Under the Dome podcast: Rep. Maria Cervania on life as a freshman Democratic lawmaker
Start your week in North Carolina politics with our latest Under the Dome podcast, for the week of March 25, 2024. Dawn Vaughan here, your podcast host and Capitol bureau chief. I’m joined by a state lawmaker as my guest: Rep. Maria Cervania, a Cary Democrat.
Cervania is a freshman representative who previously served on the Wake County Board of Commissioners. She’s also the first Filipino person to serve in the General Assembly, elected in 2022 along with a historic wave of other Filipino Americans winning elections across the country. Cervania talked about how local and state government are “diametrically different,” from demographics to how governing happens. As a Democrat, her party is in the superminority.
She said that despite the differences, “there’s a lot of commonality. And if you respect one another, and you give yourself an openness towards that, you can get things done. It may not be in the traditional way. And I’ve said this before, people think that you need to do things in the (legislature) a certain way. But being in the minority, I can’t be in the parameters of that, or I really won’t get anything done.”
That means working with other lawmakers of various political ideologies within the Democratic caucus, as well as with Republicans, and Cervania talks about how she approaches working with colleagues on both sides of the aisle. Not all lawmakers will say who they actually like in the other party, but Cervania does. She talks about how she made conversation with Rep. Larry Potts and Rep. Donnie Loftis.
Loftis was appointed to his Gaston County House seat and then elected in 2022, same as Cervania. He has also confirmed he was outside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, during the violent insurrection after the election loss of former President Donald Trump.
“I’m pretty super progressive, liberal. I went to Washington for the Women’s March,” Cervania said.
And she also sat for a week next to Loftis during an event at the Hunt Institute around the start of the 2023 legislative session.
“And I built a great relationship with him during that time. We shared stories about being county commissioners; he was ex-military, my dad’s ex-military. And at the end of the week, while everybody was cleaning up, like the tables around us, he goes, ‘Maria, I have to tell you something.’ And I go, ‘What is it, Donnie?’ and he goes, ‘I was at Jan. 6, and I wanted you to hear it from me. So that I didn’t want you to hear from somebody else and be like, judge me on it,” Cervania said.
Listen to the full podcast to hear more about her retelling of their conversation, as well as how she became a Democrat growing up in a Republican household, and how she approaches her work because of it.
Headliner of the Week
We also talk about her mindset going into the short session, her sense of optimism, and her take on the Legislative Building and General Assembly.
“So I like being actually in the legislature. I feel like sometimes it’s like this grad school of government, and we get all these topics that we don’t ever get exposed to. But we like to study the bills. I love reading, I love studying. And so I’m excited about all the different things,” Cervania said.
Stay tuned to the end for our picks for Headliner of the Week, about tech jobs layoffs and the pollening.
Listen to our latest episode below and catch up on previous episodes. You can also listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Audible, iHeart, Pandora, Amazon Music and Stitcher.
