In 2024, Republican Stacie McGinn lost to Democrat Woodson Bradley by a mere 209 votes for a seat in the North Carolina Senate. This year, the two women are set for a rematch expected to be a close call yet again.
McGinn and Bradley are vying for District 42 in the state Senate, which is a politically divided area in southern Mecklenburg County that includes Mint Hill, Matthews, Providence, Ballantyne and SouthPark.
Bradley’s platform prioritizes public safety, funding public schools, and solving affordability issues. During her time in office, she has advocated for divorce law reform and higher pay for teachers and funding for public schools, and has supported a state fund for crime victims.
She’s dubbed herself part of “Team Normal” — emphasizing her past struggles of being a small business owner, a domestic violence survivor and, formerly, a single mom. She is a classroom facilitator for a teen dating violence prevention program.
“I’m a regular person here, just trying to take care of homegrown, regular people,” Bradley, who is also a real estate agent, said at a candidate forum on Oct. 6.
The slogan is also a slight jab at her opponent, a former high-level Bank of America executive who is largely funding her own campaign.
McGinn has emphasized her upbringing with “the right kind of values,” including “the importance of education, hard work, family, faith and most of all, love of country”; her website includes a photo of her with two children reading a book about First Ladies. She also worked on a presidential task force during the Reagan administration.
Her platform includes “parental involvement and choice in education,” including funding private schools with taxpayer dollars, lowering taxes and reducing regulations, and cracking down on crime, including ending bail for repeat offenders.
At a forum at Friendship Missionary Baptist Church on Oct. 6, voters asked the two candidates for their stances on multiple issues.
Data centers
McGinn said she thinks residents should decide whether or not to bring a data center to their communities, and that she opposes taxpayers subsidizing data centers.
“That’s one thing the General Assembly has eliminated in their last session, and I think we should keep it that way,” she said, referring to Senate Bill 730, called the “Ratepayer Protection Act.”
The bill requires tech companies to cover their own costs and prohibits local governments from using taxpayer dollars to give tax breaks and other incentives to data centers. But it also contains language that lets Duke Energy charge ratepayers for power plants while they’re still being constructed, and it prohibits Duke from retiring old coal plants until they complete the years-long permit process to build a new nuclear facility. Ratepayers are on the hook to keep the coal plants running, since utility regulations already guarantee Duke an approximately 10% profit on operations.
Bradley agreed with McGinn that taxpayers should not subsidize data centers but denounced Senate Bill 730, which she dubbed “the Duke power bill” that “ripped through the legislature like a buzzsaw.” It passed largely along party lines.
“The big hand of the General Assembly needs to let municipalities govern themselves, especially when we’re the city that carries water for the whole state,” Bradley said at the forum.
Poverty
Voters at the same forum also asked the two women how they’d address poverty in their district. Bradley advocated for more funding for public schools, specifically for feeding hungry students, and criticized the cuts to SNAP benefits contained in a federal tax and spending measure. McGinn took a different approach, saying education is the primary mechanism for solving poverty.
“The last time I checked, Title 1 schools do actually have lunch programs that are feeding students,” she said. “…The way we raise up people is through education. … I believe by the ninth or 10th grade, every child should have an idea of where they’re going and what their future is going to be.”
Constitutional amendments and voting
Voters also asked for their stances on the constitutional amendments on the ballot. McGinn said she’d support the property tax cap and urged voters to follow suit. Bradley said she believed it would pass because “people are feeling the [financial] pain right now,” but that she does not support it because it could adversely affect funding for schools and other services.
When asked if they’d support a potential North Carolina Voting Rights Act, Bradley said she would, calling herself “an advocate for people to have access [to voting]” through a variety of methods. McGinn asked what such an act would include — then said she supported photo ID.
McGinn has also previously worked as general counsel for the Mecklenburg County Republican Party, where she “spearheaded an effort to put 30 new Republican poll judges in place and increased Republican poll judges approved by the BOE 11% overall,” she wrote in an iVoterGuide questionnaire in 2024.
“While I have a greater degree of confidence in activities at the polls, absentee ballots remain an area with the least amount of transparency and greatest risk of fraud,” she wrote.
I-77 toll lanes
McGinn also said she strongly supported the I-77 toll lane project and pointed to her op-ed in The Charlotte Observer.
“If you’re asking me should the state have the ability to influence it, my answer would be firmly ‘yes,’” she said.
Bradley, on the other hand, said it had been “flopped on the table like a dead fish” and said it should be a learning experience. The criticism comes after her own op-ed this summer in which she called for leaders in Charlotte to restore their support for the project.
“I do think that I-77 needs to be mitigated and needs to be expanded, but not on the backs of the people that are going to use it to continue commerce here. But now it’s baked in,” she said. “So I hope that this is a lesson on how to roll projects like this out in the future — but not only that, [with] the reinvestment back into west Charlotte, we need to hold everybody accountable.”
Campaign funding
The two have also criticized each other about campaign funding. Bradley’s supporters point to how McGinn is “pouring her personal fortune” into her campaign, which has created a gap in campaign resources between the two.
McGinn’s campaign notes that some of Bradley’s donors are from other states, particularly California. In response to comments about her campaign funds, she said to The Election Hub: “My opponent has less of her own money to spend on her campaign because of the choices she made, in my opinion.” One of the “choices” McGinn pointed to was Bradley’s involvement in Fortune Hi-Tech Marketing (FHTM).
Multi-level marketing dispute
McGinn is also campaigning on her “integrity,” repeatedly claiming that throughout her professional career, her reputation has never been questioned.
“Our track records show I am the only candidate in this race who voters can trust to put honesty and integrity first,” McGinn said in a press release.
In 2013, the Federal Trade Commission — along with North Carolina law enforcement, including then-Attorney General Roy Cooper — cracked down on Kentucky-based FHTM, which they called a “prolific pyramid scheme.” FHTM advertised itself as a way for people to achieve financial independence, but the FTC said that FHTM deceived consumers into selling their products, only for 98% of them to lose more money than they made. The FTC also said that FHTM targeted Spanish-speaking immigrants and other immigrant communities. FHTM settled the lawsuits in court in 2014, was banned from multi-level marketing and was required to pay millions to the people who lost money from it.
Bradley was a “platinum sales manager” for FHTM, which, according to court documents, was one of the highest-level positions. During Bradley and McGinn’s first race in 2024, McGinn repeatedly attacked her opponent’s involvement with FHTM, while Bradley’s campaign said she was an independent contractor, not an owner of the company.
This time around, McGinn still hasn’t given up on trying to paint herself as the more morally upright candidate. Bradley is pushing back. She recently claimed to be a victim of the scheme, which she said often targeted women and single mothers. She also said that her title at FHTM was arbitrary. On Sept. 20, Bradley posted a video of herself and Cooper in which Cooper called her “a great representative of this area” and urged voters to re-elect her.
Bradley told The Election Hub she worked with FHTM for two years from 2009 to 2011. She said she was in a “vulnerable” position at the time, navigating a “tumultuous, abusive separation period” from her ex-husband and the difficulties of the real estate market during the Great Recession.
“I was looking for a way to be social and also help ensure my and my children’s financial stability when I was invited to a close friend’s home for an FHTM event,” she said.
Lucas Gatterman, Bradley’s campaign manager, told The Election Hub that she “did lose money from FHTM and never received any of the money she was owed.”
Light rail stabbing
McGinn is also raising the issue of Iryna’s Law — a bill named after Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee fatally stabbed on the light rail in Charlotte in 2025 — to try to appeal to voters, pointing out that Bradley was not present for its final vote in the General Assembly. Records show she had an excused absence, which Bradley says she used to attend a vigil for Zarutska. McGinn maintains that Bradley never attended a vigil the night of the bill’s final vote.
Bradley has said her support for Iryna's Law demonstrates her willingness to break with her party, which provided the only votes against the measure in the Senate.
“I supported Iryna’s Law because while it was not perfect, Charlotte was hurting and something needed to be done. My support, however, does not include the amendment made by Phil Berger,” she said, referring to a last-minute amendment that allows for additional death penalty methods — like electrocution or the firing squad — if lethal injection is for any reason unavailable. “The inclusion of that amendment, which was introduced after I needed to leave for Iryna’s vigil, is the sole part of Iryna’s Law that I vehemently oppose.”
The election is Nov. 3. Early voting runs until Oct. 31.
Rachel Black is a reporter and writer for The Election Hub. Reach her at rachel@theelectionhub.org.
For information on this and other races on the ballot in Mecklenburg, Gaston and Cabarrus counties and beyond, check out The Election Hub. It is a project of the Civic Knowledge Initiative, a nonpartisan nonprofit based in Charlotte that makes it easy for every citizen to find, understand and act on reliable information about their local government and elected officials.