What does it take to win the most competitive seat in your state, and then decide the bigger job is filling the seats around you?

In this episode of Fuel for Female Founders, Andrea interviews Mary Wills Bode, former North Carolina State Senator for District 18 and co-founder of Electing Women North Carolina. Mary was practicing law on Wall Street when the 2016 election pulled her into fundraising and phone banking, then home to North Carolina to run a bipartisan nonprofit working on extreme partisan gerrymandering. Her parents met on a political campaign, and her mother’s rule has stayed the same: do not sit on the sidelines and watch other people do it, get in the game.

Mary and Andrea trace the run itself. A redrawn district opened in Granville County, a third Republican, a third Democrat and a third unaffiliated, and the most competitive seat of that cycle. She was told a Democrat probably could not win it, ran anyway and won. Inside, she found a superminority with no real check on power, a salary of a little over $13,000 a year that favors retired and independently wealthy members, and a legislature majoring in minor things while healthcare, education and infrastructure waited.

This conversation goes well beyond one term in office. Mary explains why she chose to leave public service to help first-time candidates get their feet under them, why she says women in North Carolina give only about 30% of political donations, and why one woman at the table cannot move policy on her own. She talks about lived experience you cannot fill in with assumptions, about what pregnancy has sharpened for her, and about the county commissions that run the budgets people feel most. Her closing ask is simple: vote, get educated on what you can, and do it for the women who could not.

This episode is for the woman who is done watching policy get written without her, who is tired of staying passive and is ready to give, run or back someone who will.