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Kinnaird to run again

Posted on October 25, 2007 by Staff

By Kirk Ross
Staff Writer

State Senator Ellie Kinnaird announced Tuesday that she will seek re-election. The six-term incumbent and former Carrboro mayor said she made the decision to seek another term because she wants to continue working on juvenile justice and environmental issues and plans to fight for a bill to prevent executions of the mentally ill.

Kinnaird had talked openly about retiring this year, but said she wanted to leave knowing a woman would run for her seat. She was unsuccessful in recruiting a woman candidate and began contemplating a re-election run this summer.

Since then, Orange County Board of Commissioners Chair Moses Carey, County Commissioner Mike Nelson and Carrboro Alderman John Herrera all announced that they would seek the Democratic nomination to run for the state Senate seat.
Orange County shares Senate District 23 with Person County.

Nelson and Herrera have said they will not continue their candidacies.

On his blog Leading from the Left, Nelson wrote that he was suspending his campaign and offered his support to Kinnaird. “While I’m disappointed that I will no longer be a candidate for the seat she now holds, I’m confident the progressive causes I care so much about will continue to be championed under her leadership and that we will continue to work together as we have in the past,” he wrote.

Carey said that he will continue running and intends to win the May primary.
“She certainly has the right to change her mind,” Carey said in an interview Wednesday. “But I’m not going to change my mind. I’m going to stay in the race and run the best campaign I can.”

Carey, who has served on the board of county commissioners for 23 years, said he’s been working since early this year on his campaign, including building ties in Person County.
Kinnaird said she will campaign vigorously for the seat and is planning fundraisers to get ready for it. She said the calls and emails since her announcement have been “very positive.” And while she expects a tough campaign ahead, she is not relishing the situation.

“Primaries are always divisive in a way because they are contests within the family — with the people you’ve worked with on issues,” she said. Still, she said, “It’s always good to have the issues thoroughly debated and put before the public.”

Since her election to the Senate in 1996, Kinnaird’s district has changed in shape and geography. A GOP lawsuit that resulted in the end of two-member Senate districts pitted her against former Chapel Hill Mayor Howard Lee in a bitterly contested primary in 2002. The district changed again in 2003, dropping Chatham County and adding Person County.

Kinnaird lost the Person vote in 2004 and won it handily in 2006.

“I spend about a day there a week,” she said.

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