Durham has its very own candidate for the U.S. Senate, even if no one will be calling her the frontrunner anytime soon.
Former Durham City Council member Cynthia Brown is running in the 2002 Senate race, alongside several high-profile candidates, including Elizabeth Dole and Erskine Bowles.
Compared to those candidates, however, Brown's funds are not nearly as extensive, and she and her staff have taken a different approach to the campaign. In particular, without funds to air television commercials statewide, Brown's campaign has focused on personal interaction to win supporters. Lately, she has made trips to churches, community centers and small forums.
"I'm going to have to work harder than most candidates by being out here in the voting public, interacting with them, listening to them, talking to them," Brown said. "When you don't have access to the media, you are forced to be out in the voting public to listen."
Brown's first test with the voters will be the crowded Democratic primary, originally scheduled for May, but pushed back indefinitely, due to ongoing North Carolina redistricting debates.
Ken McDouall, Brown's campaign manager, said that with Brown's campaign strategy it may be difficult to catch Democratic primary front-runners like Bowles, or even fellow candidates Elaine Marshall, secretary of state, and Dan Blue, speaker of the state house.
"It's about as grassroots as you can get it," said McDouall, who met Brown at a peace rally. "It's definitely unconventional in that we are not so much working through the established political leadership."
But Brown and her supporters, who are all volunteers and include young, low-income and progressive voters, remain concerned that the lack of financial resources is the biggest obstacle to winning the Senate seat.
"I guess it works both ways," McDouall said. "People can relate to someone who doesn't have a million dollars... but it still takes money to do minimal things like brochures, paying for gas for travel, and that's probably the big drawback at this point."
Recent Duke graduate Anne Lai, Trinity '02, completed a documentary on Brown's campaign for a class last semester.
She called Brown's campaign "refreshing" for its lack of insider backing, but said it nonetheless puts Brown at a disadvantage.
Brown's progressive platform promotes economic and job security, would guarantee health care access and environmental protection. Brown said her platform and her personal economic background provides a compelling message.
"I'm trying to get people to understand that what happens to people at the bottom affects the quality of life for people above them," Brown said. "I know what it feels like to live paycheck to paycheck, and that's a recent experience, not something I remember from my childhood."
In addition to her four years on the City Council, Brown hopes voters will see her as a public policy advocate familiar with all levels of government, from local to federal.
"There's this tendency to suggest my experience is limited to the local level," Brown said. "When you're on the outside [of the political process] as a policy and community activist, your knowledge of policy in those arenas is pretty thorough because you have to go through the process of understanding who are the key people to talk to, which relationships to establish and what policy to make."
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