Exclusive Interview: US Sentate Candidate Jeff Jackson

Jeff Jackson — current state senator, major in the Army National Guard, UNC-Chapel Hill Law school alum, and, most recently, one of the two main Democratic candidates vying for the United States Senate seat vacated by the retiring Richard Burr next year — paid “the Pit” at UNC a visit last week as part of his statewide college town hall tour. 

Jackson has made statewide voter outreach a focal point of his campaign, and has been utilizing his strong social media presence and a strategy of holding 100 town halls in 100 counties to connect with voters across the state. As this was the second town hall at UNC-Chapel Hill, with a third planned for next week, and the seventh of his college town hall tour, Jackson has clearly made connecting with young voters a priority for his campaign, which may have a significant effect upon midterm election turnout rates in Orange County.

In his town hall last week, Jackson addressed a crowd of around 500, comprised primarily of UNC-Chapel Hill students. He touched on gerrymandering, climate change, the rural-urban divide, criminal justice reform, mental health, and the increasing permeance of politics in public schools, in both his comprehensive introductory address and answering students’ questions afterwards. The following is a transcript of Jackson’s town hall questions and answers section and an interview with Staff Writer Rishi Aila, edited for clarity.

Rishi Aila: After a transgender student, allegedly raped two female students in Loudon County, Virginia. And you know, this has impacted the Virginia governor race pretty significantly, in the span of five months. Has your stance on NC House Bill 2 changed at all and how do you believe gender inclusivity should be balanced with safety?

Jeff Jackson: My stance on HB2 has not changed. I thought HB2 was a disaster for our state, from which we are still recovering. Apple just now moved to North Carolina because the state of HB 2 had worn off such that they felt comfortable being here, but it was also just morally wrong. I think the legacy of HB2 is tremendous civil rights progress. What HB2 was about was the majority party thought that they could deliver a swift kick to the transgender community that the transgender community was outside of the circle of empathy. And as a country, we sort of came together and we said, actually, we're making a call on this. And the transgender community is inside the circle of empathy. And I think that's been solid civil rights progress. That is the legacy of HB2, not to mention some people lost their elections for supporting it. And I think that was good too.

Rishi Aila: A former political advisor to John Edwards, the former Senator who represented NC, said that if they love you in Chapel Hill, you will not get elected. So as a swing state in presidential elections and a politically diverse state with lots of different needs, how do you plan to balance the interests of progressives, moderates, and conservatives and win your first statewide election? 

Jeff Jackson: Easy. You just make it a true hundred county campaign, which the state hasn't seen in a really long time. We're talking about water. We're talking about sewers. We're talking about broadband. We're talking about rural health. We're also talking about LGBTQ rights. We're also talking about women's rights. You make it a broad conversation that is a representative sample of the state. That's something that the state says “well that basically fits.” Rural counties really do know about urban counties and urban counties really do know about rural counties. And people do understand that we're not Massachusetts, but we're not Mississippi either. That's the key.

Audience Member: My friend died in the Parkland shooting and almost four years later, students are still dying in schools. What is your plan to tackle the gun lobby in Congress?

Jeff Jackson: Well, I've been there [North Carolina General Assembly] seven years. I filed a number of bills. All those bills went in the trash can and then Parkland happened. Parkland changed the debate because Florida, after that shooting, passed a number of good bills and they did it out of a Republican state house. A Republican state Senate signed into all by a Republican governor. So we thought those bills were in the golden pack. So we filed those bills. Governor Cooper endorsed them, put his weight behind them. And those bills were thrown in the trash, but they put together a task force. It was called something like the school shootings task force. And I went to the first meeting and the leader said, “there's an epidemic of violence at our schools. We have to act, we have to put aside politics. We have to do what works.” And then he said one more thing. There won't be any discussion about guns whatsoever. In that case, they're not putting politics aside. Our current two United States Senators are numbers three and four in recipients of money from the NRA. The NRA is a morally and financially bankrupt organization. I would never take their money. I would not even answer their phone call. That's how we start fixing this problem.

Hey, and by the way, we're not taking a dime, a corporate pack money from any corporate pack in this campaign. Because as soon as I do, you don't trust me anymore. That's gonna leave a couple hundred grand on the table, but that's worth it to maintain trust with you.

Audience Member: As a member of the immigrant community, immigration reform is crucially important to me, so can you comment on what your views on immigration reform are?

Jeff Jackson: I think that the [Biden] administration has a really good proposal with respect to immigration. I think it's the most robust proposal we've seen at least in the last decade. It tries to treat this holistically while not saying that the entire conversation of immigration is about the Southern border. That's an important piece of the conversation, but we've got a political force that wants all immigration issues to be viewed through the lens of the Southern border. And that's because they have an interest in shutting down the entire debate. I think there's a huge bipartisan consensus on when we would actually implement and what reasonable steps would look like with respect to immigration. And I'll give you an example. Are we going to deport 11 million people? Yes or no? No, obviously not. The way we know that we're not is that the last guy ran on that [platform] had majorities in Congress and didn't even try; It's not gonna happen. So if we had 10 people off the street and we put 'em around a table, I think we could come up to a reasonable consensus on this really quickly. There are some pieces of low hanging fruit that jump out; one, being the dreamers. Look, these people who were brought here when they were children and they spent their whole lives here, they are American citizens by any reasonable sense of the concept.

Audience Member: How do you plan to support reproductive health for women and uphold Roe versus Wade, amidst the attack on women’s’ reproductive rights by multiple states, namely Texas? 

Jeff Jackson: I'm really concerned about what the Supreme Court is going to do. We should all be watching. We should all be concerned. Women in this country have grown up with an expectation of what their reproductive rights are. And now there's a threat that that's gonna be taken away. What we should do is make sure that you all have something to count on in that space. That a fundamental right isn't going to be used to jerk you around. We should codify Roe versus Wade by federal statute to make sure we settle the question that that is considered a matter of reproductive freedom that all women in this country deserve to have. That's something that I would support is codifying Roe versus Wade. We also need to reauthorize and fund the [1994] Violence Against Women Act. We should expand it to include provisions, to protect the LGBTQ community as well. And the president authorized the Violence Against Women Act. So he's [Biden] been pretty good at supporting its reauthorization.

Audience Member: Democrats have historically done poorly in midterm elections, largely attributable to low turnout rates, so if you win the election and become a US senator how will you attempt to pass legislation through a senate in which you’ll likely either be a part of the minority party or be a part of a fractured Democratic party?

Jeff Jackson: Y'all it's [North Carolina] a 50/50 state. We're one of the nation's true 50/50 states. We elected a Democratic governor and a Republican lieutenant governor on the same night. That's dead center 50/50. Here's what I think you want me to do. I think you want me to start from a place of genuine bipartisanship. I don't think that compromise is a dirty word, and as someone who would be the junior Senator from North Carolina, I'm under no illusions that I get say "boosh" and say “here's how it's gonna be everybody.” That's not how it works. What I did in the state Senate. When I got there, I spent an hour in the office of every Republican Senator and every bill that I've passed since then, I can trace back to one of those early conversations because I learned who was good on certain issues.

Okay? This guy cares about mental health. All right, this guy cares about criminal justice. You start from a place of genuine bipartisanship, but if the other side says that their mission is your failure, you don't cave to that. And that's the difference between me and Joe Manchin. The Joe Manchin doctrine is if something isn't bipartisan then is bad by definition; y'all I disagree. Because a lot of the opposition is bad faith. They are filibustering us from raising the debt ceiling. And they're all on record supporting the raising of the debt ceiling. That's bad faith opposition. So what I think you want me to do is start from a place of bipartisanship and being willing to compromise. And if they throw down the gauntlet and say under no circumstances, I think you want me to march on. The worst thing isn't a party line vote. The worst thing is no progress with respect to healthcare, no progress with respect to climate, no progress with respect to education or criminal justice or housing.

Audience Member: Considering the recent and tragic events at UNC-Chapel Hill, how do you view the current state of our mental health infrastructure at our university and more broadly in our state?

Jeff Jackson: Concerns over mental health and limited resources at universities have been a constant at all the colleges I’ve stopped at so far on this tour. We are understaffed in that capacity from the standpoint of K through 12 schools that don't have enough nurses, school psychologists, and social workers. We understaffed with respect to mental health faculty in our universities. We should have come out of a pandemic, had a better sense of what the demand on those services was going to be. And that was a failure, straight up failure. On a bigger level, expanding Medicaid is the single biggest lever you can pull to help people with mental health. It would cover 150,000 people immediately with respect to things like the opioid epidemic, which in some counties is still raging. Also the single biggest thing you could do, we also need to do a better job at funding community clinics. There's just a ton of mental health care that's happening on a community level that doesn't get anywhere near the funding that it needs. Most of this conversation is about money. Most of it's about being willing to spend money on this as a priority. I can't be any more straightforward with you than my commitment to do that. 

I don't think the Board of Governors has done a great job of governing the University. Here's what happened? The majority [Republican] party in the General Assembly took all the power to make the appointments. They wanted as much control over the Board of Governors as they could possibly have, and they got it. They put all of their people, deeply conservative people, in charge of the university system. And it has led to nothing but controversy. Look, it's a hyper-partisan Board of Governors and they have nothing to show, frankly, for all the negative headlines that have been splashed on the papers that frankly has made it harder to recruit folks to your wonderful university, our wonderful university. This is one of the gems of our state and they've tarnished it recklessly. 

Audience Member: What do you make of the increasing amounts of PAC and dark money in politics? 

Jeff Jackson: Let's start with Citizens United [v. Federal Election Commission]. Citizens United was a five to four Supreme court decision that allowed all this dark money into our elections in this last election. If you didn't see the dark money, if you didn't feel it, you were swimming in it, a billion dollars of dark money flooded. In H.R.1, the For the People Act, one of the most important provisions was the Disclose Act. And you haven't heard of the Disclose Act, but it's the biggest thing we can do to combat dark money. What it does is it makes dark money less dark. If you make dark money, less dark, you get less of it. Getting rid of Citizens United that involves either a new Supreme Court decision or a Constitutional amendment, neither of which are on the immediate horizon or anything like that.

Audience Member: Jeff, you attended UNC’s Law school through the G.I. Bill, how do you plan on making college more affordable for the rest of us?

Jeff Jackson: Y'all the G.I. Bill is the reason why I own a home right now. It meant everything to me and my family made a huge difference. Some things we could do: one) community colleges obviously need to be tuition free, that got pulled outta the reconciliation bill and that was wrong. We should make a priority out of that. Tennessee has zero tuition community colleges. If they can do it, knowing literally nothing else about the situation, we can do it too. We also need to pass something called the College Affordability Act which does a lot of good stuff. It doubles the Pell grants that we can have and dramatically reduces interest rates. Y'all we shouldn't be charging interest rates to try and make a profit off of all of you going to school. You going to school is the investment that we're making. It establishes an income-based repayment plan so that you actually have a way out of your debt. And it fixes the public service loan forgiveness program. PSLF [Public Service Loan Forgiveness] a critical program for people who become teachers or go to public service. It is busted. Only 2 or 3% of people who apply get any relief at all. We need to fix that program to encourage you to become teachers. We want you to become teachers. I know North Carolina has recently done a very poor job of supporting our teachers. Whenever we go to a border county, we hear stories from folks who live in North Carolina and teach in Virginia, teach in Georgia, teach in South Carolina. Y'all losing teachers to South Carolina is deeply weird. That's not normal. That's new. We used to be able to recruit teachers from other states and now we're losing them, and it's really, really bad. We're working on a budget right now. The biggest sticking point is teacher pay. Teachers in North Carolina make less now than they did 10 years ago, adjusted for inflation. That's the problem.

Audience Member: With critical race theory and NC Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson’s unfounded comments on LGBTQ images being found in NC schools taking center stage, what do you make of the increasing permeance of politics in our public education system and how do we prevent politics from interfering with public education?

Jeff Jackson: All right, big picture. What we have is one party. I don't wanna say one party. We're gonna be nonpartisan about this. What we have is a lot of folks who become addicted to outrage. Who treat politics as outrage, and during these town halls I've had to be on the receiving end of a lot of outrage cycles, spin cycles. The first one was Mr. Potato head. People were very upset that it was becoming just potato head. Then it was Dr. Seuss. Then it was critical race theory, which lasted for most of the summer. And now it's a new thing having to do with school boards. 

Y'all we need to detox off of our addiction to outrage. That's what our campaign is trying to do. Show you something that you like even more than being angry. We've gotta be able to have a real substantive conversation. And that's what I would do. You don't treat it like a real debate because it's not. They're just looking for ways to get you mad, because they literally don't have a platform. Remember the last convention they [Republican party] said, we don't even need one. All they want is to keep people addicted to outrage, but you have to give people fresh hits of outrage for that model to work. And it is very much a business model that said, we need to teach students the actual history of this country. We need to teach them about slavery and the effects of slavery that are clearly still with us. You can see racial disparities, anyone who cares to look with respect to healthcare, housing education, you need to learn about that because it's the country you actually live in. 

Despite the tremendous progress Jackson’s campaign has made in shifting the tides of the election so far and reducing the fundraising gap to Jackson’s primary rival, Cheri Beasley, he still faces an upward battle in his first-ever statewide election. Beasley has been elected to statewide office (Chief Justice) before, while Jackson has not. But perhaps more importantly, Beasley appears to have the backing of the Democratic Party behind her, after an apparent falling out between Jackson and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer in 2019. However, winning a North Carolina Senate race has proven to be notoriously difficult for Democrats. Even a clear-cut establishment pick such as Cal Cunninham was unable to win the 2018 election in one of the tightest Senate races that cycle. 

Establishment pick or not, Jackson has built up a strong campaign by taking a page out of Beto O’Rourke’s playbook of barnstorming and social media use, a strategy which led to Texas’s closest Senate race since 1978. Regardless of who ends up winning the primary, either Jackson or Beasley will face stiff competition from either former Governor Pat McCrory, Representative Ted Budd or former Representative Mark Walker. With Democrats in NC falling short in their last four United States Senate Bids, the election appears to be the Republicans’ to lose, however elections in North Carolina are wildly unpredictable and it still remains anyone’s game.