Nobody gave April Montgomery, the independent candidate for North Carolina House District 51 in Lee and Moore Counties, much of a chance of winning. She didn’t show up on reporters’ lists of races to watch. Her district was assumed to be safe for Republicans. After all, Donald Trump won the district by more than 25 points.
Montgomery, though, saw it differently. She had been registered as unaffiliated ever since she moved to Sanford in Lee County about 20 years earlier. She believed people in the community were less partisan than assumed. Unaffiliated voters like her made up a plurality of the electorate. And while the district was part of the GOP gerrymander, it was supposed to have made HD-51 safe from a Democrat, not an independent.
North Carolina doesn’t make it easy for independents to get on the ballot. In legislative races, unaffiliated candidates need signatures from 4% of the registered voters in the district before the primary election. That’s no small task, but it ensures that candidates who succeed are motivated and organized.
For April Montgomery, the process launched her campaign and gave her a foundation to become the first unaffiliated candidate to win a seat in the North Carolina House since 2010 and only the third in at least 50 years. Montgomery gathered more than 3,000 signatures, far more than the roughly 2,200 needed to get on the ballot. In the process, she met voters and heard their concerns. She also built a pool of potential volunteers to fuel her campaign.
Montgomery was the right candidate for a race like this one. She had deep ties to the county’s political and social leaders. She had served on numerous boards and committees and as a volunteer in the public schools that her children attended. She knows the community and the most engaged people know her. Montgomery started the race with credibility among people who shape opinions.
She also did the work. She engaged volunteers with ice cream socials and small house parties across the district. Over the summer, she recruited people to hand-write postcards to voters introducing her as an independent candidate. And she raised the money to keep the organization going.
Montgomery reached out to people across the political spectrum. Democrats who were tired of voting for sacrificial lambs largely embraced her, though some were skeptical. Less partisan independents were enthusiastic, and even a few Republicans quietly encouraged her.
Montgomery kept her message simple. Politics in Raleigh was not working for too many people and she would offer an alternative. She would provide representation to the entire community, not promote the agenda of one political party. She would focus on better jobs, improving schools, and higher wages. It was the right message for an electorate frustrated with both parties.
By summer, Montgomery’s campaign had caught the attention of Raleigh. Her opponent, Republican Charles Taylor, won a contested primary in March and apparently thought his victory was assured. He raised very little money in the second quarter, while Montgomery had a small war chest preparing for the fall.
As the fall campaign began, Montgomery had the momentum. She had a grassroots operation that made sure her candidacy had a presence at almost every public event. Her robust social media campaign was driving engagement across channels. She advertised on the radio station carrying local high school football games and had an ad in the program.
In contrast, her opponent seemed to be focused on a yard sign strategy. The GOP had left Taylor to his own devices and they weren’t working. He seemed totally unprepared when the first mailer hit.
The same week that Montgomery launched her media campaign with a moderate-sized digital buy, a third-party group dropped a mail piece that accused Taylor of being a political insider with shady dealings. A week later, an article in The Assembly revealed that he owned property that housed a video poker parlor.
Taylor screamed. He responded about as poorly as a candidate could. He threw a temper tantrum, filing a lawsuit against the third party and accusing The Assembly of bias. In other words, he drew attention to his problems instead of letting them go away. Every time a story was reported, it rehashed the allegations against Taylor while he complained about the messenger without addressing the complaints.
A more savvy candidate would have understood that in the heat of the campaign and in a world of short attention spans, the story and the mailers most likely would have gone away. Instead, Taylor went into the final weeks of the campaign fighting with an opponent that wasn’t on the ballot.
In the end, Montgomery won by about 1.5%, arguably the biggest upset in a year of upsets. No Democratic legislative candidate won in a district that Trump carried by more than 17 points. Montgomery won in one he carried by about 25 points in 2024, a swing of roughly 27 points and the largest of any contested legislative race in North Carolina.
She did it with a different equation than any other candidate on the ballot. She ran 0.6 points ahead of Roy Cooper, the only candidate in a contested legislative race to outpace him. The median Democratic legislative candidate ran 3.4 points behind him, a 4-point difference from Montgomery. She did it even though 4.6% of voters who cast a ballot for Senate skipped her race, the highest drop-off in the state and about six times the typical rate.
Montgomery did what no Democrat could have done in that district. A rough look at the numbers suggests a Democrat would have lost by about six points. She likely won by garnering an unprecedented number of unaffiliated votes.
Montgomery’s victory offers lessons for both parties and maybe a preview of an increasingly common phenomenon. She benefited from a statewide electorate made up of more than 40% unaffiliated voters with little loyalty to a party. She also fit her district. She’s a community leader who has been engaged with her community more than with politics. She’s moderate in temperament as well as worldview. Her circle of friends and acquaintances spans the political spectrum. She makes the election more about the quality of the candidate than the agenda of a party. If more people like her can win, they will make our politics better.
And perhaps because of her courage and the increasing number of unaffiliated voters in North Carolina the General Assembly will consider lowering the signature requirement to be placed on a ballot
Well there’s going to be a lot of partisan politics she will face very soon!