There aren’t that many competitive state Senate races in North Carolina this year, but I happen to live in the middle of one.
Two years ago, Democrat Woodson Bradley beat Republican Stacie McGinn by just 209 votes in Senate District 42, an open-seat election after Rachel Hunt decided to run for lieutenant governor. With more than 124,000 votes cast, that was a margin of less than two-tenths of a percentage point.
Now they are doing it all over again with Bradley as the incumbent and McGinn back for a rematch. Their race through southern and eastern Mecklenburg County is once again among the relatively small number of legislative contests that could plausibly go either way.
I wrote after the last election that the McGinn campaign could have gone harder after Bradley over her leadership in a multi-level marketing company called Fortune Hi-Tech, which was ultimately shut down as an illegal pyramid scheme in 2013. Then as now, Bradley is an excellent saleswoman, but what she’s selling is a scam.
Back then, Bradley tried to distance herself from the MLM. Bradley’s campaign told WFAE in 2024 that she did not own Fortune Hi-Tech, was not a party to the government’s case and disputed any suggestion that she defrauded anyone.
What’s fascinating — in a bad way — is that Bradley is not running away from that history this time. She is trying to rewrite it.
Her campaign is now sending a mailer with this remarkable line:
“I survived an abusive relationship — only to be targeted by a pyramid scheme preying on survivors of abuse. I swore I’d never let that happen again … to me or anybody else.”
That is an astonishing rewriting of what happened. Bradley was not merely “targeted” by the scheme. She became one of its most public faces.
Bradley was selling the scheme
Bradley, who then went by Woodson Gardner, was not some poor sap suckered into Fortune Hi-Tech’s enormous network. As one of its senior salespeople, she appeared in promotional and training videos and addressed rooms of recruits, teaching them how to sell the opportunity to still more people.
In one recruiting speech, she told a story of leaving an abusive relationship and then connected it to the MLM.
“If that happened to you, you take that, you run with that, and you ensure that no one in your life ever lives hell on earth again,” she said. “And that’s what you have your hands on here.”
By then, Bradley had risen far beyond the rank and file. Fortune Hi-Tech promoted her as a “Platinum Sales Manager” and placed her in its “Ring of Honor.” A now-deleted LinkedIn profile described her as one of its largest earners.
In a 2013 motion seeking a temporary restraining order, the FTC identified Bradley by the Fortune Hi-Tech rank of national sales manager and cited statements from her presentations multiple times while arguing that the company emphasized recruitment.
Why this matters
I don’t think every bad decision from 15 years ago should follow someone forever. If Bradley wants to say she made a mistake, got in over her head or came to regret her role in Fortune Hi-Tech, voters can decide what to make of that.
But that is not what she is doing.
Bradley is bringing the episode back up herself and using it to sell voters on something admirable about her character. In her version, she was targeted and then became the protector, determined to keep the same thing from happening to anyone else.
There is no way a normal reader would see this mailer and understand Bradley’s documented role. She has taken the most damaging part of her public biography and recast it as a story of personal courage.
That is what makes the mailer important. It is not only about what Bradley did years ago. It is about how she handles an uncomfortable truth about herself now.
Bradley likes to talk about being on “Team Normal.” She wants suburban voters to see her as the practical mom in the middle, far removed from the strange people and ideological crusades that have come to define politics.
But there is nothing normal about turning a record that placed you near the top of a pyramid into a campaign story about being one of the people trapped at the bottom.
Candidates matter
Democrats currently lead the national generic congressional ballot by about seven and a half points, and races like this one often get reduced to a broader fight over the balance of power.
But I live in this district, and I don’t think this race should be treated as one more square on a statewide scoreboard. Voters here are choosing between two actual people, not two generic party labels.
Bradley is a sitting state senator asking them to trust her judgment and her account of her own record. They should consider not only what she did with Fortune Hi-Tech, but what she is telling them about it now.