Four North Carolina candidates vying for votes dined with graduate students Wednesday as they discussed policies ranging from the environment and coal ash to political philosophy and campaign ethics.
Lon Cecil, Libertarian gubernatorial candidate; Sean Haugh, Libertarian candidate for U.S. Senate; Sue Googe, Republican candidate for the fourth district of the state House of Representatives; and Chuck Stuber, Republican candidate for state auditor, met with students at the UNC School of Government in an event organized by the Graduate and Professional Student Federation.
GPSF President Dylan Russell kicked off the event by greeting the audience and candidates while encouraging students to get involved in politics because of its prominence and importance in everyday life.
“Sometimes government can seem small and disconnected and sometimes politics can seem really abstract,” he said. “But it’s our responsibility to bring a vital human element to our political discourse as students and scholars of this public institution.”
Googe, the first candidate to address the crowd, said she was motivated to run for office because she was unsatisfied with the direction the government was headed.
“What we need to do is to live in a harmonious society, we need to find a balance between individualism and collectivism to find a happy place,” she said.
Cecil said if he is elected governor, he would have three main focuses — growing jobs, providing clean water and improving funding for education — which he would accomplish through legalizing and taxing medical marijuana.
“When elected, I will push the legislature strongly to get a medical cannabis bill in place and quickly,” he said. “It’s not a new tax, so they don’t have to worry about that — the tax has been on the books since 1995, we just need to revise a little bit on the structure of collecting it.”
Haugh said he has two goals if elected to the U.S. Senate — stop all war and lower the national debt by reducing government spending.
