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North Carolina Durham County Commissioner Nida Allam PHOTO BY BRETT VILLENA
Succession North Carolina’s Democratic primary for the Fourth Congressional District seat features a celebrity, a longtime local leader, and an energetic, progressive firebrand. Who will follow in the footsteps of Congressman David Price? BY LENA GELLER lgeller@indyweek.com
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ida Allam giggles and shows me her phone. She’s on the “Students4Nida” TikTok page, watching a video set to an Alvin and the Chipmunks-esque cover of Taylor Swift’s “You Belong With Me.” The five-second video uses one of TikTok’s most common formats, where the subject lip syncs to a song and overlays text that sort of matches the theme of the lyrics. In this one, a UNC-Chapel Hill freshman named Chase pairs the lyrics “Sitting on a park bench, thinking to myself” with text that reads “Being a true progressive that supports climate and economic justice.” Then, as chipmunk Taylor sings, “Hey, isn’t this easy,” Allam’s name flashes across the screen. Among the eight candidates running in the Democratic primary for North Carolina’s 4th Congressional
District, Allam is the only one with a student-led TikTok account, she tells me proudly. Like New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—whose name has been hashtagged in so many TikToks that, when totaled, videos with #AOC have a cumulative 1.1 billion views—Allam excites young people. When Representative David Price announced in October that he would retire after more than 30 years in office, Allam emerged as a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed replacement with a staunchly progressive platform that includes support for a Green New Deal and Medicare for All. “I think it’s high time for North Carolina to have a fighter,” Allam told the INDY upon announcing her candidacy in November.
Allam is one of three frontrunners in the congressional race. She’s up against Valerie Foushee, a state senator with over two decades of experience in public office, and Clay Aiken, a former American Idol contestant and activist for children with disabilities with zero experience in elected office. The newly redrawn 4th district includes all of Durham, Orange, Person, Alamance, and Granville Counties and the northeast corner of Caswell County. As the region is solidly liberal, the primary will most likely decide the general election, though if none of the candidates receive more than 30 percent of the vote, there will be a runoff election on July 26. Allam and I are sitting in her dining room, which doubles as her campaign office. She opens her laptop to kick off a virtual phone bank and I see Chase from TikTok, this time framed in a box on Zoom. Like Chase, most of the phone bank volunteers are UNC students who seem wildly energetic despite it being exam season. As an icebreaker, Allam asks participants to propose a name for her baby (she had announced her pregnancy that morning), and after they drop a few suggestions in the chat—Khadija, Lex, Leia—she gives them a script and a list of phone numbers and sets them off on their own. The next day, the phone bankers joined 100 other UNC students, including basketball star Caleb Love, at a town hall on UNC’s campus. As encouraged, most attendees wore green shirts to celebrate Earth Day and endorse a Green New Deal. Allam isn’t much older than her student supporters— she’s 28. She was born in Canada to Indian and Pakistani immigrant parents and moved to the Triangle at age five when her father got a job at IBM. (She became a naturalized US citizen in February 2008). She grew up in Wake County, attending public schools, and went on to get a degree in sustainable materials and technology from NC State. In 2015, during Allam’s last year of college, three of her best friends—Deah Barakat, his wife, Yusor Abu-Salha, and Yusor’s sister, Razan Abu-Salha—were murdered in their apartment in Chapel Hill. Barakat was a student at UNC’s School of Dentistry; Yusor and Razan were Allam’s classmates at NC State. “The week they passed away, we were all supposed to go get our ears pierced together,” Allam says. “We were still kids.” While many, including Allam, viewed the triple-homicide as a hate crime—all three victims were Muslim—federal authorities ultimately claimed they could not find sufficient evidence to categorize it as such and wrote the shooting off as a violent reaction to a parking dispute. “That’s what really pushed me to realize that we INDYweek.com
April 27, 2022
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