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David Merrill (North Carolina)
From Ballotpedia
This page was current at the end of the individual's last campaign covered by Ballotpedia. Please contact us with any updates.
David Merrill (Republican Party) ran for election for an at-large seat of the Charlotte City Council in North Carolina. He lost in the general election on July 26, 2022.
Merrill completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2022. Click here to read the survey answers.
Biography
David Merrill was born in Bad Cannstatt, Germany. He earned a bachelor's degree from East Carolina University in 2001. His career experience includes working as a national sales director.[1]
Elections
2022
See also: City elections in Charlotte, North Carolina (2022)
General election
General election for Charlotte City Council At-large (4 seats)
The following candidates ran in the general election for Charlotte City Council At-large on July 26, 2022.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ |  | Dimple Ajmera (D) | 16.6 | 46,751 |
| ✔ |  | Braxton Winston II (D) | 16.3 | 46,045 |
| ✔ | LaWana Slack-Mayfield (D) | 15.1 | 42,582 | |
| ✔ |  | James Mitchell (D) | 15.1 | 42,509 |
 | Kyle Luebke (R)  | 10.1 | 28,600 | |
 | David Merrill (R) | 9.0 | 25,385 | |
 | Carrie Olinski (R) | 8.9 | 25,000 | |
 | Charlie Mulligan (R) | 8.8 | 24,698 | |
| Other/Write-in votes | 0.2 | 555 | ||
| Total votes: 282,125 | |||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
| If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey. | ||||
Do you want a spreadsheet of this type of data? Contact our sales team. | ||||
Democratic primary election
Democratic primary for Charlotte City Council At-large (4 seats)
The following candidates ran in the Democratic primary for Charlotte City Council At-large on May 17, 2022.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ | | Braxton Winston II | 21.1 | 44,761 |
| ✔ | | Dimple Ajmera | 18.9 | 40,073 |
| ✔ | LaWana Slack-Mayfield | 17.7 | 37,461 | |
| ✔ | | James Mitchell | 16.2 | 34,331 |
 | Larken Egleston | 14.0 | 29,637 | |
| Patrick Cannon | 12.2 | 25,789 | ||
| Total votes: 212,052 | |||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
| If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey. | ||||
Do you want a spreadsheet of this type of data? Contact our sales team. | ||||
Republican primary election
Republican primary for Charlotte City Council At-large (4 seats)
David Merrill, Charlie Mulligan, Carrie Olinski, and Kyle Luebke defeated David Michael Rice in the Republican primary for Charlotte City Council At-large on May 17, 2022.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ | | David Merrill | 24.0 | 19,541 |
| ✔ | | Charlie Mulligan | 22.7 | 18,461 |
| ✔ | | Carrie Olinski | 20.8 | 16,885 |
| ✔ | | Kyle Luebke | 19.9 | 16,150 |
| David Michael Rice | 12.6 | 10,281 | ||
| Total votes: 81,318 | |||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
| If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey. | ||||
Do you want a spreadsheet of this type of data? Contact our sales team. | ||||
Campaign themes
2022
Ballotpedia survey responses
See also: Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection
David Merrill completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2022. The survey questions appear in bold and are followed by Merrill's responses. Candidates are asked three required questions for this survey, but they may answer additional optional questions as well.
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David Merrill is a proven leader with more than 20 years of experience in Sales, Business Management, Operations, and developing high-performing teams. David Merrill tied the National Record for the youngest age to achieve the rank of Eagle Scout at 13 years of age. By age 24, Merrill was managing multiple branch-style locations with over $3 million in physical assets. Merrill quickly climbed the corporate ladder attributing his success to putting his team first and strongly believes that you have to take care of your employees so they can take care of your clients.
- The primary role of any city is to keep our citizens safe. Charlotte's first responders feel like the city has turned its back on them. We must treat our first responders with dignity and respect, give them a voice and the resources they need to do their jobs, and set standards of accountability. As city leaders, we must earn and maintain the respect of our city staff so that they can earn and maintain the respect of our citizens.
- Charlotte deserves affordable housing. The current city council says they want to help but they are only making the problem worse by focusing on the symptoms and not address the cause. Instead of focusing solely on high-density, low-income housing, which limits opportunity and becomes areas of increased crime and drug use, the city should be focused on new, dispersed, mixed income, mid/low density communities to improve education and advancement opportunities, and provide a path to homeownership.
- With a foundation of safe, vibrant, and affordable communities we can begin to focus on early childhood education, reliable public transportation, job creation, and economic mobility to help ensure that Charlotte is a great place to live for all its residents.
I am very passionate about keeping our city safe, making Charlotte an affordable place to live for all who reside here, economic mobility for everyone, and public transportation because there is no mobility without safe and reliable transportation. We need to treat our city staff with dignity, respect, and have more transparency with our budget including having department heads involved in their financial requests.
Characteristics and principles that are extremely important for elected officials are being humble, taking responsibility, and acting with integrity. We are of the people and must always act for the people.
The primary responsibility of the City Council is to manage the business and employees of the city. We are responsible for and to the stakeholders - our citizens and must never forget that. Everything that we do must be for the long-term benefit of the entire city, not just those that vote for us or donate to our campaigns. I will focus on keeping our city safe, ensuring an affordable place to live for all residents, reliable transportation, economic mobility, fiscal responsibility and transparency, and treating all with the respect and dignity that they deserve.
When I was 8 or 9 years old I remember President Reagan's speech saying "Tear Down This Wall" but did not yet understand the implications of what was happening. While I remember the movie 'Red Dawn,' Gorbachev with his birthmark, and the cold war, the first event I have a vivid memory of and understood was Tiananmen Square. Tiananmen Square was not a strategic battle between Super Powers. To watch one ordinary man defiantly stop an entire column of tanks and by proxy, the red army, and the communist party changed my beliefs of what a single person could do.
My first job was as a janitor at the age of 16. It was a summer job working 3rd shift to clean the floors in grocery stores around Fayetteville, NC. As the son of a single mother and community college teacher I wanted to help support my family and was not afraid of doing what it took to help make ends meet. Depending on how many people showed up for work that day, I would work 8-12 hours driving a company truck to grocery stores within 2 hours of town, sweeping, mopping, and buffing floors often after the stores were closed. I would load and unload heavy equipment from the back of the trucks. To this day, whenever I enter a store of any kind, one of the first things I notice is the floors and think about the hard work of the unseen staff that keep the facility clean.
I listen to most books and there are several books that I try to re-consume every year. These include: The Go-Giver, The 10X Rule, Start with Why, The Richest Man in Babylon, Good to Great, Spartan Up! My favorite book and the best I've ever read is Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir.
I know what it is like to struggle. To be poor and broke. To not know if I would be able to keep my lights on or buy food. There was a point in my life when I could not afford to be able to run the air conditioning in my $450 a month apartment so I would have to take a bath to cool down because the water was included in the rent that I could not pay. I've had my phone turned off and survived off a couple of packs of ramen noodles, a few eggs, and one chicken breast a day. I have known desperation, felt shame and embarrassment. I know what it took to claw my way out of poverty, to find success and abundance. I want to help the people of Charlotte find that same path to economic mobility and fulfilling their dreams.
Historically I may have said that having government experience is beneficial for anyone running for city council but in seeing how the current council is managing our city, running a successful, people-centric business is more important. I am running because our well-meaning city council has poorly executed ideas to help the city when they have in fact made many matters worse. Our police don't have the resources they need to keep us safe, our mayor and city council will not meet with the Charlotte Firefighters Association, we have sanitation delays due to staffing, and our transit workers don't feel safe doing their jobs.
Note: Ballotpedia reserves the right to edit Candidate Connection survey responses. Any edits made by Ballotpedia will be clearly marked with [brackets] for the public. If the candidate disagrees with an edit, he or she may request the full removal of the survey response from Ballotpedia.org. Ballotpedia does not edit or correct typographical errors unless the candidate's campaign requests it.
See also
2022 Elections
External links
Footnotes
- ↑ Information submitted to Ballotpedia through the Candidate Connection survey on May 1, 2022.
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