Mountain Man

It’s an hour before Big Ivy’s food bank officially opens, but over a dozen families have congregated around the picnic tables outside the metal building. Children dart back and forth among the trees playing tag. Cars idle in the parking lot as the heat from the asphalt makes the air wobble in the August sun. 

Two years ago, Hurricane Helene obliterated this Buncombe County community of a few hundred people, swelling Ivy Creek to a raging river and sending double-wides, campers, vehicles, animals, and debris screaming down the mountain. Across the broader Barnardsville community, at least 50 homes and a trailer park were destroyed. 

Like so many pockets of rural western North Carolina, signs of Helene are still everywhere. Along Dillingham Road, small clusters of storage sheds, the kind you see in Home Depot parking lots, serve as makeshift shelters. “That’s Mr. Carson’s property,” food bank director Sierra Clark explains when I ask about the five sheds a hundred yards away from where we’re standing. 

Clark said 40 families still lack housing, and the number of those who don’t have a permanent water source is probably “way more.”

Since Helene, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) has become one of the most vital lifelines in this part of the state. Micah Chrisman, spokesperson for the MANNA FoodBank network, said SNAP provides nine meals for every one the state’s food banks can provide. But after the latest round of major federal cuts, those benefits have become harder to access.

All of this has created a unique challenge for any political candidate seeking to represent this region in Congress. Last election, voters in the counties most impacted by Helene—Buncombe, Henderson, Yancey, Avery, and Madison, all in the heart of the 11th District—were still too shell-shocked from the disaster to affect how they voted, said Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, executive director of the Campaign for Southern Equality and a former candidate. 

But this year, she said, is “it’s not gonna be the same.”

Beach-Ferrara has already been proven right, but not because of Helene. Three months ago, Republican incumbent Chuck Edwards dropped out of the race after a bipartisan House Ethics Committee found that he’d “engaged in persistent unprofessional and inappropriate conduct towards two young female staffers.” 

While his upstart Democratic challenger, Jamie Ager, a farmer with no prior political experience, was already crushing Edwards in fundraising. Even so, most election forecasters still considered the race a strong Republican lean. When Edwards dropped out, the local GOP scrambled to find a replacement. It ultimately selected Jennifer Balkcom, a state House member from Henderson County.

Balkcom entered the race with far less funding and name recognition, and only three months to campaign. Almost overnight, a virtually unwinnable race for Democrats became a toss-up.

Ager has the kind of profile national party leaders salivate over: a fourth-generation farmer, family man, and political moderate. He also has a family legacy: His grandfather represented the 11th District for three terms in the 1980s, and his father, John Ager, served in the state House from 2015 to 2023. His older brother, Eric, currently represents part of Buncombe County in the legislature. 

Even before Helene, the 11th District was growing less red—the “pinkening,” as Western Carolina University political scientist Chris Cooper has called it. From 2020 to 2024, nine of the 16 counties in the 11th moved left by a few percentage points. Buncombe and Henderson, the region’s most populous counties, moved 1.8 and 2.2 percentage points left, respectively. 

This is good news for Democrats, but if Ager wants to win, he’ll have to mobilize rural and working-class voters outside his Asheville base. As his father put it: “He needs to key on the independents.”

That might explain why, on the campaign trail, Ager has taken great pains to distance himself from the national party’s vanguard: Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Zohran Mamdani. He also steers clear of the prairie populism that has successfully boosted farmer candidates in other parts of the country. He supports a public option for health care, but he stops short of Medicare for All and signed a letter declaring himself “capitalist, not socialist.” 

Ager calls himself a “Mountain Democrat.” 

This term appears relatively new—none of the old-timers I spoke with in the region had ever heard it—but it has gained traction in other Appalachian districts over the last few years. It seems to be a way of telegraphing to voters: “I’m not too blue, not also not too red.”

“We got a strain of individualism up here in the mountains,” Ager said when I asked how he defines it. “We like to work with our hands. We like hard work. We don’t mind hard work. We do like Jesus tells us to. Love our neighbor.” 

Balkcom, who changed her party affiliation from Libertarian to Democrat in 2005 and then Republican in 2016, has said Trump’s first White House bid inspired her to run for office. As a legislator, she’s introduced bills that toe the MAGA line, including a ban on transgender athletes in women’s high school and collegiate sports and a bill preventing foreign entities from purchasing farmland within a 50-mile radius of military installations. Last week, one of her TV ads attacked Ager for hosting a “drag” barn dance in 2019. The video—AI-generated but aired without an AI watermark—shows Ager waltzing with a drag queen. 

Balkcom regularly touts her roots as a “farm girl,” and another of her ads proudly boasted that her single “momma” once gunned down a home intruder. (Some have questioned this anecdote, however.)

If you hold Ager’s platform next to Balkcom’s, the similarities are striking. Both promise to deliver on Helene recovery, affordability, better access to health care, and fighting corruption. Both have agricultural backgrounds and business experience. But neither has seemed willing to drill down to the specifics of what they’ll do or how they’ll do it. 

Instead, it’s become a campaign about what it means to represent the mountains—and who voters believe will do that best. 

‘Broken to Broken Worse’

On a Sunday afternoon in Asheville’s River Arts District, the atmosphere was jubilant. Young campaign workers in green T-shirts—not blue, not red—flitted among Asheville’s progressives, who were lined up outside the music venue The Grey Eagle. Everyone seemed to know each other. A retro lapel pin tacked to a staffer’s chest declared in kelly green letters: “Mountain Democrats are marvelous.”

Inside, Ager and his three sons were playing bluegrass standards, with the candidate on rhythm guitar. A few couples from Fairview, Ager’s hometown, danced by in boot-cut jeans.

Ager began his stump speech talking about his farm at Hickory Nut Gap, which specializes in grass-fed beef and pasture-raised pork, then transitioned to his platform: Helene recovery, affordability, corruption. Western North Carolina is “still hurting,” Ager said. 

And what does he plan to do about it? 

Sit on the steps of the Department of Homeland Security “with a six-pack” until he gets the money his voters need, as he often says. His passion was clear; his plan was not. 

Ager never mentioned Trump by name. He didn’t name Edwards or Balkcom, either, though he did accuse his current opponent of having “never showed up for western North Carolina.” 

“We’ve gone from broken to broken worse,” he said.

In a corner of the barroom, I sat with a couple from Waynesville who’d moved to the region 17 years ago and run a coaching practice for nonprofit leaders. “I like Jamie,” Christine told me. (Neither wanted their last name used, citing their work.) She listed the reasons: He’s a farmer, a guy from a small mountain town, and a leader in the regenerative agriculture movement. He’d be an outsider in Washington and a bit of an unknown. 

For Noah, reversing cuts to Medicaid is a top priority. So is ending what he sees as a trend of lawmakers more concerned with personal enrichment than serving their constituents. But Ager hadn’t convinced him yet. He wanted to see the man in person. 

“Look,” Noah said, leaning in. “I went to his website. I read what he wrote there. I still have no idea what he fucking believes in.” 

When I mentioned this conversation to Ager later, he nodded. “It’s understandable to be very skeptical,” he said as we sat in patio chairs under the roof of his beautiful old dairy barn. (Weeks later, Ager would release a campaign ad featuring the locale: “Do you know what we need more of in Washington, D.C.?” he shouts, a fist in the air. “Barn dances!”) 

“My job,” Ager continued, “is to go out and talk to folks and be transparent.” 

Ager has the build of a high-school linebacker: around 6 feet tall, muscular, a little twitchy. He gave me a tour of the farm store and a rundown of which animals live where. The cows hugged the shade up the mountain, while the hogs had just been moved down the valley. 

Hickory Nut Gap’s business is now mostly wholesale, and most of its animals never set foot on this land. Ager has been successful in an industry where many have floundered. The farm’s ground pork is available in Sprouts stores around the country, and a recent financial disclosure puts his net worth somewhere between $5 million and $20 million. 

The conversation turned back to the idea of the “Mountain Democrat,” and Ager offered what he did in the wake of Helene as an example. When the storm hit, Hickory Nut Gap was hosting a conference. Many of the attendees were stranded. After checking on his parents farther up the mountain, Ager and his sons visited the neighbors, using the farm’s Bobcats and tractors to clear trees and brush. Without power, the meat in their retail store began to thaw, so they pulled out the grill and started cooking for everyone.

“One thing I know about grief is just gather up, check in on each other,” he said. “Trauma and loss creates the opportunity for connection.”

Faced with a constituency that is, in his words, as “broken” as it’s ever been, Ager was circumspect: “There’s always going to be things wrong with family, but the beautiful thing about family is that you love each other, you’re there for each other, and it’s not always easy to like the people that you love, but the love is what matters.”

A Family Legacy

A hundred years ago, Western North Carolina found itself in similarly dire straits. The timber industry had cut down millions of acres of forest, leaving hillsides and slopes barren, scarred, and unprotected. The U.S. Forest Service began buying up large tracts of land, ousting thousands of mountain families from their ancestral homes. 

It was Ager’s great-grandfather, James McClure, who transformed the economic prospects of many small farmers here in the 1920s and ’30s. Leaning heavily into the style of populism Ager has avoided, McClure built a farmer-owned cooperative that became one of the state’s largest and most economically progressive forces. The Farmers’ Federation helped thousands buy fertilizer, seed, and animal feed in bulk, and it operated a cannery where growers could process and preserve their crops. By the end of the Great Depression, the federation operated 17 wholesale warehouses across 11 counties, a vocational school, multiple feed mills, a chicken slaughtering facility, two hatcheries, and a half dozen sweet potato curing barns. 

The Farmers’ Federation was far from perfect. In publications and fundraising materials, it traded on the racial purity of white Appalachia and obscured the region’s history of slavery and free Black residents. But until it went bankrupt in the ’60s, the federation gave ranks of impoverished mountaineers a glimpse of economic self-determination. 

To Ager, the farm is a product of that legacy. But when I pressed for a connection between the platform of the Farmers’ Federation and that of his campaign—could something like that be possible now, when SNAP cuts have devastated so many families?—he pushed back. 

“Our mission at Hickory Nut Gap is to build communities through agriculture,” Ager said. “In corporate speak, that’s stakeholder capitalism, or conscious capitalism.” He name-dropped Whole Foods co-founder John Mackey, a self-described “free-market libertarian” and author of Conscious Capitalism. “To me,” Ager said, “that resonates. The job of a business is to add value to community.” 

Adding value requires patience and pragmatism, he said, both of which he’s had to cultivate as a farmer. “You can’t just go out and rant and rave about some big high-mindedness and expect it to work.” 

So what would he say to the thousands of people waiting in line at food banks in his district? 

“I would say, ‘This is sad.’” He paused. “For people. When they don’t have access to food. And that’s part of what leaders do. They create the scenario where people can have enough food to eat and help contribute to society.”

‘Not Impressed’

Balkcom did not respond to multiple interview requests from The Assembly. The eighth-generation Henderson County native told the Carolina Journal that she pursued a career in mortgage lending after watching her single mother struggle to keep the family apple and cattle farm. 

Asked about what made her farm background different from her rival’s, she said that it’s been a “harder road” for her family, “clinging to something that we believed was our heritage.” 

“It’s my passion—preserving farmland,” Balkcom told a WLOS interviewer. 

But Balkcom has generally evaded questions about her policies and vision, even after Trump endorsed her candidacy in August. If Ager’s website is a bit vague on the details, Balkcom’s has none. In a Spectrum News interview that went viral, a reporter asked her whether Chuck Edwards should resign from office. On camera, she paused for 13 seconds before submitting, “I don’t know.” 

 “I don’t think anyone has the right answers,” she responded when asked what Helene recovery policies she’d pursue.

What should be done right now to bring down consumer prices? “I don’t know.”

When WLOS asked whether the president’s deployment of immigration agents in North Carolina had gone too far, she replied, “I don’t know that I could answer that.” 

“Not impressed,” a longtime NC-11 GOP operative said of her performance. Part of the problem is time; her campaign hasn’t had the luxury of months of coaching and time to get her up to speed. But he also thought her team simply “did not prepare her” for interviews. He doubted she was the best pick. 

It’s not as though Balkcom is new to politics. In the state House, she sponsored several Helene-related bills and served on the House Select Committee on Helene Recovery. But he couldn’t remember hearing “a peep” from Balkcom about the topic, at least not publicly. “[And] she’s my rep,” he added. At this point, he said, “I would vote for Jamie.” 

Used to Being Forgotten

People in Appalachia, said Josh Copus, a sculptor and small business owner based in Marshall, “get used to being forgotten.”

Copus has been friends with Ager since they were at Warren Wilson College, and he understands where the feeling of abandonment comes from. Although he obtained the small business loan he needed after the storm, he hadn’t seen government aid benefit most of the people he knows. Overall, Copus said, recovery in Madison County has been “pretty lame.” 

His take made me think of the Big Ivy food bank, where a couple named Jennifer and Damien (they also asked me not to use their last names) said they became regulars three months ago after receiving a letter from the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services informing them they no longer qualified for SNAP. The letter didn’t say why, but after calling the number on it dozens of times, Jennifer said she gave up trying to reach a real person. 

Damien is unemployed and receives $300 a month in disability payments. Jennifer works as a cashier at Dollar Tree in Weaverville, where she makes $14 an hour but is lucky if she gets 15 hours a week. She suspects the new work requirement is the reason their assistance was cut, but she doesn’t know how to get more shifts; most other businesses are 30 to 40 minutes away. 

Sierra Clark, the food bank manager, fields calls from people like Damien and Jennifer all the time. On average, the Big Ivy food bank is seeing 20 new families each month. She doesn’t know how the food bank will keep up. 

I asked Jennifer and Damien what they wanted from their next member of Congress. Both just shrugged. The midterms seemed pretty far from their minds. 

“Local politics is the antidote to national politics,” Copus insisted. Challenges notwithstanding, he feels Ager is the best chance his district has had in a long time. “He’s our people.” A man of the mountains: no more, no less.