A Yardstick for Accountability: Kelly's Day-One to Day-100 Roadmap for North Carolina

Every candidate makes promises. Far fewer put those promises on a calendar. That distinction is at the heart of Kelly's campaign for North Carolina — and it is why this agenda is being published not as a list of aspirations, but as a dated, checkable roadmap. If Kelly is elected, these commitments become the measuring stick. Voters should expect updates. Journalists should ask for receipts.

Why a Public Timeline Matters

Too often, campaigns end where accountability begins. Platforms are shelved, priorities quietly shift, and voters are told that change takes time — sometimes indefinitely. Kelly's approach rejects that pattern. By announcing a concrete 100-day agenda before the election, the campaign invites scrutiny rather than avoiding it. Every item below is something the office can actually initiate in the first hundred days, and each carries a clear benchmark for success.

Days 1–10: Restoring Trust in the Democratic Process

The first priority is the foundation of everything else: the right to vote.

• Sign an executive order protecting voter access. Within the first week, Kelly will direct state agencies to expand early voting information campaigns, ensure county boards of elections are fully funded and staffed, and guarantee that polling place closures cannot occur without public notice and justification.
• Launch a nonpartisan election integrity task force. Not to police voters, but to police the process — auditing registration purges, modernizing voter rolls, and ensuring no eligible North Carolinian is dropped from the rolls without notice and an opportunity to correct the record.
• Restore voting access for formerly incarcerated residents. Kelly will begin the administrative work of ensuring every citizen returning from incarceration knows their rights and faces no bureaucratic maze when registering to vote.

These are not symbolic gestures. They are the administrative groundwork that determines whether an election in Watauga County runs as smoothly as one in Wake County.

Days 11–40: Putting Working Families First

With the democratic footing secured, the agenda turns to the kitchen-table economics that define daily life across all 100 counties.

• File the Fair Wage Act. Kelly will send legislation to the General Assembly raising the state minimum wage and eliminating the tipped sub-minimum wage, with a schedule that gives small businesses time to adjust while giving workers relief they have waited decades for.
• Direct agencies to lower the cost of prescription drugs. Through bulk purchasing agreements, transparency requirements for pharmacy benefit managers, and a state-based prescription drug affordability board, Kelly will use executive authority to begin reining in prices immediately — no waiting on Washington.
• Release a statewide housing emergency declaration. By day 40, Kelly will publish a county-by-county housing assessment and direct state housing finance resources toward communities where rents have outpaced wages.

Each of these actions comes with a public dashboard, updated monthly, so any resident can track what has been done and what remains.

Days 41–70: Rebuilding What Has Been Neglected

North Carolina's rural communities have watched resources flow to metropolitan corridors for too long. The middle stretch of the agenda addresses that imbalance directly.

• Break ground on broadband expansion projects in counties that have waited years for connectivity, using existing federal funds that previous leadership left on the table.
• Convene the first Rural Prosperity Summit in a decade, bringing farmers, small business owners, and county commissioners to the table with state agency heads — not for photo opportunities, but for binding commitments.
• Restore full state funding for public health departments, which were hollowed out during and after the pandemic and remain understaffed in dozens of counties.

Days 71–100: Setting the Long Game

The final stretch of the first hundred days is about durability — building structures that outlast any single administration.

• File the North Carolina Voting Rights Act, a state-level statute codifying and expanding protections against discriminatory districting and voter suppression tactics, so that no future court ruling can strip away what the General Assembly writes into law.
• Establish an independent redistricting commission, ending the practice of legislators drawing their own maps and handing communities a genuine choice in their elections.
• Deliver the first People's Report — a public accounting, delivered in plain language, of every commitment made, every action taken, and every deadline still ahead.

The Standard We Are Setting

Some will say this is ambitious. It is. But ambition with a deadline is simply accountability. North Carolinians have grown accustomed to waiting — for broadband, for hospitals, for wages that keep up with rent. Kelly's first 100 days are designed to end the waiting on the things that can be fixed now, and to build the machinery to fix the things that take longer.

The full agenda, with itemized benchmarks and publication dates, is available on this site. Print it. Bookmark it. Hold it up. That is exactly what it was written for.