NC's District 12 Residents Must Wait Until 2015 for a Congressional Representative

One North Carolina Congressional seat will stay vacant until January 2015

Almost 620,000 residents are in North Carolina's 12th District. But this year, they've had no one speaking specifically for them in our nation's capital in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Jason Husser, an assistant professor of political science at Elon University, says congressional vacancies are quite common in the House of Representatives. "They happen all of the time,” says Husser.

Rep. Mel Watt held the office from 1993 until January 2014. He accepted an appointment from President Barack Obama to serve as the Director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency in Washington, D.C.
According to Husser, 12th District residents do have limited congressional support.“The Office of the House Clerk still maintains a congressional staff to assist people dealing with federal agencies and they still have two U.S. Senators representing them and the North Carolina delegation as a whole still has some responsibility for representing the broader state interest.”

The 12th District is in central North Carolina and comprised of parts of Charlotte, Winston-Salem, Greensboro, Lexington, Salisbury, Concord, and High Point. A number of residents living in and around this area agree the vacant seat is not ideal. Bill Hartman lives in Winston-Salem and says, "I think this is taxation without representation. I think there should have been a special election."

Jamestown resident Diane Roberts is frustrated by the long vacancy. "I have mixed emotions about it. I'm not happy about it, but what are you going to do. You can't put anyone in there overnight." One Winston-Salem man did not want to be identified. He wears a big smile, dark sunglasses and a big wide rim straw hat.  "The day after day struggle trying to stay alive and take care of your family, sometimes you don't even want to worry about the political stuff that's going on. The best thing is to keep Jesus in your mind and keep rolling," his smile widens.

The 12th District and the First District, in the eastern part of our state, were created after the 1990 United States Census, when North Carolina gained a district. Both are designed to increase the chance of minority representation in the U.S. Congress.

Critics call District 12 an example for gerrymandering. Others say it enables African Americans to choose the representative they want. Governor Pat  McCrory could have called a special election to fill the seat. But he believes it would have confused voters to run the special election so close to the May 6th primary.

“If Congressman Mel Watts had resigned several months earlier, I think we could have done it. But I had to follow election law and there were a lot of drawbacks to what would have been a double election, which I think would have been disadvantageous to the voters and to the tax payers of North Carolina.

But some who live in the 12th disagree.  Joe Cater says, "give us a choice." Also, according to McCrory, a special election would have cost about a million dollars.  On the primary ballot, there are nine candidates running for the 12 District seat, two Republicans and seven Democrats. “It will almost certainly go to whoever wins the Democratic Primary," says Husser. "It was designed to increase the probability of diverse representation in the United States House.” Voters will have the final say as they continue casting ballots. Polls close Tuesday at 7:30 p.m.