News-Record.com

So, you want to represent your friends and neighbors in the North Carolina General Assembly? Good for you. Where else can you take time away from your family and full-time job to work for (relatively) low wages and have your every move scrutinized by us folks in the press?

Are you gunning for a seat in Guilford County or some place on our borders? (Districts bordering Guilford include parts of Davidson, Forsyth, Rockingham, Randolph and Alamance.) Want to be sure the paper and this blog includes you in our columns when we talk about the buzz around such-and-such a race or who might challenge who in which district?

Well, drop me a line. (mbinker@news-record.com or 919/832-5549.)

That's what Olga Morgan Wright did the other day. She's planning to run in NC House District 58, which is currently held by Rep. Alma Adams.

Just like that, she gets her name published on this here blog (read by no fewer than seven people and two hyper-active cats every day) and exposure to the, um, masses out there on the Internets.

Wright, by the way, is a Republican and challenged Adams the last time around. She took home 32.34 percent of the vote in 2004, which wasn't too shabby in a district where Republicans had only made up 22-odd percent of the registered voters.

(Libertarian Walter Sperko also ran in this race the last time, taking home a little less than 2 percent of the vote.)

House District 58 stretches out from Greensboro the Alamance and Randolph county lines. It's reasonable to expect that since 2004 there's been some demographic shift in the area - with more Republican-leaning voters moving into precincts outside Greensboro - to make the district more competitive.

Still, it would have to be a massive (and undetected) population shift to make things completely even. And Adams is a strong incumbent with strong ties to the House leadership (which could be both a good and bad thing this year) and a corps of support anchored firmly in a handful of east Greensboro precincts that tend to vote in pretty good numbers.

All in all - voters should expect to see a competitive campaign here, with Adams having an edge due to incumbency, name recognition and voter registration percentages. On the flip side, Wright will likely get some bump in name recognition from her prior campaign and has shown she can "beat the spread" during the fall campaign.