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Democrat LaKesha Womack, who was charged with a felony mid-campaign for stealing a car, defeated incumbent Republican Tim Moore in North Carolina’s 14th Congressional District on Tuesday, flipping a Republican seat in a race.
Womack, a first-time candidate who raised roughly $56,000, won with 51.1 percent of the vote to Moore’s 48.9 percent, a margin of about 6,415 votes out of more than 288,000 cast, according to unofficial results from the North Carolina State Board of Elections.

Moore, the former longtime speaker of the North Carolina House who first won the seat in 2024, had been widely viewed as a heavy favorite.

Weeks before Election Day, Womack was served with a criminal summons on a pending Class H felony charge stemming from an allegedly unreturned 2019 Toyota Corolla rented from Budget Car Rental.

Court records show the original summons was issued in January 2020 but returned unserved the following month. It was reissued and served on Womack on October 11 at a Polk County campaign rally.

Under North Carolina law, willfully failing to return a hired motor vehicle valued above $4,000 is a felony.

The summons listed the vehicle’s value at $20,000.

Womack’s next court date is November 10.

In a campaign video and subsequent interviews, Womack acknowledged that she did not return the rental car. She said she and her young son were homeless at the time, that she had no stable address to receive notices, and that she believed the matter had been resolved and amounted to money owed to the rental company.

WSOC reports:

Court documents obtained by Channel 9 accuse Womack of failing to return a Toyota Corolla to Budget Rental Car by Oct. 13, 2019. The criminal summons was originally issued three months later. But it wasn’t served until about two weeks ago.

“What happened to the rental car?” Channel 9 Government Reporter Joe Bruno asked.

“I can’t talk about that because it is an ongoing legal case,” Womack said. “But I will say that if it were something much more serious, then I probably would have been served and charged much quicker than a week before early voting started.”

While Womack declined to share specifics on Thursday, prior to being served the warrant, she told supporters on Facebook she had experienced homelessness with her then 10-year-old son.

“At one point, I had a rental car, and I did not return the rental car on time,” she said. “And I did not know that they had filed a case against me for this because, again, I was homeless, so I had nowhere to receive mail.”

The pending felony case will continue after Womack takes office in January.