WS Chronicle

Voters are going to the polls now in early voting for June 7 primary candidates. Josh Brannon, Jim Roberts and Charlie Wallin are vying to be the Democrat to represent the newly drawn 5th Congressional District in the United States Congress.

This district now includes the east side of Winston-Salem. The east side was in District 12, and had Alma Adams as its representative.

All men have admirable traits and a strong desire to serve the public. But The Chronicle endorses Charlie Wallin for the 5th Congressional District.

Adams, who replaced Mel Watt as the congressional representative for the area in 2014, has spoiled people who live on the east side of Winston-Salem, so to speak. Adams was very constituent oriented. She communicated with the media constantly about the things she was doing to help us. She opened an office in Winston-Salem and provided help to veterans and others who needed help with federal programs by hiring former state Sen. Earline Parmon of Winston-Salem to be a liaison. (Parmon died in March.) She paid attention to historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) such as Winston-Salem State University. She paid attention to us.

Out of the three Democratic candidates, Charlie Wallin seems to understand constituent work.

He has been chairman of the Fifth District Democrats since 2015 and has been active in the community and in the Democratic Party for the last 16 years. He acknowledged our loss of Adams as a representative in his op-ed piece last week in The Chronicle. He talked about several issues that we are concerned about, such as poverty, the legal system, mental health system and low graduation rates. These are topics Adams, from Greensboro, would address. Now, she is running for re-election in the new District 12, which does not include any of Forsyth County. 

Wallin appears to be the best choice for us, but none of the three Democratic candidates has held office before, and the winner’s most likely opponent in November, Republican incumbent Virginia Foxx, is expected to be a formidable foe. She has endorsed Donald Trump as the Republican nominee for president. We will see how her candidacy is affected by that and by her new constituency on the east side of Winston-Salem.

The Chronicle endorses Michael Morgan of Raleigh, who is an African-American superior court judge who is running for the Supreme Court seat. He has served as Superior Court judge for the last 11 years. He was also a district court judge for five years and a state administrative law judge. He’s a lifetime member of the NAACP and was among the first black students to integrate New Bern school system in 1964.

Morgan has this chance to run because of a ruling by the N.C. Supreme Court when incumbent Robert H. “Bob” Edmunds of Greensboro recused himself in ruling on a court case challenging the new N.C. law that allowed retention voting for incumbent Supreme Court judges rather than allowing opponents to run against the judges. The state Supreme Court voted 3-3, a tie, in the matter, so that let the lower court ruling stand. It said the retention election would be unconstitutional.