The Assembly: “Robinson has, to put it mildly, an unorthodox political profile. She’s a blunt progressive Democrat in a deep-red mountain county. She last worked as a shift manager for a Pizza Hut. She’s a white woman married to a Black man in a place with almost no racial diversity, and they live with their son in a government-subsidized apartment. She favors flip-flops, nose rings, and T-shirts that broadcast her political sympathies.
Today’s T-shirt featured the logo of Down Home North Carolina, the nonprofit running this two-day candidate training camp. Founded in 2017, Down Home organizes working-class voters in the state’s rural areas and small towns around economic issues like fair wages, safe and affordable housing, and better public-school funding. It has chapters in Ashe and eight other counties, including some of the most difficult places for those issues to get traction, and its work is intentionally multiracial.
Down Home launched a candidate-training program in preparation for this year’s election, covering skills from message development to fundraising. Robinson joined 11 other potential candidates for the inaugural class, which met over a warm December weekend in Durham.”