Jeff Jackson is exploring a run for U.S. Senate

The 38-year-old state senator, a millennial who’s inarguably one of Charlotte’s most popular politicians, told his supporters in an email Tuesday morning that he’s talking with his wife, Marisa, and their family about running for the seat to be vacated by Senator Richard Burr.

“Marisa and I will talk about it with our kids over the holiday,” he wrote.

What’s working for him: Jackson has a devoted following in Charlotte. He’s 38, handsome, and has three adorable kids. He’s a captain in the Army National Guard who first enlisted after watching the towers fall on September 11. Charlotte magazine recently named him a Charlottean of the Year.

He has nearly 200,000 followers across the three big platforms. His only rival there is his wife, Marisa, who handled those social duties while he was deployed with his Guard unit this fall.

Even in this year’s election, when his district was redrawn to include more Republicans, he pulled 54 percent of the vote. In the previous two elections, he approached 70 percent.

What’s working against him: In the state Senate, he’s been the loudest dissenter several times, but hasn’t had a great deal of success working with the Republican majority to get things passed.

Also, as of now, Jackson doesn’t have the statewide fundraising base of some of his potential opponents.

And there’s a decent chance that Jackson or any Democratic candidate will be facing one of the most high-profile Republican names in the 2022 races: the president’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump.

That would be something: A Jeff Jackson-Lara Trump race would be interesting, if for no other reason than Trump, a Wilmington native, is also 38. So it would guarantee the Senate’s first millennial member.

Currently the youngest senator is 40-year-old Josh Hawley of Missouri. Jackson points out that 40-year-olds are not millennials (the official cutoff is 1981). When I talked to him on Tuesday, I told him I was 40, and he joked, “Yeah, we have nothing in common, generationally.”

When I asked if he’d considered the possibility of running against a Trump, he said Marisa has asked him what that would be like.

“Do you think Donald Trump (would) personally attack you?” he said she’d asked. “I said, ‘Absolutely.’”

What’s next: That last part, putting his family into the national political scene, is what Jackson says he’ll be weighing over the next few weeks. Their kids are 12, 5, and 2.

“We’ve just hit this rhythm in our family where everything is working and everyone’s doing well and everybody’s happy,” he said. “I wonder, is my obligation to keep that streak running as long as I can?”

“(Marisa) works fulltime and we have three kids. For me to say I’m going to spend a huge chunk of the next six years in D.C. is the biggest decision we’ve had to make in our marriage.”

Who else is running? The Observer reported Tuesday that N.C. Supreme Court Justice Anita Earls, a former Charlotte lawyer, is considering a bid for the Democratic nomination. Erica Smith, a state senator from eastern North Carolina who lost in the Democratic primary for Thom Tillis’s seat earlier this year, has said she’ll run for Burr’s seat.

On the Republican side: Lara Trump, of course. But also former mayor and governor Pat McCrory has been rumored to be in the mix. A recent poll showed Trump with a slight lead on McCrory. Representative Mark Walker is the only one who’s formally announced a bid.

Simpler times: Hard to believe it’s been almost six years since Jackson became the talk of national media for showing up to work on a snow day. This was February 2015 — exactly one thousand years ago in U.S. political time — and icy roads left the legislative building mostly empty, except for Jackson.

Then 32, Jackson took to social media and joked that he was passing bills with unanimous support — of course, he was the only one voting. The posts were picked up by Buzzfeed and Rachel Maddow.

“This is going to be like ‘Night at the Museum’ except at the end we’ll have a stronger middle class,” he wrote.

In the tweetstorm, he gave redistricting responsibility to independent bodies, expanded broadband access in rural North Carolina, passed childcare subsidies, expanded mental health for people in jail, gave Charlotte governing power of its airport, and supported early childhood education.

It was all fun, until the Civitas Institute came in and added up the hypothetical cost of everything Jackson “passed.”

“It was like eight tweets, six years ago, and I still get asked about it every day,” Jackson said.

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