After years as a nonprofit lawyer focusing on healthcare advocacy, Adam Searing ran for a seat in the Chapel Hill Town Council. He was elected and began to represent constituents in the town he had grown up in. However, after years of pushing change forward as a lawyer Searing was frustrated by the difficulties of local government. “Right here in my town, we’re just ignoring people,” he says. Upon Chapel Hill mayor Pam Hemminger’s announcement of retirement, Adam decided to enter the mayoral election in an effort to increase his influence on the city’s future.
Adam still holds his seat on the Chapel Hill Town Council, and will maintain it if he loses the election. Sitting near him is Jess Anderson, his opponent and the one who received the previous mayor’s endorsement. “I really don’t do this because I want to be in a different office,” says Adam. “The only reason to do this is to try and volunteer in your community and make changes you want to see.”
Right after sunrise during the early voting period, Adam puts up campaign signs outside a polling location. “Yard signs don’t vote,” he says, but he still puts them up everywhere he goes. In a local election where previous races have been decided by single digits, it’s vital to be known.
Misinformation and dramatization largely based on zoning disagreements circulated extensively throughout the mayoral race. The current state of many of the city’s issues was often unclear to residents, and that fueled contention. Searing was the candidate who faced more extreme controversy, largely due to his desire to preserve Chapel Hill green spaces over encouraging development. “I’m stubborn,” said Adam. “If you start doing all these personal attacks and stuff hoping I’ll give up, I’m not gonna give up.”
In a smaller city like Chapel Hill there are no large rallies or televised debates for executive office. Instead, Searing’s campaign was made up of long days of canvassing through neighborhoods. He was met with mixed opinions, but disagreement was distinctly more civil in person than online, and he took time to speak with individual voters. “I love Chapel Hill so much,” he says, “and I have stuff I want to do here after traveling across the country and seeing how it can be done.”
As part of his goal of making tangible changes, Adam is running at the head of a slate of five Town Council candidates. On election night he hugs Renuka Soll, one of the slate candidates. If the full slate were to be elected, they would have a majority in the council and be able to overturn prior zoning decisions.
On election day, Adam stayed at the polling locations from 6:30 am to 7:30 pm with various friends and supporters. As the polls closed, he stood with a childhood friend, the one who initially convinced him to run for town council. “We all put 110% of ourselves into this campaign,” he says.
Adam eats lunch in one of the public spaces currently slated for development, which he hopes to rework if elected. “I grew up just a little way away from here, we’d come out here all the time,” he says. “Every time I come out here I think about it. If we get a majority, we can reverse this vote.” The public land is not officially designated as a park, so it goes largely unused.
Standing in the corner away from his election party, Adam writes his concession speech after watching his margin of defeat widen all night. The race hasn’t been officially called, but after years of working adjacent to politics he knows how it goes. “We were arrayed against a lot of very powerful forces who didn’t want us to succeed,” he says, “and we tried our hardest.”
