Grass Roots North Carolina / Forum For Firearms Education
Post Office Box 10665, Raleigh, NC 27605
877.282.0939 (Phone) 919.573.0354 (Fax) www.GRNC.org

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Release date: November 9, 2022

NC Gun Voters Win Big

Grass Roots North Carolina recommended

candidates make nearly a clean sweep

[Raleigh] In Tuesday’s biggest election victory, NC gun voters are sending Ted Budd to the U.S. Senate to replace retiring RINO Richard Burr. As a gun shop owner and strong Second Amendment supporter, Budd will be a considerable asset in the Senate.

Judicial races

Equally large were gun voters’ judicial victories, where we made a clean sweep of NC Supreme Court and NC Court of Appeals races. Thanks to victories by strong constitutional conservatives Richard Dietz and Trey Allen, Republicans will now control the NC Supreme Court by a 5-2 margin – something that will serve North Carolinians well as we continue to struggle over redistricting and our as-yet-unimplemented voter ID law.

Congressional races

Despite having a partisan, Democrat-led NC Supreme Court throw out and essentially redraw congressional districts, we were still able to send Chuck Edwards to the U.S. House in District 11. Edwards is a strong Second Amendment advocate who has been of considerable service to gun rights supporters in the General Assembly.

NC General Assembly (NCGA) races

In unofficial results, it appears that gun voters achieved a super-majority in the NC Senate, with 30 seats, and 71 seats in the NC House, just one seat shy of a supermajority. Here too GRNC-PVF was highly successful, winning in 8 of 10 targeted Senate races and 10 of 16 targeted House races.

Big individual wins

The GRNC Political Victory Fund was able to return Buck Newton to the NC Senate, where he had previously been a stalwart sponsor of gun rights legislation. Meanwhile, GRNC-PVF again defeated Christy Clark in Mecklenburg County. Clark is a “Mom’s Demand Action” Bloomberg gun ban advocate who briefly served in the seat before GRNC-PVF defeated her in 2020.

The GRNC and GRNC Political Victory Fund election effort included:

• 1+ million Ted Budd ads delivered to mobile devices via sophisticated “geofencing” apps;
• 1+ million email election alerts sent for NCGA races and judicial races;
• 150,000 “Remember in November” voter guides, with 120,000 mailed directly to voters;
• 60,000 GRNC-PVF postcard election alerts into targeted NCGA and judicial races;
• 98,000 “Peer-to-Peer” text messages in targeted NCGA and congressional races;
• 20,000 automated telephone alerts into targeted NCGA and judicial races.

Said GRNC president Paul Valone:

“I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers who made our victories possible. As an all-volunteer organization, GRNC is able to get more ‘bang for the buck’ when doing independent expenditures for and against candidates, allowing us to better shape a political environment conducive to gun rights.

“Now GRNC is calling upon Republican leadership to acknowledge the gains given them by gun voters by passing an aggressive Second Amendment legislative agenda. In particular, we are interested in joining the 25 states which have successfully adopted permitless or ‘constitutional carry’ laws, as well as repealing our Jim Crow era pistol purchase permit law and closing the ‘church loophole’ which prohibits lawful North Carolinians from protecting their families in churches which sponsor schools. GRNC’s legislative action team will be highly active in pursuing those objectives.”