North Carolina’s Senate District 11 covers Franklin, Nash, and Vance counties. And while individuals in that district, like many across the nation, have been dealing with rising costs from the grocery store to the gas pump, their Senator Lisa Barnes has been working with her Republican colleagues to focus on political games instead of providing much-needed relief to her constituents.
It took lawmakers well over a year to pass a critically needed budget that funds state programs like Medicaid, teacher raises, law enforcement growth, and more. Republican lawmakers in control of the General Assembly passed a slew of bills before finally releasing and passing the recent state budget: from House Bill 549, which gives additional powers to the Republican State Auditor, to Senate Bill 227, which eliminates Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) practices in public education.
Barnes, a Republican, has been in office since 2019, serving one term in the state House and three in the state Senate. Outside of her legislative work, she helped work on her family’s Nash County farm, Barnes Farming. That was until 2024, when she and her husband defaulted on $40 million of loans with a large Dutch bank and ceded ownership of the farm.
Before that, Barnes’ name, along with that of her farm, began trending when José Arturo Gónzalez Mendoza, a husband and father of two, died of heat stroke working on Barnes farm. She was fined $190,000 by the North Carolina Department of Labor (NCDOL) for violations relating to the death, with the NCDOL citing Barnes Farming as having a “willful serious violation” and two other “serious” violations.
Barnes might not be making headlines this year, but by voting with Republicans 100% of the time, she is part of the team that has left North Carolina families behind, instead prioritizing corporations.
Raising our rates
While the people of North Carolina are already facing higher utility bills, with a possible increase on the way if the North Carolina Utilities Commission approves the request from Duke Energy, Barnes passed legislation that would allow Duke to take even more from families.
Senate Bill 266 is expected to shift $87 million in annual payments from the state’s commercial and industrial customers to residential customers, meaning families will pay more while industries pay less.
The bill also allows Duke to charge ratepayers for power plants that are under construction, even if those projects never get completed.
Leaving our kids behind
With North Carolina coming in dead last in the nation for public school funding, Lisa Barnes has also joined her Republican colleagues as they siphon money that could go to public schools into the state’s Opportunity Scholarship program. The state’s spending on the program reached $589 million this year. Data from 2025 shows that many of the vouchers that year went to families that already had kids in private schools, with nearly a quarter of recipients being in the state’s highest income bracket ($259,750 or more for a family of four).
Instead of passing funding that could help North Carolina public school teachers and students, Barnes voted to override Governor Josh Stein’s veto of House Bill 87, enrolling the state in Trump’s federal school choice tax credit program, which lawmakers allotted $1 million in the state budget to implement.
While teachers in North Carolina are using their own funds to buy school supplies and families are facing financial troubles, Barnes has brought in millions of dollars in campaign funds, including donations from large corporations like Duke Energy.
From siding with corporations to raise utilities bills, shirking her constitutional duty to provide a sound, basic education to the state’s children, and being a rubber stamp to pass extreme policies, Barnes has shown where her priorities lie.
North Carolina deserves leaders who want to invest in the people who put them in power, not themselves and their own agenda. In the Senate District 11 race, Barnes is facing Democratic candidate James Gailliard, a Rocky Mount pastor and former state lawmaker.
As manufacturing jobs are disappearing, families are unable to afford homes, and seniors are struggling to pay for medication, Pastor Gailliard is running to advocate for the needs of working families, small businesses, and underserved communities across the region.
