Can a Populist Who Likens Herself to Zohran Mamdani Topple a Staid Democratic Incumbent in North Carolina?

“NORTH CAROLINA WARNING,” anti-Muslim agitator @AmyMek tweeted to her 588,000 followers on a recent Tuesday night. “The Zohran Mamdani of North Carolina — congressional candidate Nida Allam — is actively working against federal immigration enforcement.”

The post described efforts by Allam — a young Muslim populist running in North Carolina’s solidly blue 4th District — to alert communities to the presence of immigration officers in Raleigh, Durham and the suburbs between them. She attached a video that Allam had filmed in November, describing how to report sightings.

Allam was all too happy with the comparison. The next day, she changed her bio on X to another quote about her from Mek: “BEWARE THE NEXT ZOHRAN MAMDANI.”

The 32-year-old Durham County Commissioner is challenging incumbent Rep. Valerie Foushee in this year’s Democratic primary. The race is a rematch: Foushee, who had served for nearly three decades at just about every level of local government, defeated Allam by nine points in 2022 and subsequently cruised to victory in the general. In 2024, Foushee ran unopposed in her primary.

A lot has changed since their last matchup. Donald Trump is back in the White House with a vision of retribution against liberal hubs like North Carolina’s Research Triangle: In November, the area was targeted by federal immigration agents; the district’s prominent universities, hospital systems, and scientific research and development companies have suffered millions in federal funding cuts, the most of any district in the nation.

In addition, the war in Gaza has upended the politics of the Middle East within the Democratic Party, pushing Foushee to pledge not to accept campaign donations from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which was among the groups that funneled more than $3 million in outside spending to her 2022 campaign.

And then there is the new mayor of New York City, whose rapid rise has suggested what might be possible for a social-media-savvy, progressive, anti-establishment Muslim candidate. Mamdani’s campaign manager, Maya Handa, also managed Allam’s 2022 effort, and she acknowledges the parallels. “North Carolina is not New York, and Nida is not Zohran,” Handa told me recently. “What they do have in common is outspoken, unbought leadership and a message that deeply resonates with working people in this crisis of democracy and affordability.”

On policy, Foushee and Allam are both solidly left of most House Democrats, and their voting records likely wouldn’t differ dramatically. Both support Medicare for All, investing in clean energy and infrastructure via the Green New Deal, codifying Roe v. Wade, and raising the federal minimum wage. And yet, they are also radically different in their approach to politics. Allam has an aggressively pro-worker message and a penchant for TikTok trends and selfie-style Instagram videos. Foushee is a measured, 69-year-old stateswoman and the highest-profile member of a local political dynasty.

Consistently, Allam is a step more antiestablishment. Foushee co-sponsored legislation to ban selling certain heavy munitions to Israel; Allam favors a full arms embargo. Foushee has called for Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to resign; Allam says ICE should be abolished. Foushee has sworn off money from AIPAC, but has recently received donations from PACs affiliated with weapons manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies; Allam has pledged not to take any money from corporate PACs or “right-wing” special interests and has accused Foushee of being funded by “big pharma,” “big tech,” and “corporate defense contractors who ensure that billions of our tax dollars are being spent to fund genocide and war abroad.”

This is one of the nation’s bluest districts and, in that sense, a bellwether — not for the country as a whole but for the mood of the Democratic Party’s core voters. If a candidate like Mamdani is going to ascend to Congress anywhere outside New York City in 2026, this would be one of the likeliest places — but it is far from a sure thing. “Louder is not always better,” Foushee told me recently, and the March primary may go a long way toward answering the question: Exactly how outspoken and defiantly left-wing do Democrats want their politicians to be in 2026?

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Allam’s first official 2026 campaign event took place in Durham Central Park on a warm December afternoon. She wore a gray shirt emblazoned with her first name, and orange face paint peeked from under her hijab. She was joined by 25-year-old activist David Hogg and about 30 campaign volunteers. “Raise your hand,” Hogg asked the group. “Have any of you seen Valerie Foushee in public, at all? Ok, two of you, congrats.”

Foushee is unapologetic about her quieter approach to politics. “I’m not one who’s going to be tooting my — ‘hey, hey, hey, look what I did’ — I’m not doing that. And you can criticize me all day and all night. I’m not doing that,” she told me. “My goal is to be successful in achieving the goals of the district, and so I have developed a way of doing that that may not get me noticed by the media, because you don’t see me standing on steps with a microphone or megaphone.”

Before entering politics, Foushee was a police department administrator. In preparation for our December interview, I listened to a 2017 oral history in which she described hearing the phrase “two Black males” repeated over and over on the police radio at her job. “I was raising two Black males,” she said, referring to her sons. “I’m listening to it all night. … I would go to bed hearing ‘two Black males’ or wake up reading ‘two Black males’ or ‘young Black males.’”

When we met at New Hope Market in Chapel Hill — she says she often conducts business there because she’s friends with the owner — we began by talking about her first election: a 1997 Chapel Hill-Carrboro school board race. Foushee frames that campaign, and every election since, as part of her belief in public service. She describes her political career in earnest, old-fashioned terms: “seeing a need, and wanting to give back to a village, a community, that had given to me.”

Foushee is unapologetic about her quieter approach to politics. “I’m not one who’s going to be tooting my — ‘hey, hey, hey, look what I did’ — I’m not doing that,” she says. “And you can criticize me all day and all night. I’m not doing that.” Chase Pellegrini de Paur for INDY

She was the first Black woman to serve in most of her roles — as the district’s school board chair, as an Orange County commissioner, in her state House, state Senate and now U.S. House seats. Her pitch to voters, delivered in a Piedmont accent and peppered with quotes from South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn and the Bible, is experience. “People see that their everyday costs of living have increased to a point where it’s difficult,” she said. “There’s still more work to be done, and … I have the experience and the relationships that exist in Congress now to get it done.”

Foushee is a careful interviewee who tends to speak in threes. (“Nobody else has the experience, nobody else has developed the relationships, nobody else knows this district better than me.”) She is quick to clarify if she feels a question has been framed unsatisfactorily, or to hold up a finger for silence when she’s ready to answer.

Her allies describe her as a background operator who puts her head down and does the work for the district. There’s “not a person that I can think of who’s more progressive than me,” Foushee said. “I’m just more pragmatic than most.” In 2024, she secured over $11 million for district projects, such as affordable housing in Chapel Hill and a sewer infrastructure extension in Granville County. Since 2023, she’s sponsored 23 bills — though, in an era of GOP control of Congress, none have passed.

As a politician obligated to split her time between the district and D.C., Foushee is accessible only through a gauntlet of aides and controlled town halls. Allam, by contrast, is almost unavoidable, especially on social media. Her claim to the progressive mantle is inseparable from her millennial-style campaign. Her TikTok videos range from a recent visit to the Durham Animal Protection Society (“Simba!” she exclaims as she lifts a cat in the air a la “The Lion King”) to the first-person video that she took of immigration enforcement agents detaining several people in November (“Do you have a warrant?” she loudly asks the masked officers).

After working on several campaigns, including Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential bid, Allam joined the state Democratic Party’s executive board. She became the first Muslim woman to win public office in North Carolina in 2020 when she was elected to the Durham County Board of Commissioners and became the state’s youngest county commission chair in 2023; she’s currently in her second term on the board.

Allam, who was born in Canada and moved to the U.S. when she was 6 years old, has pointed to her own experience as evidence that she is the right person to stand up for immigrant communities. She has worked to create an immigrant and refugee services coordinator position in Durham, raise the minimum wage for county employees to $19 an hour, and advance housing affordability initiatives. Her platform includes making public colleges tuition-free, fully funding Section 8 housing vouchers, ending Citizens United and banning congressional stock trading.

Her pitch to voters, in part, is that she is more of a fighter than Foushee: Voting and sponsoring legislation, she told me recently, are “the bare minimum” for a member of Congress. “Are you whipping votes? Are you rallying your community? Are you pushing the party internally to support Medicare for All? The Green New Deal?”

But no issue has come up in the race as persistently as Israel, which dominated local politics for a time in 2023 and continues to reverberate. In November 2023, a Jewish-led group of protesters blocked rush hour traffic on the Durham Freeway for hours under the banner “NC JEWS SAY CEASEFIRE NOW! CALL REP. FOUSHEE.” Some of those same protesters also packed and shut down city council meetings; in one tense incident in Durham, a dozen police officers formed a wall between demonstrators and council members. The Carrboro and Durham councils eventually passed resolutions that denounced the war; the former urged Foushee to follow suit, and the latter was forwarded to her and President Joe Biden. Over two years, Foushee shifted her language away from her previously full-throated support of Israel and toward concern over the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Gaza.

I asked Foushee what it was like to be the target of so much high-emotion criticism. “I think what’s most important is that I listened,” she told me. But she clearly didn’t want to dwell on it in 2026. “Let me put it this way,” she said. “I don’t think that people feel that that is a very important issue as it relates to kitchen table conversations.” She does, however, see it as “an important issue because we all want peace in the Middle East,” and noted that she has “always been for a two-state solution.” She also thinks she hasn’t always been heard clearly on the matter: “I think people discounted much of my sentiment about that situation because it was clouded by the fact that I took money from AIPAC.” And she added that, in 2023, she represented four counties where protests and resolutions were not unfolding.

Allam has made the Gaza war a centerpiece of her advocacy, as well as her case against Foushee, over the past few years. When Foushee traveled to Israel on an AIPAC-sponsored trip to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2024, Allam penned a critical letter to the editor. Allam describes herself as a pacifist and says she looks at the devastation in Gaza and sees her own two young children. “And then every time I open my phone, I see a child who’s been beheaded,” she told me. “I see a child who’s now an orphan — the largest population of child amputees, and it’s all our taxpayer dollars that’s funding it. Like, I just morally, I don’t understand how that has, like, been allowed to occur.”

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While Durham and its long history of liberal politics are at the heart of the 4th District, other towns on its fringes — Cary, Apex, Morrisville, Holly Springs and Fuquay Varina — have the potential to be something of a wildcard in the Allam-Foushee matchup, because they’ve been newly drawn into the district. Allam’s political career is tied to Durham, Foushee’s is tied to Orange County, and each won their respective political homes in the 2022 primary. Neither has been in a competitive election in the terra incognita of Wake County.

In 2023, lawmakers drew portions of western Wake and eastern Chatham counties into the district, replacing parts of several more rural counties to the north of Durham where voters had overwhelmingly favored Foushee in the past. Of the roughly 40,000 votes that Foushee won in 2022, about 22% came from areas no longer in the district. The changes affected only about 5% of Allam’s voters.

Asher Hildebrand, a Duke University politics and policy analyst who used to work under Foushee’s congressional predecessor, cautions against making any assumptions about who those new boundaries may favor. “In its iteration then and now, even though it has portions of other counties, Durham, as a community, as a population center, is the center of gravity in the district,” he told me.

Allam, however, is hoping that immigrant residents, concentrated in the newly added portion of Wake County, will help her. Morrisville, for example, is 42% Asian and home to an increasingly politically active Asian-American and Pacific Islander population. While the federal immigration crackdown in North Carolina has focused on Spanish-speaking communities, Allam said all immigrant communities are on edge, and noted that she plans to “invest very heavily” to reach first-time and immigrant voters. “There’s so many Indian and Chinese Americans and other immigrant communities that are struggling because they’re being targeted and living in fear,” Allam said. “They’re walking around with their passports now.”

Voting and sponsoring legislation, says Allam, are “the bare minimum” for a member of Congress. “Are you whipping votes? Are you rallying your community? Are you pushing the party internally to support Medicare for All? The Green New Deal?” Wilson for INDY

Wake County is historically less liberal than Durham and Orange, though the Democratic apparatus there has had recent success in local elections after working for years to try to mobilize votes for younger and more progressive candidates. In the purplest parts of the district (Cary, Apex, Holly Springs, and Fuquay-Varina), Democrats swept town council seats last fall and ousted Republican mayors. In Pittsboro, in the new southwestern corner of the district, nearly a quarter of the town’s 4,600-person population showed up to an April “No Kings” rally.

Wesley Knott, the 29-year-old chair of the Wake County Democratic Party, has personally endorsed Allam (the organization doesn’t typically endorse in partisan primaries). In an interview with one of my colleagues, Knott painted the contest as a referendum on the current state of the Democratic Party. “For me, this is fundamentally not about Valerie Foushee. I think she’s served honorably and with integrity,” Knott said. “And if you think that the Democratic Party is on the right track, then I think she’s a perfectly acceptable option in the primary.”

For Foushee’s allies, though, the election is also a referendum on the representation of Black voices in the party. One of North Carolina’s other two Black congressional representatives, Don Davis, is at risk of losing his seat after redistricting, and 15 other Black U.S. House members could be drawn out of their districts if several Republican-led states succeed in weakening a provision of the Voting Rights Act.

State Sen. Natalie Murdock, who first met Foushee a decade ago while working as a vice president of the North Carolina Democratic Party’s African-American Caucus, put it in stark terms to me over coffee in downtown Durham: “Why at this time in history — where we will likely lose Black members of Congress — why should this district, Durham, that is very progressive, say we are going to fire a Black woman that is showing up and doing her job?”

Murdock has been an effective campaign surrogate for Foushee in the past, telling my colleague in 2022 that she would “brag on her because she won’t do it herself.” Murdock is hardly the only political figure rallying behind Foushee. Gov. Josh Stein, former Gov. Roy Cooper, nearly every state representative and senator in her district, Durham Mayor Leo Williams, and the sheriffs of Chatham, Durham and Orange counties have all endorsed her. So has the Congressional Black Caucus, as well as Rep. Pramila Jayapal (whom Allam lists as a political inspiration) and Rep. Maxwell Frost, co-chairs of the Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC. Foushee also scored a quiet endorsement from former congressman David Price, who represented the district for over 30 years and did not endorse in 2022.

Allam has endorsements from the Justice Democrats, the Sunrise Movement, the Working Families Party and Hogg, the irreverent Gen Zer and controversial former vice chair of the Democratic National Committee. “What Nida represents here is the opportunity for us to create real change in our party, and send a clear message to establishment Democrats that the days of taking corporate — if you are taking corporate money, your days in power are fucking numbered,” Hogg told the crowd at the Allam event in December. He added that this district was “the best opportunity that we have in our party to flip a seat back from a corporate controlled AIPAC-backed Democrat.” After the event, and before he set up to film social media content with Allam, I asked him what message he had for Foushee. “Retire,” he said, after a long pause.

In 2022, outside money was a key factor, said Handa, Allam’s former campaign manager: “If Nida’s campaign had not been outspent … by super PACs, we would have won.” This time around, Allam has made outside spending a central issue.

In the first nine months of last year, Foushee’s campaign raised $222,000, according to the most recent reports available. Unions were among some of the top donors (including machinists, aerospace workers, and state and county employees), followed by pharmaceutical companies. Allam says those donations are in conflict with Foushee’s stated values, like support for affordable health care and campaign finance reform. Foushee says she is simply representing the Research Triangle, which is home to “corporations that bring jobs to the people in this district,” including pharmaceutical companies like Merck, GSK and Eli Lilly.

Allam announced in a press release that she had raised $200,000 on the first day of her campaign — via more than 3,500 individual donations averaging $58 each.

While national money — and attention — are likely to flow to the race, it is also sure to involve its fair share of esoteric local politics, like Allam’s perceived feud with a Black Durham City Council candidate, or where the candidates stand on a planned data center in Wake County. Allam recently won the endorsement of one influential local PAC, the People’s Alliance, while Foushee again clinched the endorsement of the other, the Durham Committee on the Affairs of Black People. (There’s also a low-profile Democrat in the race, Mary Patterson. The winner of the primary is expected to easily defeat perennial Republican candidate Max Ganorkar, whose website calls on residents to “BE AN ANTI-SOCIALISM WARRIOR.”)

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Foushee’s aversion to self-promotion seems to have left her feeling unfairly portrayed. At an August town hall in Carrboro, she thanked a resident who asked about her stance on Gaza: “You just don’t know how many times I’ve been waiting for someone to ask that publicly so I can answer it publicly,” she said, as if a local political heavyweight doesn’t have the clout to summon a gaggle of reporters with a single email. At the end of our interview, she thanked me sincerely for “listening to me and hearing it from my mouth.”

Her incumbency may give her some name-recognition advantage, but it’s also put her on the defensive. The challenger can campaign on criticism of the incumbent, while the incumbent needs to defend a congressional record that has played out in an era of Republican control. Per conventional political wisdom, Foushee tends to avoid talking about Allam at all. When I mentioned her “challenger,” she reminded me that she has several. This dynamic has made for a somewhat lopsided debate, allowing Allam to frame the election as a referendum on Foushee, her campaign funding, and her political style.

And that stylistic contrast — between a traditional establishment-backed politician and a younger, outspoken candidate happy to be compared to Mamdani — may, in the end, be the deciding factor in the race. Months from now, Democrats beyond North Carolina can read the results and see how, or whether, the mood of their voters has shifted since 2022. In particular, they may discover a judgment on what progressive voters perceive as the job of a congressional representative in the second Trump era.

“It is not, in my opinion, my role to elevate my work,” Foushee told me. She has served in public office consistently since her 1997 school board election, but, until Allam, hadn’t faced a strong challenger in a decade. “And I’ll say this: If that’s a requirement, then I probably won’t ever be reelected, because I’m not going to start today doing that.”

Chase Pellegrini de Paur is a reporter for INDY in North Carolina.