While Jamie Ager confidently flipped North Carolina’s 11th District, which spans most of Western North Carolina south of Avery County, there were some narrower upsets across the region. In another congressional district that spans the northern portion of the mountains, just 99 votes separate a Democratic challenger from Virginia Foxxa Republican incumbent who has served for more than 20 years.
In the vote count from election night, Chuck Hubbard, a Democrat from Wilkes County, garnered 48% of the vote and U.S. Rep. FoxxR-Banner Elk, garnered 47.66% of the vote in the race for North Carolina’s 5th Congressional District, with all precincts reporting, according to the North Carolina State Board of Elections. Libertarian candidate Robert Luffman received 2.64% of the vote. What remains to be counted are provisional ballots and late-arriving absentee ballots.
This is by no means the only congressional upset in the state — Democrats across the state won congressional races in districts that were redrawn last October to give Republicans an edge in this year’s midterm elections. But this one is certainly the closest.
Breaking down Foxx vs. Hubbard numbers
Hubbard ran against Foxx in 2024 and lost by 19 percentage points. The district went for Trump by 18 points that year, too. In the 11th District, which encompasses more of broader Western North Carolina, Jamie Ager bested State Rep. Jennifer BalkcomR-Henderson, by 16 points. That district went for Trump by 10 points two years ago.
The race for the 5th District is currently within distance of a recount — the threshold in North Carolina for requesting a recount is less than 1% of the votes cast between two candidates.
Candidates can formally request a recount once the vote has been canvassed, 10 days after the election. But Foxx has already called for a recount in a press release posted to her Facebook account on Nov. 5.
She has served the district in Congress since 2005. Since her initial election, she has never had a competitive challenger. She has gained more than 60% of the vote the past three times she was up for reelection.
“As the final votes are carefully tallied, I expect that our local election officials will act with the utmost integrity — as they have consistently done in the past — to ensure the fairness and accuracy of this election,” she wrote in the release.
Hubbard claimed victory in a statement but said he knows he will have to fight for the seat. He’s a former journalist for the Wilkes-Journal Patriot, a local newspaper founded by his grandfather and based in North Wilkesboro. In his statement, he mentioned being ready to secure Helene recovery funds and lower costs across the district.
“As of now, we’re leading by 99 votes,” he wrote in a Facebook post. “My team and I are prepared to fight to count every vote while building out our office.”
A number of provisional ballots and late-arriving mail-in ballots from service members and people overseas have not yet been counted. In North Carolina, these ballots must be received by Nov. 12 to be counted. Though most races were called earlier this week, results aren’t official until after state and county canvasses later this month.
In recent recount history, Republican challenger Jefferson Griffin lost to state Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs in 2024 by 734 votes. Griffin spent six months challenging the election — first by a recount, then in court challenging various groups of voters until a federal judge ordered that Riggs be certified as the election winner.
‘A tough swath of geography’
The 5th District encompasses a scramble of counties, from fragments of Guilford that include parts of the Greensboro metropolitan area to all of Ashe and Watauga in the mountainous northwest corner of the state. Greensboro is split into three congressional districts — the 5th, the 6th and the 9th.
North Carolina’s congressional map was most recently redrawn in October 2025, when the state legislature approved new maps after a call to action from President Donald Trump. Congressional districts have been redrawn six times since Foxx initially took office in 2005. Prior to 2025, each of those redraws took place after a decennial Census or in response to a court ruling.
While North Carolina has been considered a swing state by some in recent decades despite the state voting for Republicans in all but two presidential elections since 1968, large portions of rural Western North Carolina have stayed Republican even during eras when the South was overwhelmingly Democratic, before the second party system.
During the Solid South era that spanned from the late 19th to the mid-20th century, the whole state trended towards Democrats, but much of today’s 5th and 11th Districts swayed Republican because of the sizable Quaker population in northwest North Carolina and Unionist sentiment across the region.
Christopher Cooperan associate professor of political science at Western Carolina University, said that the 5th District is a tough swath of geography to represent with a unified voice. There are rural mountain counties, as well as Guilford, a Piedmont county with a large urban population.
“The High Country and Greensboro are not very similar demographically; they’re not very similar in terms of what they need from Congress; they’re just very different kinds of places,” Cooper said.
There hasn’t been a political shift like this in North Carolina, or the country, really, since 1974, after former President Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal, when the whole nation trended towards Democrats. Republicans had good midterm years in 1994 and in 2010, when the North Carolina General Assembly gained a Republican majority that had not been broken in either chamber of the legislature until this year. Democrats had good years of their own in 2008 and 2018. But none of them compare to what happened on Nov. 3, 2026.
Legacy of Foxx and the road forward
Foxx, a conservative, has been the head of North Carolina’s congressional delegation since January 2025 and is the longest-serving member. She’s the chair of the House Rules Committee and also sits on the House Judiciary, Ways and Means, Oversight, Energy and Commerce and Education committees. She has a background in education and grew up in Avery County, which is one county south of her current district.
In 2005, a first-term Foxx was one of 11 members of Congress to vote against a $51 billion aid package for Hurricane Katrina.
Nineteen years later, the western portion of her district, particularly in Watauga County, was deeply affected by Tropical Storm Helene. The disaster’s damages in the state amount to roughly $60 billion, but only 16% of recovery needs have been funded thus far, according to the Governor’s Recovery Office from Western North Carolina. The federal government has funded $11 billion and Gov. John Stein requested an additional $10 billion from Congress in June of this year.
As in the 11th District, Helene funding and affordability were key issues in the 5th. Foxx significantly outraised Hubbard. According to FEC filings, Hubbard had raised $863,260 as of Oct. 14, while Foxx raised $2,189,052.
Foxx’s website states that she “cut down red tape” and helped speed up the still-unfinished recovery process. On Oct. 1, Foxx re-introduced the Disaster Recovery and Resilience Act, which would establish a bond between federal agencies and temporarily suspend certain local, state or federal regulations during disaster recovery processes.
The race between Foxx and Hubbard only switched from “solid R” to “likely R” by the Cook Political Report on Oct. 30. Hubbard campaigned on securing Helene recovery funding, protecting programs like Medicare and Medicaid, government transparency and LGBTQ+ rights. He’s also against members of Congress trading stocks and did not take money from political action committees.
An election of upsets in Western NC
Whether the current outcome will stick after the Nov. 13 canvassing and a potential recount remains to be seen, but for it to have been even this close is something of an upset.
The congressional upsets are far from the only ones in a decisive night for North Carolina politics. Some of the most dramatic changes came in western counties. Among other seismic shifts in rural county commissions were historically red Jackson, Yancey and Transylvania counties. Some were seats in the state legislature that had not been represented by Democrats in decades.
In the NC House, Brevard Democrat Mark Burrows won the race for House District 119 against sitting Rep. Anna FergusonR-Whittier. Burrows ran on a platform of fiscal transparency. Jennifer Balkcom’s replacement in Henderson County’s House District 117 Republican, Chelsea Walshlost her bid to Democrat Lynn Russo.
“We are a part of a larger movement of dissatisfaction of everything happening at the national and even at the state level,” Burrows said.
This article first appeared on Carolina Public Press and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. ![""]("https://i0.wp.com/carolinapublicpress.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/cropped-cropped-CPPlogo_icon_RGB.png?fit=150%2C150&ssl=1"){kind=icon}
Source: carolinapublicpress.org
