"Raleigh needs a new type of leadership," says Ken McCool after winning seat for N.C. House, dist. 105

I am Anna, I am Penn's campaign manager, and before we say anything, I just want to say thank you to all of y'all. You guys have made this campaign so much fun. I have had the time of my life getting to meet all of y'all and work with all of y'all. The amount of blood, sweat, and tears that y'all put in, it blows my mind every single day. And I'm just so grateful for every single one of you. And I am just super, super excited to announce the next representative of House District of the United States of America. Well, I was joking. Leader Reeves, who is now going to be my boss, we were talking this morning. I said, I think if we win, we'll win by three points. And we have well overshot that. So we are very excited. I first want to thank Anna. Anna was the only person. I told most people in this room that I interviewed one person to be my campaign manager, and if she said no, that probably wouldn't have happened. So Anna, thank you so much for your patience and your work. Thank you very much. So many people have supported me along the way. I'm just a kid from Athens. And I didn't think I would make it to the state capitol, but here we are. And it's going to be a good night. You know, we thought maybe we'll win and we'll maybe break the supermajority and be able to uphold Governor Stein's veto, but I don't want to get too ahead of myself. But I think we're going to have a majority by the end of tonight. We're going to be able to do really good work, and it's starting to get really easy. You don't win elections like this by yourself. It takes an army of volunteers and donors and friends and family. Every single one of you have played a role. Whether you gave a few dollars, knocked on many doors, and Anna probably will agree to doing that. We knocked on 30,000 doors this campaign. We made 15,000 phone calls. We wrote 15,000 postcards. I made more call time phone calls than I ever would like to do, but we needed to do it anyway. Broadly, it's a new type of leadership. It has been bad for the last four years of Tricia Copeland, and we're frustrated. However, when we win, we don't flip. She has served North Carolina for a long time, and we should thank her for that. Albeit, all of us are very disappointed in the last four years, but it still took a great sacrifice. So I want to thank Tricia Copeland for her work over the last 20 years, and I'm excited to take this seat and finish what she started 20 years ago. And I want to thank her for that. I know it takes a lot of sacrifice, and I wish her and her family very well. This is what's going to happen. We're going to get money in Matthews finally, so we don't have to get on the wrong track. Thank you very much. We are going to finally build more parks. We are going to pay our teachers a livable wage. We are going to make life easier for everybody. No more Duke Energy rate hikes. No more political theater. No more chaos. Just normal. Might I say, boring politics. That's what I ran for. That's why I'm here. Thank you so much for the gift you have given me. This has been the honor of my life. Running for the seat has been the honor of my life. And I'm even more grateful to serve in it. Thank you guys so much. I really appreciate it.