Tim Moore helped draw North Carolina’s 14th Congressional District, then won it by nearly 15 points. On Tuesday he lost it to a first-time candidate, Democrat LaKesha Womack, who took 51.1% of the vote to his 48.9%, a margin of 6,415 votes out of 288,361 cast, according to the state elections board and local reporting.
Moore was the longest-serving speaker in the history of the North Carolina House. In 2023, as speaker, he voted to redraw the congressional map, and the new 14th swapped much of Democratic-leaning Charlotte for rural, conservative counties. The seat had been held by Democrat Jeff Jackson. The legislature’s map drew accusations of racial gerrymandering aimed at Black and Latino voters, as Blavity noted in its account of the upset. The district now runs from west Mecklenburg County through Gaston, Cleveland, Rutherford and Burke counties.
Womack, a minister and consultant, had never run for office. She is a former national chair of the AME Zion Church’s young adult ministry, and she is chief strategy officer of ASPIRE Community Capital, which works to expand economic opportunity for entrepreneurs that banks overlook. Her campaign was built on what she called “affordability and accountability”: health care costs, Social Security and Medicare, housing and the minimum wage. “I can’t preach about the hungry if I’m not willing to advocate for policies that will eradicate poverty,” she told WFAE.
Her race was also tested in October. A felony summons was served on her over a 2019 rental car that was allegedly not returned on time, a matter filed in January 2020 and not served until weeks before the vote. Womack said she and her son were homeless that year, that she believed the matter was resolved, and that the timing was “questionable.” Critics called it a distraction. Moore questioned her fitness for office. Voters weighed it and sent her to Washington anyway.
On election night she posted: “THIS is what democracy looks like!!! When we vote, we WIN!” Moore had said before the vote that he was “in a seat that’s not considered competitive, but I’m running a race as if I was.” It was competitive. He lost.
Womack’s win was one of several flips in the state. Democrat Jamie Ager also took the 9th District. Together they show the limit of the strategy behind the 2023 map: carving up Charlotte works only while the voters left over stay home. A map drawn to dilute Democratic and Black votes in Mecklenburg did not hold when those voters, and their neighbors in Gaston and beyond, turned out. Democrats now control the House. Whether they use that power to defend the Voting Rights Act is the next test, and Womack’s first.
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