Where’s Sarah Stevens?

If you didn’t know former Republican state Rep. Sarah Stevens is running to unseat N.C. Supreme Court Justice Anita Earls, you probably aren’t alone. 

Ten days away from the start of in-person early voting in October, Stevens’ campaign hadn’t run any television ads, agreed to any public debates, or posted much on social media. Stevens has also raised very little money in one of the state’s most important races this year.

Public opinion polls show Earls with a narrow lead. The Supreme Court race is one of the few statewide races on the ballot, and it is particularly high-profile because the 2024 race between Democratic Justice Allison Riggs and Republican Jefferson Griffin turned into a monthslong court battle that a federal judge ultimately resolved.

At this point in that election, Griffin had nearly twice as much money in the bank as Riggs, entering July with $1.1 million in available cash compared to her $583,000. This year, the script has flipped.

The latest campaign fundraising data shows Stevens entered July with less than $258,000 in available cash. Earls, meanwhile, had 13 times as much, with more than $3.5 million at her disposal.

Stevens is also hardly visible on the campaign trail, opting for private fundraisers over public events. She and Earls recently participated in a panel hosted by the Federalist Society, and both addressed the North Carolina Bar Association in remarks televised on PBS in September. Both events were closed to the public. 

Stevens’ campaign declined to make the candidate available for an interview, share her upcoming appearances, or quantify how active she’s been on the campaign trail. 

“I don’t know of any public events planned at this moment,” her spokesperson, Stephen Wiley, said in a statement to The Assembly on September 18, less than a month before in-person early voting begins. “She is following the strategy laid out by her advisors to communicate with the voters she needs to reach.”

Asked how many fundraisers and public events Stevens has had, Wiley replied: “Several.” 

By contrast, Earls has held or attended roughly 200 public or campaign events since announcing her reelection bid in October 2024, according to her campaign.

“I really believe that people deserve to see the folks that are ruling on our highest court,” Earls said in an interview with The Assembly last month.

Mitch Kokai, a senior political analyst for the conservative John Locke Foundation, said judicial elections are traditionally low-profile, but this campaign trail dynamic is still unusual, given that Earls has been so active. 

“We’ve not seen ads. We’ve not seen press events. We’ve not seen a whole raft of media events,” he said of Stevens. “Being the lesser-known candidate, you’d think she might want to get more publicity.” 

Getting Out There

Stevens, a longtime attorney in Surry County, hasn’t been in a competitive race since her first run for office in 2008. Since Republicans took charge of the General Assembly in 2011, voting maps have kept Stevens in a safe state House district. She’s also never had a serious primary threat, handily defeating her challengers in 2018 and 2022. In this year’s state Supreme Court race, Stevens ran unopposed in the primary.

In the legislature, Stevens championed several changes to state election laws, including measures implementing a photo ID requirement to vote and making statewide judicial contests partisan after more than a decade with no party labels. Before leaving the legislature this year, she led the House Judiciary Committee and co-chaired the House Election Law Committee, which advanced a proposal last year that would have prevented state and county election board members from encouraging people to vote (a provision that was later scrapped). 

Stevens also sponsored the high-profile Iryna’s Law, named after Iryna Zarutska, a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee who was fatally stabbed last year on a Charlotte light-rail train. Among other things, the law restricts the circumstances under which defendants can be released from jail while they await trial and seeks to resume the death penalty. 

Earls has argued that Stevens wouldn’t be an effective check on the legislature if elected to the state Supreme Court. “My opponent is seeking to grade her own homework,” she said. “That’s not how we do it.”

Stevens says it won’t be a problem. She told The Assembly last year that she would consider recusing herself if the court heard a challenge to one of her bills, but she said she’d prefer to be convinced in the courtroom that the bill was unlawful.

“If the law was wrong when I wrote it, and these people can convince me that it was wrong and unconstitutional, I’m not above changing my mind,” Stevens said. “I promise to just be fair and impartial on the court. If there’s even the appearance of impropriety, I would step aside.”

She argues that Earls is the one injecting politics into the legal system. 

In a September interview with WUNC, Stevens said Earls wrongfully struck down a state photo ID law, despite voters passing a constitutional amendment to support it in 2018. 

“I’m not sure how an amendment to the constitution is declared unconstitutional when 80% of the citizens of North Carolina voted to have that added to our constitution,” Stevens said. (The amendment actually passed with 55% support.)

Earls noted that she struck down a related law the legislature passed to implement the constitutional amendment, not the amendment itself.

Stevens also said she thought it was inappropriate that Earls co-chaired a racial equity task force that then-Gov. Roy Cooper assembled, which Stevens argued was mixing responsibilities between the executive and judicial branches. The task force recommended eliminating cash bail for certain misdemeanors unless the defendant posed a risk to public safety. The legislature didn’t adopt the recommendation.

Earls, who formerly served as the executive director of the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, says reforms are necessary to ensure people have equitable access to the courts and are treated fairly under the law. She got into hot water in 2023 for criticizing the judiciary’s lack of diversity and saying her Republican colleagues should do more to address it. The Judicial Standards Commission launched an investigation, prompting Earls to sue, but the commission ultimately dismissed the complaint.

Both women have spoken publicly about one thing they have in common. Stevens, who was diagnosed with breast cancer two decades ago and again in August 2023, completed her treatment in March 2024; Wiley, her spokesperson, said she’s doing very well. Earls was diagnosed with breast cancer last year and has since completed her treatment. 

Here, There, Everywhere 

In an August 2025 interview with The Assembly, Stevens said she knew campaigning for a judicial office would be different from running for a legislative seat. She has lived in her old district all her life and said she had gotten to know many of her constituents. 

About 85,000 people lived in her district. More than 11 million people live across the state. 

“Some of them love me,” she said of her constituents. “Some of them hate me. … But I had a name and a reputation, and the people knew me and knew me for who I am. I’ve somehow got to get to those 12 million other people to convince them who I am.” 

Unlike in legislative races, judicial candidates are limited in what they can say. The Judicial Standards Commission says they should avoid making any “derogatory or misleading statements about an opponent or judge” and avoid statements that show support for, or curry favor with, groups that might come before the court. 

Eric Heberlig, a political scientist at UNC Charlotte, said prioritizing fundraisers over public appearances can help keep them out of trouble. Candidates have also relied on outside groups to campaign for them in recent years.

“It’s been less necessary for candidates to go there themselves when you have surrogates to go there for them,” Heberlig said.

A group backing Earls has run ads criticizing Stevens’ legal career. But the scope of outside spending won’t become clear until campaign finance reports are filed with the Federal Election Commission later this month. Meanwhile, national Republicans have put money into U.S. Senate campaigns they didn’t expect to be competitive. A super PAC recently canceled $6.5 million in planned ad spending for North Carolina candidate Michael Whatley.

“This is a difficult year for Republicans because of the potential for a blue wave,” said David McLennan, a retired political scientist at Meredith College. “Republicans are more focused on the supermajority in both houses of the General Assembly and getting Michael Whatley’s numbers up.”

Even so, the three Republican candidates running for the state Court of Appeals this year have appeared regularly on the campaign trail. 

Michael Byrne, an administrative law judge running for the Court of Appeals against Democratic incumbent John Arrowood, has perhaps been the most active, in part because he had a competitive primary and needed to make his case to voters earlier than the others.

Byrne likened his campaign strategy to a chant from the television show Ted Lasso: “Roy Kent, Roy Kent. He’s here, he’s there, he’s every-fucking-where!”

Byrne said, “I honestly believe that if you expect people to go out and work for you and support you, then you’re under obligation as much as you can to go see them and tell them why.”

He said that while he’s seen Stevens at fundraisers, the two campaigns don’t coordinate their schedules. The Court of Appeals candidates are much more in sync, he said.

“Where Sarah Stevens was on a given day, I’d be lying if I said that I knew because I don’t know her schedule,” Byrne said.

Meanwhile, Stevens remains largely out of public view. 

“If there are public events in the future, we will send you a heads-up,” Wiley said. 

More than two weeks later, the campaign hasn’t shared any updates.