Surprise! You’re in Congress Now
There were other surprise winners from North Carolina, where aggressive Republican gerrymandering backfired and became a textbook “dummymander”—when districts drawn to favor the GOP unexpectedly fall into Democratic hands.
Key points
- Looking the part—which could mean a crisp suit or a trucker hat and cowboy boots, depending on where you’re from—can’t hurt.
- House seat, but never actually pictured himself in Washington as a newly elected member of Congress.
- (Even members of Congress need to figure out their health plan.) “I knew that we could win.
For one thing, he had to Google how much members of Congress make ($174,000 a year—more than 10 times what he was paid to serve as mayor).
The race for a seat that had once been thought to be firmly in Foxx’s hands is not yet called, but Hubbard now leads by 335 votes.
Additional details
- Orientation for incoming members of Congress is a little like the first day of school.
- He arrived just in time to stand on the outer edge of the crowd, which was clustered around a white 1997 Toyota Land Cruiser that belongs to Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, one of the caucus’s co-chairs.
- Many, though, had not allowed themselves the luxury of picturing what a victory would bring, because most of them had organized their life around a single date: November 3, Election Day.
- when the doors of the watch party he’d left burst open and his supporters streamed out, shouting that he was ahead of longtime Republican Representative Virginia Foxx by just 99 votes.
- He’d bought a bunch of button-down shirts and crammed them into his messenger bag before running back to pose for a photo with the Blue Dogs, a group of moderate Democrats.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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