clarion.brevard.edu
Volume 83, Issue 29 Web Edition SERVING BREVARD COLLEGE SINCE 1935
^ April 25, 20l^8
Woodsman for Congress
Ready for the District 11 primary election
By Florian Peyssonneaux
Opinion Editor
With less than two weeks before the May
8 primary Election Day, Brevard College
professor Dr. Steve Woodsmall is in the heart of
the campaign in a race with two other candidates
who are seeking the Democratic nomination for
U.S. House District 11. (Early voting started
Apil 19.)
Since he started his campaign in December
2017 for District 11, which spans the entire
western tip of North Carolina, including
Transylvania, Henderson and parts of Buncombe
County, there has been a lot of work by
Woodsmall and his campaign staff. “We have
campaign events literally almost every night,”
Woodsmall said. “It’s a brutal process.”
Even with a large number of forum and
debates, “we never had a true debate, more like
a forum where all candidates answer the same
questions,” Woodsmall said.
As for the campaign team, Woodsmall finds
help from Brevard College members along with
others. “Dr. Hamlett is my campaign manager,
and we have a communication director who
is a recent college graduate—he is currently
an intern in the U.S Senate,” Woodsmall said.
“He is doing a great job, and then we have a
deputy director of communication who lives
in Asheville.
“We have a lot of volunteers—a couple of
Brevard College students volunteered and are
working with us,” Woodsmall said.
This eampaign is a souree of inspiration for
some college students. Alex Tenjhay, who
has been volunteering for the campaign since
February, is now thinking about starting a
Democrat’s group at the college. “He has been
to a lot of our event and knows what’s going
on,” Woodsmall said.
For the past few months Woodsmall, his
campaign staff and all the people who decided
to volunteer are trying their best to communicate
about Woodsman’s candidacy. “We’re just
working hard, talking to people, getting the
word out,” Woodsmall said.
According to Woodsmall, it is important to
elect the person who is the most qualified for
the job, and that is exactly what he is basing his
campaign on: his experience and qualifications.
“My main push as a management scientist
is to look for the root cause of the problem,”
Woodsmall said. Even though the candidates
have debated issues like health care, immigration
and other problems, there is more to it.
“The root cause of all those problems is money
in politics,” Woodsmall said. “And I’m the only
candidate talking about it.”
Woodsmall believes that he can represent
all the people of District 11 if he is elected to
Congress. That is part of the reason why he got
endorsements by many groups, including AFL-
CIO and Equality North Carolina. “I am the
only (District 11) candidate in the Democratic
primary who received any endorsement that I
am aware of,” Woodsmall said.
The campaign should have been very fair
among the three Democratic candidates who
agreed at the beginning of the campaign to
be respectful to one another by not using any
negative advertising.
“Early on we agreed that we wouldn’t do
negative campaigning,” Woodsmall said.
However, in a letter to the editor in the Asheville
Citizen-Times, candidate Phillip Price called
Woodsmall a “carpetbagger.” Woodsmall
considers this an insult to military veterans like
himself who had no choice about where they
lived while on active duty as well as to those
who just chose to live in Western North Carolina.
Woodsmall doesn’t want to take victory in
the primary for granted, even if he and the rest
of his campaign staff get good feedback from
meetings. First of all, there is no polling data,
“so we don’t really know what’s going on, but
I get a really good response after each forum,”
Woodsmall said.
Campaign manager and Brevard College
professor Dr. Ralph Hamlett thinks positively
about the way the campaign is going. “I am
hopefully optimistic about the election even
though there is no polling data,” Hamlett said.
Most of the information they receive suggests
that the campaign is going well.
See 'Woodsmall for Congress' on page 2
Steve Woodsman’s campaign booth at the Brevard College second annual Pride Festival last week.