Wesley Knott grew up in rural Mississippi, in what he describes as a “conservative evangelical bubble.” He credits his quote-unquote liberal indoctrination to his college years at Ole Miss. Right after graduation, he married his now-wife and they moved to the Triangle to take jobs in finance and accounting. That’s when he got involved in local politics, serving as a precinct captain and then area coordinator for the Wake County Democratic Party.
In 2022, at 25 years old, Knott decided to run for office. He lived in House District 66, which had just been redrawn. He threw his hat in the ring and quickly realized he would be running in a Democratic primary against a sitting state senator, Sarah Crawford.
He lost to Crawford by fewer than 150 votes.
“That wasn’t on my bingo card,” Knott laughs. But the experience motivated him to get more involved in the county Democratic Party. He served as deputy organizing director and executive director. Then last month, he was elected chair.
Knott takes over following the emotional rollercoaster that was the 2024 general election season, and amid the ongoing battle to get Allison Riggs’ state supreme court election victory certified. He knows that, a little more than 100 days into the second Trump administration, many Democratic voters are feeling some combination of consternation, fear, and hopelessness.
He’s betting that all those feelings will work in the Democrats’ favor come November, when several Wake County towns have their next elections. And he’s determined to knock on as many doors and talk to as many voters as humanly possible in the lead-up to those races.
Knott also intends to pay himself a stipend as chair—something the Wake Democrats haven’t done before—so that he can do the job full-time. The county party currently has two other employees—an organizing director and an operations director—in addition to its small army of volunteers. For the time being, they aren’t filling the executive director position.
The INDY talked with Knott about the Wake County Democratic Party’s plans for 2025, the future of its nonpartisan endorsements, and the conversations he’s having with voters right now.
INDY: Wake County has municipal elections coming up later this year and then midterms in 2026. What’s your game plan for the next year or so?
We have 34 municipal elections this fall, and I plan to win all of them. The strategic plan we are drafting literally is, “Win every municipal race this fall.”
In 2023, we saw that voters who we had conversations with at their door turned out at a higher rate—more than 300 percent higher—than people we did not talk to. And our capacity to do that work has increased quite a bit. In 2020, we had about 900 conversations with voters at their doors, but granted, it was a pandemic. In 2022 we had about 1,900 conversations with voters at their doors. And in 2024, we had more than 45,000 of those conversations. So the shift in our capacity to be on the ground talking to voters has been extraordinary. With that energy, heading into an election where turnout averages 15 percent in some of these municipal elections, we have a real opportunity to flip every remaining town council and commission and to sweep seats across the county.
Tell me more about your organizing and voter turnout strategies. Wake County is huge, and I imagine wrangling thousands of volunteers and keeping them engaged post-general election is a heavy lift.
In the past decade since I’ve been around, the county party has been focused on our official party structure and party business first, and then organizing—actually getting out and talking to voters—was somewhere down the list. I’m trying to shift the organization to think we are organizers first. We’ve got party business that is important, but it’s a week out of the year. Every other day, we are engaging in our communities to have conversations with voters.
Candidates are going to raise millions of dollars, they’re going to run ads on TV and radio, fill our mailboxes up, put up signs and billboards, and they’re going to get their message out. But we are the only people that are listening to the voter and what they have to say, and we are the only people that can take it beyond that 30-second ad in a conversation at the door or over the phone.
Post-2024 general election, we all saw that map depicting the “red shift” of counties across the country voting for Trump at higher rates than in 2020. Wake’s red shift was small, about one percentage point, but it was there. What do you make of that, and what other indicators are you looking at to gauge how well Democrats are connecting with voters in Wake County?
I want to err on the side of owning that we aren’t doing enough, aren’t connecting with voters. I don’t want to just write things off and say, ‘Well, that was because of inflation or this factor or that factor.’
I think [it’s important to answer the question], “Can we prioritize a tough, competitive race and be successful in North Carolina?” Allison Riggs winning her seat—and she did win her seat—is a testament to yes, we can do that, even in the face of the national shift to the right.
As far as indicators go, I focus more on, are our volunteers engaged? Are we getting out in the community and talking to voters? What are they reporting back? And is there energy around pushing back against what’s happening under the Trump administration? When I see 1,000-person protests happening every single week for the past couple of months, and I’m looking at our voter contact data, I’m seeing that our people are energized. That’s what empowers us to win elections.
How are you prioritizing outreach to the Democratic base, versus people who don’t vote as consistently, versus unaffiliated and Independent voters, versus specific demographic groups that the Democrats didn’t do so well with last election?
We pull our targets for organizing using a pretty data-based approach. In partnership with the [Democratic National Committee], we get modeling for who is likely to turn out and who’s likely to vote for Democrats if they do, and we go talk to that entire universe of voters. We tend not to dig into demographics and historical trends.
But on the flip side, when we see clear trend lines—the Latino community becoming more conservative, Black voters staying at home at higher rates than in the past, young voters, especially young men, drifting to the right—those are red flags that say we have more work to do in our community.
We focus on getting out the vote in the 60-day window between Labor Day and Election Day, and we spend the rest of the year getting ready to do that as effectively as we can. I tend to think that if somebody is unlikely to vote, I want to talk to them as close as possible to when they can actually go vote. So I view that Labor Day to Election Day period as the gold standard. If we can double our conversations there, it’s worth spending the rest of the year building towards that.
That’s exactly the model we have at Wake Dems. We spend the rest of the year organizing in our communities. We’re going to be hosting community forums. If we have specific regions in Wake County that we lost support from demographic groups, I want to circle up with community leaders.
What does canvassing look like right now? Do people answer the door?
It’s certainly a tough environment. But people are actually longing to talk about what’s happening and to have somebody say, “What you are experiencing, those fears and concerns and worries, those are real. We share them. Here’s how you can take action and make a difference.” You can tell when people are craving an opportunity for that versus when you’re trying to pull them along.
When you encounter voters who are skeptical of or unhappy with their Democratic elected officials, particularly the local ones, how do those conversations go?
This is challenging, because most voters are just trying to live their lives. They’re busy, and they’re not paying nearly as close as close attention to politics day-to-day as we are. And so when housing becomes unaffordable in their neighborhood, they can be really quick to say: “That’s the city council’s fault,” or the Wake Board of Commissioners’ fault.
Often the honest answer is that our municipalities have their hands tied by this gerrymandered Republican general assembly. They won’t let us raise wages. In Raleigh, we can’t set a minimum wage. People probably don’t understand that we are prohibited from more progressive tax structures. [State-level Republicans] are trying to ban us from having our own diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives at the local level. And so we try to explain that there is a group of Republicans who have drawn themselves into permanent power and who are disconnected from our communities. We try to point to that and say we are limited in what we can do.
But also, we have to do a better job. There’s a national narrative about what it means to be a Democrat, especially in large cities, that we have to push back on. If we want people to be safe in their communities, let’s make sure they know that that’s what we’re fighting for. If we want people to be able to live where they work, let’s make sure that they know that we share those values.
Will the Wake Democrats continue making endorsements in nonpartisan municipal races where multiple Democrats are running for the same seat?
I don’t want to get ahead of the entire executive council, because we deliberate and make decisions about endorsements as a group, but I don’t expect that we will shy away from that.
I know that it can be controversial at times. Some of that blame gets misplaced on us. The problem starts when more Democrats run for office than there are seats available. We are limited in our ability to elect Democrats who share our values when that happens.
If there are more Democrats than seats, we could list all of them, I guess, and just tell people who the Democrats are. But that would guarantee that we split tickets, which is counterproductive to the mission.
So yeah, we make decisions that are sometimes controversial, but the result is that we turned out the most votes for a Wake Forest commissioner in the history of the municipality in 2023, we flipped the commission, and they passed a nondiscrimination ordinance. So we went from three municipalities that hadn’t [passed one] down to two. We’re going to finish that work in Holly Springs and Fuquay Varina this fall, and make sure that no matter who you are, where you come from, who you love, or how much you’re worth, you can feel loved and welcomed and accepted in your community.
Our vision for Wake County is that when people say, “Hey, what’s it like to live there?” we can just say, “Wake County is a great place to live, work and raise a family,” and we won’t have to qualify it with, “As long as you don’t live in, blank.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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Chloe Courtney Bohl is a corps member for Report for America. Reach her at chloe@indyweek.com. Comment on this story at backtalk@indyweek.com.