Editor’s note: The Smoky Mountain News has on several occasions attempted to contact Jennifer Balkcom’s campaign for a profile like this one. On Sept. 17, a campaign staffer texted SMN saying they’d reach out in a week. Despite numerous follow-up phone calls and text messages, the Balkcom campaign failed to respond.
Jamie Ager needed a hat, so he chose the underdog.
When the Democratic congressional candidate and his deputy campaign manager pulled into Pisgah Memorial Stadium’s parking the evening of Oct. 9, he took off his green-and-white “Ager for U.S. Congress” ballcap and sported hat head as he made his way through the bustling crowd until he came upon a stand selling Pisgah Bears gear.
He bought a hat with a black P in the center set against woodland camouflage. Fans may not have thought he was anything but a Bears fan, perhaps a former mill worker with some chickens and cows he raises on some family land in nearby Bethel, were it not for the fact they’ve already seen his face on mailers, television spots, and digital ads.
“Hey Jamie,” a man walking by shouted. “Go Bears!”
“Go Bears,” Ager replied.
“Come on, yell it,” the man replied.
“Go bears,” Ager growled.
Pisgah was playing cross-county rival Tuscola that night. As expected, Tuscola prevailed with ease. The game brought out over 10,000 fans, many of whom were rooting for the visiting Mountaineers. It was an opportunity to meet voters, and when asked whether he was concerned about alienating thousands of Tuscola fans, he’d earnestly responded that it wouldn’t matter. The gregarious Democrat is confident he could have a conversation with anyone, and the annual County Clash game was the perfect chance to test that assertion.
The hallmark of Ager’s campaign to flip NC-11 has been that sense of optimism, that if only he has honest conversations, he can find common ground with anyone, even Republicans and Tuscola fans.
He talked to a couple of farmers in the stands. Ager, who’s made his career in agriculture the centerpiece of his campaign, spoke their language and understood their concerns. His brand is built around an authenticity only possible for someone so deeply rooted in the mountains. Toward the end of that conversation, the men had advice.
“Make them remember you,” one said, “That’s the whole key.”
“Be yourself,” the other quickly followed.
Whatever else can be said about Ager, he’s already hitting those wickets.
As he ambled through the boisterous pre-game crowd, he came to Chip Lance, who was wearing a T-shirt with an American flag-patterned Pisgah P and American flag pants that may have previously been part of a July 4 Uncle Sam costume. Their exchange felt amicable at first, but undertones of tension developed. Ager introduced himself and said he was running for Congress.
“I’m running for Congress also,” Lance said flatly.
“I got a couple of your mailings,” he added.
“Yeah?” Ager asked cautiously.
The man paused for sake of comedic timing and continued, “every day.”
Ager frequently asks voters where they’re from. Western North Carolina is a tight-knit region. Many who go back generations in the area know the same families. Being a farmer and entrepreneur, he figures the odds are good he can identify a common relationship to build trust. Lance graduated from Enka High School in 1997, just one year after Ager graduated from A.C. Reynolds High School. Ager knew someone with whom Lance had played baseball.
“Good dude,” Ager said. “He’s a hoss.”
Keeping the conversation in neutral territory, he asked where Lance got his stars-and-stripes pants. Lance was committed to the joke.
“The gettin’ store for when you’re runnin’ for Congress,” he said. “You’re wanting to be my representative, and you’re not wearing any red, white, and blue?”
Lance still lives in western Buncombe County; God’s country, he said. Ager was curious why someone from Buncombe County would be a Pisgah fan. He pointed to a Pisgah cheerleader 20 feet away — his daughter, who is in 10th grade.
“She lives across the county line in the twin cities of Enka/Candler,” he said. “But we support where our kids go because that’s the most important thing.”
The cheerleader walked over and said hi. Lance pulled her in closer and dropped the humor, his deadpan tone becoming serious as he stared at Ager.
“This is what you are running for,” he said to the man who hopes to represent WNC in Congress.
The leap
Ager is the CEO of Hickory Nut Gap Farm in Fairview, founded by his great grandparents in 1916. Over the years, that land has been used in different ways. When Ager took it over in 2000, he prioritized raising beef cattle, pigs, and chickens using regenerative practices that are, as he puts it, friendlier to people, animals, and the land. It has since become a regional success story.
He has served on various boards, mostly related to agriculture and sustainability, but said he hadn’t thought seriously about running for office before last year. On July 31, 2025, he released a video announcing his campaign, in which he discussed his reasons for running, including creating a better world for his three sons.
“They’re good kids living in a complicated world, and they deserve a good future,” Ager said in the video. “So do you and your kids.”
Jamie Clarke, Ager’s maternal grandfather, served as NC-11’s congressman from 1983-1985 and again from 1987-1991. His father, John Ager, served in the North Carolina House of Representatives from 2015-2023, and his brother, Eric, has held that seat since then. Ager says that exposure to politics helps him understand that world. But that isn’t what his campaign has been about. While many congressional candidates around the country go into detail on policies, hammer the other party, and fearmonger, he prioritizes meeting people where they are.
Others have taken notice.
“I think that Jamie Ager might be the best congressional candidate in the entire country,” North Carolina pollster Tom Jensen told Spectrum’s Tim Boyum in an episode of the “Tying it Together” podcast.
Ager has also received national attention and was featured in an episode of “ The Long Play ,” where he was interviewed by former Obama White House Communications Director Jennifer Palmieri.
He told SMN the attention makes him “kind of uncomfortable,” but it would be hard for anyone to come to that conclusion after observing him on the campaign trail. Staffers accompany him at meet-and-greets but don’t control interactions as often seen with other candidates. Some voters challenge him, some have stories of institutional failures affecting their lives, some have questions, and some are happy just shooting the breeze. He seems to relish the casual conversations most.
“I think people are tired of all the partisanship, and they want a regular old person who’s lived a regular old life and is not going to turn every conversation into some partisan thing,” Ager said.
The district has been held by Republicans for the last seven terms. Ager may need that regular-guy approach to win over moderate unaffiliated voters and even some Republicans who take issue with the status quo under President Donald Trump. It helps that both he and most of his staff are local. Campaign Manager Grayson Barnette hails from Caldwell County in the northeastern part of the district. Barnette, whose background is in grassroots organization, said the campaign intends to “cast a very wide net.” He hopes that along with getting Ager elected, the campaign can help build community.
“It’s about bringing people together for joy,” Barnette said. “It’s OK to be hopeful. It’s OK to have joy. It’s OK to share and not be agonized by politics.”
NC-11 is notoriously hard on campaigns due to its size and terrain. It is 97 miles straight-line distance from Ager’s farm to Murphy in the far western part of the district, but it takes about 2 hours and 15 minutes to drive in normal traffic. It feels “like a blur,” Ager said of the campaign, but it helps that he is willing to get an early start each day.
“Politics still starts later in the morning than a farm operation,” he said.
A quick change
Ager and his wife, Amy, woke up Aug. 5 and got going like any other morning. When Amy looked at her phone, she was shocked. She broke the news to her husband. His incumbent opponent, Republican Chuck Edwards, had dropped out of the race .
“Of course he did,” Ager replied.
Edwards had been dogged for months by allegations that he’d made unwanted advances toward two young female staffers. He was later censured by the House on Sept. 1 .
An Aug. 10 vote of the District 11 GOP Executive Committee nominated Jennifer Balkcom to take Edwards’ place on the ballot. Where Ager’s campaign was already barreling forward with a full head of steam, Balkcom had to fabricate the hulking machinery of a congressional campaign with less than three months until Election Day.
Barnette said that while the campaign did make minor adjustments, the broader strategy stayed the same — get out and meet voters. For his part, Ager didn’t mind the change. Farmers are nothing if not adaptable.
“I feel like we’ve been through enough entrepreneurship and business stuff and agriculture where you always know things are about to change, and you’ve got to be chill,” he said.
Balkcom is a mortgage loan officer from Henderson County currently serving her second term North Carolina’s House of Representatives, where she has mostly voted the party line. She was registered as a Libertarian until 2006 and a Democrat from then until 2016. Like Ager, she grew up on a farm and has touted her agricultural background on the campaign trail.
She has spent little time with local or state media and struggled in what may have been the only interview to ask policy-level questions . When asked by Spectrum’s Reuben Jones whether Edwards should resign before the end of his term, she paused for about 12 seconds.
“I’m not sure. I’m not sure,” she said. “I mean, he messed up. I think he needed to decide to resign. We’ve censured him, and that’s kind of where I’d leave it. I’m not sure.”
Balkcom has crisscrossed the district much like Ager, but judging by social media content produced by her campaign, has mostly just delivered prepared remarks at GOP-sponsored events. This stark contrast was on display during Canton’s Labor Day Parade, a draw for thousands of people from around the region. While Balkcom waved from a float, Ager moved among the crowd, never missing an opportunity to shake a hand and slap a back.
Both candidates have worked to prove their mountain bona fides and expressed their versions of mountain values in competing 30-second ads spots released at the end of last month.
Ager’s ad opens with him wearing his trademark jeans, plaid button-down shirt with rolled up sleeves, and ballcap.
“Do you know what we need more of in Washington, D.C.?” he rhetorically asks a crowd of seated supporters. “Barn dances!”
The ad cuts to a scene where everyone is dancing to mountain music, including Jamie and Amy Ager.
“Politicians just dance with lobbyists, but I’ll take a good mountain hoedown any day,” Ager says in a voiceover. “In Congress, I’ll invest in Western North Carolina again by taking on corporate greed that raises our costs, and I’ll fight for our Helene recovery funds.”
Balkcom’s ad begins with her saying she comes from a long line of “tough mountain women.” After depicting the candidate and her “momma” in a field full of cows, it cuts to the two women sitting at a kitchen table with coffee mugs.
“Mom raised us on her own,” Balkcom says. “She taught us to be strong, and when someone broke into her house, she shot them.”
“You break into my house, you’re going to get shot,” Balkcom’s mother says frankly.
While Ager’s ad bolstered his credibility as a regular guy from Western North Carolina, Balkcom’s ad did something even more valuable — it got people talking. Although some found it shocking and others, like Last Week Tonight Host John Oliver, ridiculed it, her name was uttered across the nation, the state, and the district by people who otherwise may have never even known she was running.
The state of the race
Ager on Feb. 23 was added to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s Red-to-Blue list meant to help candidates the DCCC believes can flip Republican congressional seats, opening a pathway to securing more individual donations.
The most recent campaign finance data filed on Oct. 15 shows that Ager has received about $5.09 million in campaign contributions and has spent about $3.76 million to Balkcom’s $355,000 raised and $60,000 spent.
Barnette has said from the beginning of the campaign that the goal was to get support from as many people across the state as possible. While Ager has taken money from labor organizations and Democratic Political Action Committees (PACs), he has refused to accept corporate PAC money. The impressive sum Ager has raised may bring him closer to winning, but Barnette said the campaign’s grassroots approach has also worked to turn the tide one voter at a time.
“We’re trying to really engage people through authentic community spaces, through culture, through places people want to be, through shared community,” he said.
That approach might just work. While at the beginning of this election cycle, NC-11 was rated by the Cook Political Report as “solidly Republican,” it is now considered a “toss up.”
Midterm elections usually favor the party not holding the presidency, and according to experts, the Republican Party is particularly unpopular right now. A WRAL/WSOC poll published last week found that only 17% of North Carolina adults say their life has improved since the 2024 election that brought Donald Trump back to the White House. Although the Republican-led General Assembly suspended the state’s 41-cent-per-gallon gas tax (Gov. Josh Stein signed the bill at Hickory Nut Gap Farm) on Oct. 9, it may not be enough to ease the perception that the cost of living is too high.
Libertarian candidate Travis Groo could also be a factor. Democrat Don Davis beat Republican Laurie Buckhout by just over 6,000 to win the state’s First Congressional District in 2024 . The Libertarian in that race took home almost 10,000 votes. Western Carolina University Political Science Professor Chris Cooper told SMN that Groo may get enough votes to have an effect, considering Libertarians historically siphon more votes from Republican candidates.
“A whole lot of conservatives in this region who are not wild about what’s happening in the Republican Party may vote Libertarian,” Cooper said.
The confluence of these circumstances along with Balkcom’s short runway creates a feeling that Ager could have a chance to win in a district most had written off a year ago. But without any reliable public polls, Cooper cautions anyone against conflating prognostication with reliable forecasting, warning that the lack of internal polling results publicized by either campaign may indicate that neither loves what they see.
However, Cooper warned that despite the momentum Democrats have nationwide, people shouldn’t read the district’s likely movement to the left as an indication it may be blue, or even purple.
Heath Shuler was the last Democrat to hold the seat. In 2012, the General Assembly gerrymandered the district to almost guarantee a Republican victory. Shuler bowed out of that race and Democrat Hayden Rogers lost to Republican Mark Meadows by almost 15 points. The last NC-11 county outside of Buncombe to vote for a Democratic presidential candidate was Jackson, home of Western Carolina University, in 2008. Donald Trump carried the district with 54.2% of the vote in 2024, and Edwards won with 56.8% that same year.
Ager recalled that when he first decided to run, no fewer than 10 people reminded him of these facts. He said his only course has been to have faith that he can win while understanding it would take nothing less than his best effort. He said that paradigm has held steady.
“There’s only one way to do anything,” he said. “That’s all in.”
With a little help from his friends
It helps to have supporters who are also willing to go all in, as displayed at Asheville Yards on Oct. 13, just two days before early voting began. A rally held at the outdoor music venue featured a performance from a slate of popular local musicians, including members of the Grammy-winning bluegrass band Steep Canyon Rangers. While attendees were encouraged to make donations, the event was free and drew thousands of people.
As people filed in, the musicians, many of whom had never played together, sat backstage practicing, figuring out who plays what songs in what keys and where the name “Jamie” could be inserted in the lyrics. Once they hit the stage, the average listener would have never known most of them hadn’t played together, and they created a unique energy that can’t be replicated through anything other than live music.
Ager, sporting an American flag rodeo shirt, spent the first half of the event mingling with the crowd before giving his stump speech, pumping his fist high into the air as he began talking.
“I’ve been running for Congress now for about 18 dang months, and I feel good,” he exclaimed. “I got a lot of energy, and we’re ready to win. Let’s do this thing.”
While Ager’s speech highlighted things he’d like to see changed — gerrymandering, corporate money in campaigns, the high cost of living, a broken healthcare system — much of it reiterated his roots, including his faith. He talked about his great grandfather, a Presbyterian preacher. That heritage come with two features, he said.
“The first feature it comes with is a good, strong, heavy dose of guilt and shame, which we’re good at dealing with,” he said. “The second thing is an idea that our job on this earth is to love your neighbor like Jesus tells us to, to be a good community person, to care about your neighbors, to care about your community, to love your family, love your community. That’s why I’m running for Congress.”
Barrett Smith, who plays bass and guitar and sings for the Steep Canyon Rangers, had the idea for the event and reached out to other musicians who could donate their time and talent. Smith told SMN that while he doesn’t know Ager well, they share many of the same friends. Based on reputation, he’s considered Ager to be a stand-up person and feels passionate about the campaign. He doesn’t often wade into politics, as the Steep Canyon Rangers are mostly apolitical, but he believes Ager stands against an unacceptable status quo.
Smith spoke with former bandmate Woody Platt, whom he rarely gets to play with since Platt’s departure from the band in 2022. Platt, who is friends with Ager, coordinated with the campaign. The idea became a plan, and the plan became reality.
“I kind of just set it in motion, and then it turned into its own monster that started programming itself to be awesome,” Smith said.
The final stretch
Ager has laid out his policy platforms in interviews with the likes of the Asheville Citizen Times , Spectrum , and PBS North Carolina .
In those interviews, he said he wants to get inflation under control to make the cost of living more reasonable, remove barriers to increasing the supply of affordable housing, establish a “reasonable minimum wage,” fund childcare subsidies, and restore the Affordable Care Act. On immigration, he wants to see stronger border security but also a path to legal status for longtime residents who have contributed to society.
During some interviews, Ager will answer policy questions by redirecting to hyperlocal issues like the lack of federal relief dollars coming to the area in the wake of Hurricane Helene.
His experience through Helene has shaped the way he views the recovery. While he didn’t lose any cattle; his parking area was flooded; he had several landslides on his property, he lost his fences; and like many in Buncombe County, he was without power for days on end. This created not only personal hardships but challenges for his business. He often talks to voters about how inspired he felt watching neighbors come together in the wake of the disaster, putting political affiliations and prior beefs aside for the good of the community.
But there’s a difference between understanding the needs of the community after the storm and working effectively to meet those needs. Ager can tell the region’s story authentically and compassionately, but can he do so to federal lawmakers in a way that will yield results? Ager answered this question with the same unflinching optimism that has driven the campaign. He said his ability to be “feisty” and work with others will make a difference;; his willingness to not “sit back and be meek” and to have tough conversations will lead to results. He plans to carry that mindset over to other tough issues, too.
“I’m a facilitator of good discussions. I’m curious. I ask questions,” he said. “To me, those are almost more important skills than having a prescriptive, specific way I’m going to solve the healthcare crisis in this country … it’s one thing to be idealistic; it’s another thing to execute, and execution is hard.”
Ager has skirted some questions on hot-button national issues like Israel’s protracted military campaign against Palestine or whether the House should investigate or even impeach President Donald Trump, but he said he is ready to handle those issues as they arise.
“Being focused on Helene recovery, being focused on the cost of living, and being focused on corruption are the big things to get right when we’re in Washington D.C. Are there other things that are going to come along? Yes. Having a good staff … you can trust to help you facilitate discussions and get educated about all the different topics is part of the job of that office,” he said. “I feel pretty comfortable in navigating that.”
Ager has positioned himself as a moderate candidate in a conservative region who is willing to represent the will of most of his constituents, but that has likely come at the expense of support among the more progressive wing of his own party. An internal battle has waged in the Democratic Party at the national level over the last couple of years over whether progressive litmus tests have become barriers to party success. It’s become a battle of litmus tests and heterodoxy. Ager doesn’t think of things in those terms. He said he just wants to care about his community, do the right thing, and be humble. But the reality isn’t that simple.
“I don’t care what political party you’re in as long as you care and are earnest in your attempt to help your community. Let’s talk! I don’t have a monopoly on all the good ideas,” he said.
But sometimes, taking a stance of any sort can alienate part of the electorate. In July of this year, Ager signed the Promise to America, which presents six key tenets: “We are capitalist, not socialist; We want safety, not lawlessness; We are responsible, not reckless; We believe government should solve problems, not create them; We are mainstream, not extreme; We are proud, not ashamed of America.” His endorsement of the pledge came under scrutiny from some of his constituents.
WCU’s Chris Cooper said that while the goal is never to alienate part of the electorate, winning over moderate voters is a must for the self-proclaimed “Mountain Democrat,” a term that historically carries a connotation of some more conservative ideologies.
“I think if you’re Jamie Ager, that’s a feature and not a bug,” Cooper said.
Ager told The Hometown Holler Podcast earlier this month that, as his race has become a toss-up, that he feels like “the dog who caught the car.” To bone up on the nuances of legislative service, he’s sought opinions from people within that world, including some conservative representatives. He has also since before his campaign officially began sought the counsel of his older brother, Eric, a state representative.
Eric Ager said that his brother’s “boundless optimism” will serve him well in a world where part of the job is sometimes getting “beat up” by legislative opponents and the media. He told SMN that no matter how prepared someone is to take office, there is a learning curve. Still, he believes his brother is charismatic, persuasive, and willing to study the issues.
“He’s good at learning, but he’s not a know-it-all,” he said.
Barnette, Ager’s campaign manager, calls this “fierce positivity.” Ager hopes to bring that mindset into office, and if things continue to break his way, that might just happen.
“The scenario where we win is feeling like it has momentum, which is exciting,” Ager said. “It’s like the responsibility of the role starts to become more real.”