About Jonah

Jonah Garson, an attorney, organizer, and the current First Vice Chair of the North Carolina Democratic Party, was raised in Chapel Hill and is an alumnus of Chapel Hill High School and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His mother is a psychotherapist. His father managed a rural health center in Prospect Hill (Caswell County) before retiring. He has twin sisters, Anna (Director of International Education at Tufts University) and Meghan (a child-life therapist at Boston Children’s Hospital) and a brother-in-law Todd (a helicopter paramedic and ER-surgeon in training).

Garson worked for former N.C. Senate District 23 Senator Ellie Kinnaird, the late N.C. Rep. Paul Luebke, for the campaign of former N.C. House Speaker Joe Hackney, and for the Duke Center for Child and Family Policy, before attending Columbia Law School, where he graduated in 2014 as a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar. In his over 10 years of practice, Garson has served in the Labor Bureau of the Office of the New York Attorney General, as a corporate attorney at an international law firm, and, for the past six years, as a litigator in state and federal court at the Orange County-based Parry firm representing businesses, individuals, nonprofits and state agencies in high-stakes civil litigation in state and federal court. His firm has served as counsel for the NC Broadband Office, litigating against bad actors trying to take advantage of the billions of dollars of rural broadband money, and for the NC Department of Revenue, litigation against some of NC’s very wealthiest trying to take advantage of tax credit loopholes. Garson has been proud to represent Democratic state legislative witnesses in litigation over gerrymandering and voter ID laws, and to lead a number of voter protection efforts locally and statewide. He serves as volunteer, pro bono counsel for E3 Camp, a free summer STEM enrichment camp for Black and brown students in Orange County.

Outside of private law practice, Garson has served as the Chair of the Orange Country Democratic Party, a Governor Cooper appointee to the North Carolina Education and Workforce Innovation Commission, as a multi-term executive committee member of the Chapel Hill-Carrboro NAACP, and as a voter protection director. In 2022, he ran in an open primary for N.C. House District 56, receiving 49% of the vote.

In 2023, Garson was elected 1st Vice Chair of the North Carolina Democratic Party alongside Chair Anderson Clayton of Person County and other statewide leaders. The party has grown under their tenure to be one of the largest state parties in the country, which successfully opposed Republican Party attempts to invalidate hundreds of thousands of voter registration and overturn the election of Justice Allison Riggs to the North Carolina Supreme Court, and which helped lead efforts to recruit candidates for all 170 North Carolina state legislative seats in 2025.

Garson also currently serves as a member of the Orange County Planning Board, which is charged with making difficult decisions and recommendations regarding development of, and farmland preservation in, Orange County’s rural areas.

Jonah can be reached easily at jonah@jonahgarson.com.