting failure of the current immigration system has led to the deportation of illegal immigrants who have served in the Armed Forces of the United States; like Moe Davis, Woodsmall is also retired Air Force. But by far the most visible failure is the separation of children from parents who are apprehended during unlawful border crossings. “We’ve got to give everybody who wants it a pathway to citizenship. There’s a right way to do that, but we’re treating people who cross the border illegally as felons and we’re putting them in cages and that’s just not the way to do it,” he said. “That’s not the America I think we want. We fail to remember that this country was founded by dreamers, for dreamers. Now that the old white people have gotten theirs, they want to keep the brown people out, which is absolutely ridiculous. That’s not what America’s all about.” One thing America is all about, is guns — enshrined in the Second Amendment, the creator-endowed right to bear arms has led to the United States having both the highest percapita gun ownership rate in the world (120 firearms per 100 residents) and the greatest number of firearms in the world, almost 400 million or more than the next 42 nations combined. “One of my mantras on the gun issue in this country is, it’s not a Second Amendment issue, it is absolutely a public safety issue,” he said. “Other than the money from the NRA and gun manufacturers, one of the reasons we can’t address that problem is because the people on the right are framing it from the fear perspective that everybody’s going to take away your guns.” Woodsmall favors reasonable, responsible gun ownership and approves of restrictions on certain weapons, magazines and ammunition as well as an assault weapons ban, like the one that expired in 2004. “We have kids doing active shooter drills in kindergarten on the first day of school with Walmart selling bulletproof backpacks,” he said. “You know, 97 percent of gun owners want more restrictions on guns. It’s not the gun owners that are the problem. Going back to my experience as a management expert, a huge part of being able to solve a problem effectively is how you frame that problem. And we’ve got to do a better job of framing that problem for what it is, which is a public safety issue.” Bringing Woodsmall’s management and money-focused platform full circle is the issue of the federal deficit, which has counterintuitively increased during a purportedly fiscally conservative Republican administration to levels not seen since the outset of the Great Recession in 2008.
