WFAE
Mecklenburg County commissioners were surprised Ella Scarborough ran for reelection last year. She finished with more votes than any other Commission candidate.
Mecklenburg County Commissioner Ella Scarborough is an icon in local politics as the first African American woman elected to the Charlotte City Council, in 1987.
But in recent years, Scarborough, who is 75, has been struggling to participate in meetings and follow discussions, according to six current and former commissioners.
They declined to speak on the record because they don’t want to tarnish Scarborough s distinguished career.
Because of Scarborough s health, they said they were surprised she ran for reelection as an at-large candidate in 2020.
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On October 9, Cal Cunningham, the Democratic candidate in North Carolina’s 2020 Senate race, gave an online press conference to reporters. It was a critical moment in his campaign: Over the past week, the generic but apparently wholesome Southern Democrat whose eventual victory over Republican incumbent Thom Tillis seemed all but preordained had become a man under siege. Cunningham was now primarily occupied with dealing with the fallout from a leaked series of explicitly sexual but not exactly sexually explicit text messages that he’d exchanged with a woman who was not his wife. Though labeled “sexts” by the media, the texts found Cunningham telling the woman, Arlene Guzman Tod