Democratic congressional candidate Jamie Ager is a fifth-generation farmer, but that’s not his only family business.
Ager, who is running to represent Western North Carolina’s 11th Congressional District, comes from a family of politicians. His grandfather, Jamie Clarke, served two terms in the US House of Representatives. His father, John Ager, was a North Carolina state representative from 2015 to 2023. His brother, Eric Ager, is currently serving his second term as a state representative.
In 1982, Ager’s grandfather narrowly defeated Republican Bill Hendon by less than 1,500 votes to represent North Carolina’s 11th Congressional District. In 1984, the seat flipped back to Hendon by two percentage points. In 1986 and 1988, Clarke won his seat back, winning with about a one-percentage-point lead each time. In 1990, the seat returned to a Republican by a narrow margin.
[Subscribe for FREE to Carolina Public Press’ Daily, Weekend and Election 2026 newsletters.]
The apple may not fall far from the tree. Despite an extended head start and a last-minute switch on the Republican side of the ballot, the congressional race between Ager and State House Rep. Jennifer Balkcom, R-Henderson, is expected to be just as close.
Ager said the familial political ties help. People in more rural communities he visits still remember his grandfather fondly.
“They probably voted Democrat back in the '80s, but don't anymore,” Ager said. “And now they're like, ‘Oh, you're Jamie Clarke’s grandson. You're OK. You're a farmer,’ and that gives me the opportunity.”
The Western North Carolina district, which includes 15 counties, hasn’t had Democratic representation since 2013. It’s grown to become reliable Republican territory, with help from some Republican-friendly redistricting by legislators.
But after Hurricane Helene devastated the region in 2024, not everyone was pleased with Republican US Rep. Chuck Edwards’ leadership. There was a perception among many Western North Carolinians that Henderson County Republican was missing in action, not fighting hard enough to secure recovery funds.
“What happened with Helene, he really lost me there,” a woman told Carolina Public Press in late July while shopping at an Asheville farmer’s market with her child.
“I'm from Swannanoa, so we got hit really hard. So I don't feel like he responded correctly, and I don't feel like he was really involved. I got emails that he sends to like everybody, but that's all we got from him. I just don't think that there was much done on his end when it came to actually boots on the ground helping us.”
National Democrats paid attention to the shift. They invested in Ager early; the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee added Ager to its “Red to Blue” program in February, before the primary was over, which led to some local consternation. As part of the program, Ager would receive strategic guidance, fundraising and training.
They bet that Ager could ride the anticipated blue wave to victory in a midterm election year with low presidential popularity and lagging support for the incumbent, Edwards.
But nobody expected the race to dramatically shift less than 100 days before Election Day.
Balkcom enters the race
Henderson County Republican lawmaker Jennifer Balkcom did not have a US Congress run on her list of New Year’s resolutions.
But after Edwards dropped out of the race over sexual harassment allegations, she stepped up. On August 10, just 85 days before Election Day, she was chosen as Edwards' replacement.
“This race is too important to sit out,” Balkcom said in a statement at the time. “We must hold this seat, preserve our mountain values, work with President Trump’s Administration to continue rebuilding Western North Carolina, and make sure Washington never forgets the people who call these mountains home.”
Balkcom is also from a farming family.
While she works as a mortgage loan officer, she watched her single mother fight to keep the family farm growing up and has worked on agricultural policy in the state legislature. This session, she sponsored a successful bill that bans adversarial foreign governments from acquiring agricultural land or other land close to military installations.
She also pushed for legislation preventing banks from denying or restricting service to agricultural producers based on their greenhouse gas emissions or use of fossil-fuel derived fertilizers or fossil fuel-powered machinery. That bill did not pass.
During her two terms in the General Assembly, Balkcom passed a few high-profile bills into state law. She authored the 2023 Fairness in Women’s Sports Act, which banned transgender girls and women from competing on girls and women's sports teams.
She followed that up this session with House Bill 805, which required the state to recognize only two sexes, banned use of taxpayer funds for gender transition procedures, cross-sex hormones or puberty-blocking drugs for incarcerated prisoners, required school boards to let parents remove their child from classroom discussions if they infringed upon their religious beliefs and required online entities to verify the age and obtain consent from anyone in a pornographic image before publishing it.
Some of her other sponsored bills that did not pass would allow parents to make conscientious objections to student vaccination requirements, establish procedures for removing certain library books from schools, give parents the right to consent to any changes to their child’s name or gender designation within school records and access to counseling records and allow disabled veterans to prequalify for property tax homestead exclusions.
She led on a few crime bills this session. The Gun Violence Prevention Act would create an additional felony charge for felons who possess or use a firearm during a crime.
“If you're already a felon, you should not have a gun,” she told WLOS. “But we did not have a sentencing capability that was high enough to keep them in jail after committing one crime.”
Another bill increased sentencing for soliciting minors online. Finally, she pushed legislation banning sleeping or camping in public spaces, like sidewalks or public buildings. Local governments could designate property for homeless people to use instead, with certain sanitation and behavioral health requirements, but there was no funding attached to the bill.
Balkcom chairs the House insurance and the Agriculture and Natural and Economic Resources Appropriations committees. She also served as vice chair of a Helene Recovery Committee.
She told WLOS in an interview that she thinks the federal government’s response has been slow, but that she has been on the ground talking to local municipalities, fire departments and farmers about their recovery needs.
“In the state, I've been at every meeting,” she said. “I've been working to bring funds here. I mean, we're at $2 billion with the state (Helene recovery funding).”
Balkcom told Spectrum News in another interview that the state has probably done more than they were required to do as part of the recovery process. She explained that state lawmakers have been strategic, passing a new recovery bill every few months as they determine what the greatest needs are and how money can be most effectively spent.
She said she wants to go to Washington, D.C., to help get Federal Emergency Management Assistance funding back on track.
“We need more money,” she said. “This is a long run. I mean, this is a different topography than a lot of the whole entire state; we're not flat as you can imagine.”
Carolina Public Press reached out to Balkcom's campaign several times over email, phone and text. She was not made available for an interview.
Her lead strategist, Jordan Shaw, said Balkcom is the right choice for Western North Carolinians.
“She's an eighth-generation Western North Carolina farm girl,” he said. “She is born and bred in these mountains. She knows these people. She knows their issues, and she can speak to them in a very unique way as someone who has lived this life.”
Ager and Balkcom campaign
Ager’s been campaigning since July 2025, giving him over a year head start over Balkcom.
In his first five days, he had raised $150,000. By the end of September, his campaign contributions rose to more than $5 million.
Even before Balkcom replaced Edwards, his campaign’s momentum lagged behind Ager. He was behind in the fundraising battle at the time, raising $939,000 to Ager’s $1.69 million at the time of his withdrawal from the race.
Balkcom’s state House seat was fairly secure, so there was no need to raise a significant amount of money. By the end of June, she had just under $15,000 in her state campaign coffers. According to federal campaign finance data, she raised $355,000 by the end of September for her Congressional campaign.
Money is critical in a district like NC-11. It’s rural, with tough terrain to cover knocking doors. Candidates need funding to get their message across on the airwaves, through direct mailers and by other digital means.
Ager was thankful for the national Democrats’ financial support, but he said he was clear about his stances before accepting. He said he’s a more moderate Democrat — one who supports the Second Amendment and who doesn’t strongly attach his identity to his politician affiliation.
“The Democrats are looking for more diverse opinions because we need a big tent party,” he said.
Ager’s deep connections with the community might be just as helpful. As owner of Hickory Nut Farm in Buncombe County near Fairview, he’s interacted with many people in the business and agricultural communities.
“I'll visit a lot of Republicans and a lot of Independents and small-business owners who are too busy to be super-focused on politics,” he said. “That was me. I'm familiar with that experience.”
Ager said campaigning has been “fun and pretty easy” for him. By now, he’s been to every county in the district multiple times to talk to voters and community leaders.
Balkcom doesn’t have the same luxury of time. She told Spectrum that the campaign has been a whirlwind.
“It just feels like 90 miles an hour, and you're building a plane that you're trying to land here in just a few months,” she said.
Balkcom has limited time to introduce herself to voters, convey her message and earn their vote. Shaw said has to be done largely through paid media, like digital advertisements, since she cannot meet every voter.
“She doesn't have time to drive to all the events,” he said. “She doesn't have time to meet every voter because of the truncated nature of this race, but she's working hard to meet as many voters as she can.”
So far, Balkcom has a few campaign ads up.
Her first ad introduced herself as a lawmaker working to protect family farms. Her second told the story of her single mother shooting a man who tried to break into her home. Her mother then said Balkcom would fight just like her, for lower costs, Helene funding and better healthcare.
Other ads frame Ager as too liberal for Western North Carolina, and tie him to some of his liberal financial supporters.
Ager’s campaign ads lean into his farming background. In them, he shares concerns about lagging Helene recovery funding, government corruption, rising costs, Medicaid cuts and climate change leading to worse natural disasters.
What Balkcom and Ager each stand for
In interviews with news outlets, Balkcom has taken stances on some national issues. She said she supports term limits and thinks local governments should have the most power over data center moratoriums.
She did not give definitive answers, however, on whether she would support a war powers resolution to give Congress more control over the Iran war or approve financial aid to Ukraine. She said the economy was not as bad as it was under former Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration, and said she wasn’t sure which ideas she might bring to the table to lower prices.
While she said she would have voted to censure Edwards, she was hesitant about whether he should resign or not. Regardless, she wants to be judged by her own merits, not any of her predecessors.
“We should not judge other people by other people's mistakes,” she told Spectrum. “I would say my record and my reputation in Raleigh is something that I hope people will research and see that I'm not any of those people.”
Trump endorsed Balkcom, and has rallied in North Carolina on her behalf.
Just like his grandfather, Ager knows that if he wins, he is only guaranteed two years. The seat could easily flip back to Republican control in 2028. He said he has to be realistic about what he can accomplish in that time.
When Helene hit, Hickory Nut Farm’s creek overflowed, crushing the entire corral system. Water lines went down and they lost electricity. Ager and his family took all the meat from the farm store to first responders to distribute to people. There’s still a level of sadness and grief whenever people talk about that time, he said.
Furthering Helene recovery is his No. 1 focus, he said. First, he wants to make sure delayed projects and money gets moving again.
“We need a leader who's out there finding the specific places and almost like doing the bully pulpit thing of being like, ‘OK, this project's not happening right now. How's the money held up? Who do I got to talk to?’” Ager said.
While Helene will never be fully behind them, Ager hopes to get the region’s economy going again. He said small businesses are still earning less revenue than they were before Helene. Western North Carolina needs someone to “celebrate the region” to get tourists to visit and people to build businesses, he said.
“I feel like our current congressman just doesn't do that,” Ager said. “He just kind of sits back and doesn't want to piss anybody off.”
Beyond Helene, Ager wants to take on corruption in Washington, although he recognizes that would take much longer than two years. There are big problems to address, like immigration reform, rising healthcare costs and creation of a long-term resilient food system, but Congress can’t solve them when everything is mired in corruption, Ager said.
In the shorter term, Ager said he would support removing tariffs to lower costs for businesses and consumers, ending the Iran war, investing in healthcare and deregulating the housing industry.
There’s been little polling in the race. A September Public Policy Polling survey found that Republicans generally have a four-point lead in the district, but when voters were asked to choose between Ager and Balkcom, Ager had a three-point lead. Considering the poll’s limited scope, Balkcom and Ager are essentially in a statistical tie.
It may be a long election night for the pair of farmers.
This article first appeared on Carolina Public Press and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.