The Morrow You Know

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On a Friday afternoon in late January, Ed Strickland scanned the main dining room of Johnny Bull’s Steakhouse, looking for people who might want to hear from Michele Morrow, the 2024 Republican nominee for superintendent of public instruction who announced in mid-December that the “US Senate race just got a whole lot more exciting” with her entry. 

The Franklin County Republican Party, which Strickland chairs, had reserved a room at the Louisburg restaurant with seating for more than 20. But so far, hardly anyone had shown up.

An ice storm had glazed the state the previous weekend, and a “historic” snowstorm was predicted to begin within hours. Perhaps the weather had something to do with it. 

Yet Strickland had noticed that ice hadn’t deterred some 500 people from coming out for Republican Sheriff Kevin White’s campaign kickoff in nearby Youngsville a few days earlier, and Johnny Bull’s parking lot was now full of regular customers. He returned to the reserved room alone. 

Morrow agreed to stay for lunch despite an audience of only five: Strickland, two residents of Lake Royale, her campaign manager, and a reporter from The Assembly.

While her surprise defeat of incumbent Superintendent of Public Instruction Catherine Truitt in the 2024 primary prompted MAGA influencer Steve Bannon to call her a “rising star,” Morrow’s luster seems to have faded since she lost in the general election. She is competing with five other Republicans in the 2026 Senate primary, and she is not the candidate anointed to fill Thom Tillis’ seat.

President Donald Trump has instead backed Michael Whatley, whom he had previously elevated from chair of the North Carolina GOP to lead the Republican National Committee. 

Another candidate, Charlotte-area attorney and novelist Don Brown, had been soliciting the support of party activists and grassroots groups for almost a year before Morrow jumped in.

Morrow has cast herself as the “freedom fighter” in that mix—audacious, pugnacious, and battle-tested. Her wager is that Republican voters will come around to her argument that neither Whatley nor Brown has a real chance of defeating the Democrats’ presumed nominee, former Gov. Roy Cooper. She points to poll data showing Cooper with a substantial lead over both of them. 

But without the full campaign coffers of a frontrunner—Whatley, with an unusual level of RNC help, had received more than $5 million by the end of December, to Morrow’s $3,700—she is pressing her case one luncheon at a time. 

In Louisburg, she seized the opportunity to make news. “You can write this,” she said, leaning toward me over her barbecued chicken sandwich. “I think I probably won that election,” referring to her 2024 bid.

Attendee Elizabeth Sams gasped in surprise, seeming to make a bigger connection in her mind: “Just like Trump.”

The Making of a Messenger

Morrow’s savvy as a political communicator has often been underestimated, but it’s a skill she’s been honing for a decade.

She has said she came to politics through Rush Limbaugh, listening to his radio show while working at a remote Christian camp in Colorado, cut off from the internet and TV.

After moving to Cary around 2014, Morrow began to cultivate her own audience. She started with YouTube videos about the harms of American immigration policy from the perspective of a former missionary to Mexico. During the pandemic, she capitalized on her background as a registered nurse and rebranded as “Rogue RN.” Morrow became a regular presence at protests against mask, vaccine, and school closure requirements. 

By then, Morrow had forged a friendship with Sue Butcher, the founder of Liberty First Grassroots, a local PAC that offered workshops for conservative activists, among other things. Butcher had connected her with FreedomWorks, the now-defunct organization that supercharged the Tea Party movement. 

Her first test of those skills was a run for Wake County school board in 2022. But some of her Cary neighbors had archived her past social media comments characterizing public schools as “indoctrination centers” and using hashtags like #KilltheTraitors. She lost the officially nonpartisan three-way contest, with 36% of the vote compared to the winner’s 56%, but quickly pivoted to a run for statewide office. 

In the race for superintendent of public instruction, she could explicitly run against the Republican establishment. Morrow circulated a flyer tying Truitt to Tillis.

It’s a strategy GOP insiders say was remarkably effective. Tillis had been elected to the Senate in 2014 after playing a leading role in the Republican takeover of the North Carolina legislature and serving as House speaker. But he was increasingly under fire for his willingness to negotiate with Democrats, and his votes on gay marriage, gun violence, and immigration had angered many of his party’s grassroots activists. Republican parties in more than half of the state’s counties voted to censure him, as did more than two-thirds of the delegates to the 2023 state Republican Party convention.

When Tillis was listed as a “special guest” on an invitation to a Truitt fundraiser in February 2024, it was like “the cherry on top,” said Michele Woodhouse, the former chair of the GOP’s 11th Congressional District, who supported Morrow’s run. “It was the death knell for Catherine.”

Morrow got little time to enjoy her primary victory. The following week, CNN published a report that vaulted her onto the national stage. 

The story highlighted her “disturbing suggestions about executing prominent Democrats for treason,” including Cooper, Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Hillary Clinton, Sen. Chuck Schumer, Anthony Fauci, and Bill Gates.

The candidate and her team tried out a variety of responses to the coverage, eventually settling on attacking the media as “shameful.” They tried to refocus the race on school safety, hosting a town hall and creating an advisory board. 

But, in the end, voters backed Democrat Maurice “Mo” Green; he got 51% of the vote to Morrow’s 49%. 

“Many may say we lost this fight,” Morrow said in a Facebook post the morning after Election Day. “But I say this fight has just begun.”

Prayers and Polls

Within a month, Morrow had founded the National Alliance for Education Reform, a lobbying outfit that seeks to “help our elected officials implement” the Trump administration’s education priorities. 

“Maybe I can do the work of a superintendent and not have to go to all the meetings—just do the actual work of transforming education for everybody,” she recalled thinking at the Louisburg luncheon. 

Morrow told her lunch companions that she traveled to Washington, D.C., for meetings at the U.S. Department of Education, various think tanks, and congressional offices. She said she discussed education policy and also the upcoming U.S. Senate race.

“Most of the people up there that were connected with President Trump did not understand the discord that there was about Thom Tillis,” she said. “We were telling them repeatedly that Thom Tillis cannot beat Roy Cooper. And they were very surprised by that.”

Morrow said she made it known that she was willing to run. “Because most people don’t want to run in a statewide race. They don’t want to put up with the attacks from the media and the left,” she said. “And I said, ‘Listen, I just did it. I’m still standing.’”

But back in North Carolina, turmoil in her personal life was beginning to seep into public view.

In January 2025, Morrow sought a domestic violence protective order against her husband Stuart, writing in her complaint that they were beginning to make separation arrangements and that Stuart had threatened to kill himself in a public manner to harm her reputation. She also wrote that he had slapped, pushed, and punched her multiple times—once breaking her shoulder in three places—and that she feared that the separation would lead to further violence.

A few days later, Stuart initiated court proceedings to determine how to split the couple’s assets and custody of their then-12-year-old son. (Their other four children are now adults.) In a court filing that someone later excerpted on Reddit, Stuart blamed his wife’s political activities for the implosion of their marriage. 

“Many may say we lost this fight. But I say this fight has just begun.”

Morrow post on Facebook the morning after the 2024 Election

The acrimonious separation put pressure on Morrow to get a paying job. After focusing on her new lobbying outfit for “a couple of months,” she said, she turned to submitting job applications. She thought securing a nursing position would be a breeze because of the national shortage. But, she said, no one called her back for months. (“It was probably all the stories they read about her in the paper,” Sam Hassell, Morrow’s campaign manager and chief operating officer of the National Alliance for Education Reform, said at the Louisburg lunch.)

Morrow said she landed a job in July, the same month that Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law and top pick for the Senate seat, decided not to run. When President Trump endorsed Whatley, Morrow decided to focus on her new position at WakeMed and wait to see what happened on the campaign trail. 

She could understand why Trump picked Whatley: “He’s always done what he’s asked, right?” But she saw a weakness. Among party activists most inclined to vote in a primary, Whatley is disliked for several reasons: resisting efforts to close primary races to unaffiliated voters; running a party election using apparently insecure and unreliable technology; failing to materially help turn out the vote in the mountains after Hurricane Helene; and, perhaps most of all, standing by Tillis. Grassroots activists sometimes derisively refer to him as “Tillis 2.0.” But beyond those insiders, Whatley is relatively unknown.

Morrow said she called Brown—who was working to draw attention to his legal work for the military, defending people charged in the January 6, 2021 riot, and on behalf of COVID vaccine skeptics—and told him, “I’m still thinking about it, but let’s see what you can do.”

In the meantime, she kept her eye out for political jobs. When Corey DeAngelis, a high-profile promoter of alternatives to traditional public schools, posted on X in October that he and former Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters were assembling a team to dismantle teachers’ unions, Morrow let them know she was interested.

She didn’t have to make a final decision about her Senate candidacy until December, when the filing period ended. “I was praying, I was fasting, I was seeking what was happening, and I was waiting for a poll to come out,” Morrow said. 

The data she was waiting for arrived in mid-November. Harper Polling, on behalf of the conservative Carolina Journal, talked to 600 likely general election voters and found Cooper led Whatley by almost 9 points. The poll also tried to assess how Brown would fare against Cooper and found a similar result—Brown was down about 10 points.

That was all Morrow needed to hear. 

‘Numbers Don’t Lie’

The Senate primary is different from any she had been in before. For one thing, there are many more candidates: six, plus one who has been disqualified but will still appear on the ballot. 

Among them, Whatley has both establishment support and a “Complete and Total Endorsement” from Trump, making some of the scorched-earth tactics she used against Truitt seem unwise. And with Brown in the race, sharing many of her positions, she faces competition for the anti-establishment vote. 

Some of her most vocal supporters from 2024 are now in Brown’s camp, including Butcher, the PAC founder who connected her with FreedomWorks, and Jim Womack, the Lee County GOP chair and prominent “election integrity” activist who in 2024 called Morrow a “grassroots darling.”

Yet, from the beginning of the campaign, Morrow has spoken as though she were the frontrunner, preordained to run against Cooper. “With me in this race, his good-guy facade will crumble,” read her initial press release.

She offers numbers as proof that Whatley and Brown have no chance of winning, with little allegiance to statistical principles. 

An image Morrow posted to Facebook in mid-January distills the argument. In it, a chart labeled “2024 Election” shows “total votes” for Morrow, Brown, and Whatley. Morrow’s are listed at more than 3 million—which seems to be the sum of the votes she received in the primary and the general election. Brown, who ran in the 8th Congressional District primary that year but lost to Mark Harris, is listed at 8,519. Whatley, who didn’t run for any office, has zero. 

“Unlike democrats (and a few others),” Morrow wrote in the caption, “numbers don’t lie.”

That line hasn’t been persuasive to all of Morrow’s former supporters. Some harbor suspicions that she entered the race as a spoiler—perhaps even in exchange for a monetary reward from Whatley or the GOP. (At the lunch in Louisburg, Morrow dismissed the idea as preposterous. Whatley’s spokesperson declined to comment; the state GOP’s spokesman said via email, “Only in the minds of the left-wing ‘journalists’ of The Assembly would this story be true.”) 

A feud with her former campaign manager, Sloan Rachmuth, has sent many other criticisms and rumors zipping around the internet. Morrow set off the latest round of conflict when she announced in early January that she was “boycotting” NC Political Tea, the podcast Rachmuth now co-hosts with Margaret Ackiss, due to comments Rachmuth had made on X about the recently assassinated conservative activist Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA, as well as Vice President JD Vance. 

Rachmuth and Ackiss quickly struck back, suggesting that Morrow was in a romantic relationship with her campaign manager and that she was a bad mom for pursuing elected office during a contentious divorce, among other things. On X, they called her run for office “pure narcissism and grift.”

Whatley spokesperson Jonathan Felts posted a GIF of a man eating popcorn in response to Ackiss calling Morrow “FUCKING INSANE.” Prior to that, he had barely acknowledged Morrow’s existence.

The accusations from Rachmuth, Ackiss, and others in the GOP’s right wing have gotten enough traction that Morrow issued a 10-page letter to refute them. 

“While I fully expected the LEFT to lose their minds when I got in this race, I was not prepared for the slanderous lies and false allegations from Don Brown supporters and the people whom I have fought with for the last decade and consider to be my friends,” she wrote.

The divorce-related allegations were the most hurtful, Morrow said. “I doubt very highly that if I were a male candidate that this would be discussed. … I am in zero danger of losing custody of my child. Shame on anyone who spreads this lie or supports those who condone it.”

One grassroots leader “who is upset that my filing did not align with his plans to resurrect his organization” is the original source of all the attacks, Morrow said. 

While she did not name him in the letter, and she and Hassell also declined to name him to The Assembly, Womack said Morrow is probably referring to him: “I told her very honestly and forthrightly that I would be her biggest opposition if she ran because of what she was doing to the grassroots base of the party that was supporting Don Brown.” Womack has been working to coordinate the activities of 40-some grassroots groups under the umbrella of the Conservative Coalition of North Carolina.

Morrow insisted in the letter that she would “not be manipulated or controlled by anyone, except the Holy Spirit” and argued that if Republicans did not unite behind her, “the ONLY candidate that is going to bring the earned media attention we need in this race,” they were sure to lose the Senate seat “and quite possibly the majority in the House!” 

“President Trump’s America First plan,” she cautioned, “will be dead in the water.”

In the face of questions about her viability, Morrow seems to be employing the old Bannon strategy of “flood the zone.” 

An AI-generated image she posted to Facebook in January appeared to show her driving a car with Nicolás Maduro, the freshly deposed president of Venezuela, in handcuffs in the backseat. “Add him to the list!” read the caption. Her campaign put out a press release two weeks later claiming that journalist Don Lemon had “conspired with anti-ICE agitators” to storm a Minnesota church: “Arrest Them All.”

Early this month, Morrow circled back to one of the talking points that got her in trouble in 2024, posting a video of Trump to Instagram with the caption: “Michele Morrow was right about Obama 5 years ago! Barack Obama was a TRAITOR. …”

The election fraud claim she raised at the Louisburg lunch features Obama, too. The story, as she tells it, starts at 11:15 p.m. on election night. She was ahead by 2 points when “130,000 votes came in, and they all went to Mo Green.” 

The suspicious votes, she said, came from Mecklenburg County, a Democratic stronghold. Morrow focused on a rally Obama held there ahead of the election, during which he mentioned her. “Cooper got him to campaign against me,” she said. 

She offered no details or even a possible mechanism for fraud but delivered the story in Trumpian cadence.

“Within 20 minutes, just like that,” Morrow said, the results flipped. “I believe that, right?” 

Then she moved on, back to her core pitch, that she alone can win against Cooper.

Morrow has also brought back livestreaming as a way to reach a larger audience, advertising the first of weekly events as “DUE TO POPULAR DEMAND!”

Torn from the Grassroots

Under North Carolina law, a candidate can win a primary with just more than 30% of the vote. If no one in the race hits that threshold, the runner-up can request a runoff.

So far, Whatley has barely acknowledged Morrow’s campaign; his spokesperson declined to speak with The Assembly about it. That’s to be expected of a frontrunner, unless internal polls signal that the race is tightening, said David McLennan, political science professor at Meredith College.

If polls showed Morrow within 15 points, McLennan thinks Whatley would change his strategy.

The only public poll to date is from Carolina Forward, a left-leaning group. In early January, they found Whatley with 36% support in the primary to Morrow’s 4% and Brown’s 6%. But more than half of those surveyed said they were still undecided. (The question, put to 530 Republicans or right-leaning voters, had a margin of error of 4.9%.)

More polling data should be available later this month, said Mitch Kokai, senior political analyst for the conservative John Locke Foundation. 

In the meantime, Brown says he is the “obvious choice” to win the primary, having put more than 25,000 miles on his car and rolled up “more endorsements than anyone else,” including from former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, former Trump attorney Sidney Powell, and former Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson.

“I don’t have anything to say about Michele Morrow,” he said. “Morrow is not the story.”

He went on to point out that most Republicans who sought statewide elected office in 2024 outperformed her.

To Kokai, Morrow’s claim that her name recognition gives her an advantage is also dubious. If Republicans do remember her, he said, it’s “as much for her losing the general election and the negative publicity around the social media comments that came out after she won the primary … as her beating Catherine Truitt.”

“I told her very honestly and forthrightly that I would be her biggest opposition if she ran because of what she was doing to the grassroots base of the party that was supporting Don Brown.”

Jim Womack, Lee County GOP chair

Woodhouse, the former GOP chair in the far western part of the state, also sees Morrow’s name recognition as a liability. For that reason and others, “I told her very bluntly not to run,” Woodhouse said.

But analysts both inside and outside the party say it would be foolish to count Morrow out: She’s a good grassroots campaigner, and she has advantages in both charisma and familiarity. 

She is also willing to do the work of persuading voters, one person at a time. That could make the difference in a low-turnout primary.

Parry Ketchmark, one of the attendees at the Louisburg lunch, had questions about how Morrow was going to win the primary when Brown had already secured the support of so many grassroots leaders, including those in Franklin County.

He repeatedly pressed Morrow for details about her strategy. Each time, her campaign manager tried to refocus the conversation on what he said is the only question that matters: Who can beat Cooper?

Eventually Morrow gave a more candid response. “It makes no sense,” she said, “that I offer to come up here and speak to people and to answer their questions, and they don’t show up. That tells me that the very problem is within these people themselves, because 11 months, 13 months ago, they would have walked over glass for me.”

She asked Ketchmark to give her phone number to the skeptics.

“If the mentality is no one can beat Roy,” she said, volume rising, “then let me fall on the sword.”

“The other thing is, I’m sorry, but a 60-something-year-old lawyer against a 70-year-old lawyer—that’s not going to excite the young people,” she added. “It’s not going to excite the ladies. It’s not going to excite the people that we need to get out the vote.”

Ketchmark stopped her there. 

“Well, you’ve got my vote, and I will make some phone calls just because of this heated conversation,” he said. “I don’t know how much it’s gonna help, but I’ll make some calls.”

Staff writer Bryan Anderson contributed reporting.