Kate Barr’s Senate Race Was Impossible To Win. That Was The Whole Point.
She ran for a state Senate seat in one of North Carolina’s most gerrymandered districts knowing she didn’t stand a chance.
Kate Barr didn’t for one second entertain the thought of winning her North Carolina Senate race last November. She had a concession video ready to post a week before the election. The 42-year-old Democrat and mother of two was running against incumbent Republican Senator Vickie Sawyer in District 37—but she was really running to protest gerrymandering.
District 37 was one of many in North Carolina that had recently been redrawn by the Republican supermajority in Raleigh. Now, the district, which includes Iredell County and a sliver of northern Mecklenburg County, leans heavily Republican. A large part of Barr’s campaign was about explaining that to her constituents. She made it her mission to spell out, simply and directly, what gerrymandering is and how it affects them. “People in power draw our voting districts in order to keep their power,” she says. “So it’s representatives choosing their voters instead of voters choosing their representatives.”
Barr says she’s been training to lose that Senate race her whole life. On her website, katebarrcantwin.com, she writes, “I voted for Al Gore in 2000, cheered for Carolina basketball during the Matt Doherty era, and watch the Carolina Panthers on Sundays.” As a biology major at UNC Chapel Hill, she planned to go to medical school but ultimately “got the bug for health economics.” Her husband, Dan, became a radiologist, and his residency took them to Roanoke, Virginia, and Ann Arbor, Michigan, before they decided to settle in Davidson.
In 2015, Barr founded Pip & Grow, an eco-friendly baby bassinet company. During her seven years in business, she received national awards and was named to the inaugural Forbes Next 1000 list. For the last three years, she’s worked remotely as a senior behavioral scientist at the University of Michigan’s Center for Academic Innovation. She and Dan are parents to 8-year-old Winnie and 6-year-old Max, and her “extreme volunteerism” includes work with the Davidson Town Planning Board, Davidson Housing Coalition, and Davidson Sustainability Committee.
Barr launched her losing campaign at the start of 2024 with cheeky taglines like, “Get in losers, we’re (not) going to the Senate” and merch with messages like “Gerrymandered AF.” Last summer, she caught the attention of The Washington Post, which published a story on her efforts to highlight the impacts of gerrymandering. “I never expected anyone on the national level or outside the district to care,” Barr says. “That was beyond my wildest fantasies, especially given that I ran with basically no filter.”
She lost the election on November 5 but still secured 35% of the vote—more than she anticipated. It’s motivated her to keep “making noise and raising hell” so that other unwinnable races across the state and country get the attention they deserve. Here’s Barr in her own words, edited for clarity and concision.
Both of my parents were politically active, my mom in particular. She was one of the first white teachers at Hillside High School (in Durham) and helped integrate that school. One of the things she said that’s always stuck with me is, “The only way integration worked in Durham is because the Duke professors decided to send their kids to the newly integrated schools, no matter what.” They put their children where their principles were.
My first political awareness was around the Gulf War and Desert Storm. I was very concerned that the kids in Iraq wouldn’t get milk and wrote a letter to President (George H.W.) Bush. My first presidential election where I could vote was Bush-Gore in 2000. I heard Al Gore speak when I was in Young Democrats of America at UNC. I was just so sure that I had seen our next president speaking. I shook his hand when his motorcade stopped to meet people along the drive.
I think the 2016 election woke me up. The thing I had to face was, I didn’t do anything to achieve the outcome I wanted. I voted, but I didn’t knock on doors, donate money, or write postcards. I didn’t put in the work. I just assumed it was going to happen. But democracy is a verb. We have to participate if we want things to go in a particular direction. I thought, I am going to make this patch of ground around me as amazing as I can for everyone who lives here.
Last fall, when Beth Helfrich decided to run for House District 98, I was working on her campaign. I realized that a bulk of deciding to run for office is paperwork. I thought you had to be invited or a member of a special club or something. Nope, you just have to be willing to do the paperwork. So this was lurking in my brain. I thought, I’ve got opinions and would like to make some changes.
I was standing in line with a glass of wine at Christmas in Davidson, waiting to get my second glass of wine, and my friend was like, “Hey, wanna run for state Senate?” It was right after Natasha Marcus had been drawn out. We knew the new maps made this an unwinnable seat. So I emailed the state Senate recruitment team. I said I would tell everyone I was going to lose from the jump. They were super on board because they like to mix stuff up.
I’ve long felt gerrymandering was the root cause of problems in our political system, but I also wanted to run on public education, commonsense gun laws, and reproductive health care. Abortion is health care. Those are the facts. Not to mention, the cost of being female in the workplace and becoming pregnant at the wrong time. I don’t even know how to talk about it rationally.
I’m a product of the public school system and the daughter of a public school teacher. As a mom of two kids who go to public school, I believe in public education. We need to fully fund education and pay teachers more. I was lucky enough to speak to high school students in a civics class in Statesville, and it was the coolest thing because they fact-checked me the whole time. They had their laptops out, Googled stuff, and asked follow-up questions. It made me feel really hopeful because I was sure at least half the kids in the room didn’t agree with my perspectives. But the fact that they knew not to take the grown-up in the room at their word and use the resources available—that’s what education is about to me.
We’re sacrificing our children’s lives to let people have weapons that are meant to hunt humans, and I cannot make that make sense. I have no problem with responsible gun owners, and I think most responsible gun owners understand the dangers. I have good friends with guns, and we all agree on the types of background checks that should exist. And that comes back to gerrymandering. If the citizens of North Carolina fundamentally agree on this, why haven’t we seen improvement? It’s because our representatives don’t answer to the voters.
I wish more people understood how much gerrymandering touches their everyday lives. If you’re mad about traffic, if you feel strongly about how your community is or isn’t growing, if you’re upset about your property taxes going up, you should care about gerrymandering. The way District 37 was drawn this time was specifically to unseat Natasha Marcus. It is a nefarious gerrymander because the map was drawn to unseat an outspoken Senator who was chosen to be outspoken in that way. That’s the kind of silencing of opposition and dissent that’s unacceptable in a free society.
Since The Washington Post article came out, it was nonstop. It was such an amazing thing to feel like someone from the outside saw what I was trying to do and understood it. That article really represented that we were having fun, and we wanted it to be funny and hot pink and sparkly, but we were also dead serious.
My husband basically turned into a “trad dad” to make this all possible. He took the kids to all the things, made the appointments, got the groceries, and made dinner, all while doing his day job. He just took over, especially in the last month when I’d have to get on some Zoom at the most inconvenient time. He’d just look at me and say, “We got this.”
We talk about politics a lot at home. Mostly we talk about gerrymandering because I want (my kids) to understand why I go around saying I’m going to lose. They watch sports, and they know the goal is to win. They were a little disappointed on election night because they still believed I had a chance, despite my telling them over and over again that I didn’t.
Plenty of people around me were ready to have some wild, come-from-behind win. I still don’t really know how to evaluate what I was supposed to get versus what I got. Vickie (Sawyer) hasn’t really had a competitor before, so we just didn’t have data to know what to expect. People who are smarter than I am about how to predict things said I outperformed by 3% to 3.5%, which is great.
I really feel like I won the day my neighbor’s fifth-grade daughter walked up to me with a green binder, collecting signatures to protest gerrymandering. Her mom had to explain to her why her neighbor Beth Helfrich could win but her neighbor Kate Barr could not. She was horrified by it and thought gerrymandering had to be illegal. Kids get it.
I’ll never say no to running for office again, because I never thought I would do this. That said, my passion project is these unwinnable races across the state and the country. My email is full of people who want to run in their own gerrymandered spots. So my focus for the next handful of years is the Can’t Win Victory Fund. I’m trying to bring what I know from my day job in behavioral science and apply what I’ve learned from the campaign, and just, like, explode it. It’s giving me some hope right now.
(N.C. Attorney General) Jeff Jackson told me that women have to be asked to run for office seven times, and men have to be asked zero times. For women, especially, who feel hopeless after this election, I say: Run for something. It’s scary as hell to put your name out there but also so freaking empowering. Run for school board, city council, dogcatcher. … It doesn’t have to be the open U.S. Senate seat in 2026. Run for something you care about. And don’t be afraid to be outspoken.
