A North Carolina man who recently won the state’s Cash 5 online game is planning to leverage part of his jackpot to finance a very specific undertaking: his own congressional campaign.
Josh McConkey, who lives about 15 miles west of Raleigh in the city of Apex, announced his bid for Congress last February and will be vying for the state’s 13th District in a primary election slated for March 5.
McConkey has an impressively dense biography, including a career as an emergency physician, a role as a U.S. Air Force Reserve Colonel, and a flight surgeon who completed a tour in Iraq. The veteran and aspiring congressman found the windfall—which is coming in the final, harrowing stretch of a highly competitive Republican primary race—to be profoundly fortuitous. “This is divine intervention,” McConkey told the UK paper The Daily Mail.
There's no other way to explain it, the timing is just absolutely perfect.
A nondescript January day
McConkey was in the same humble, nondescript place where many individuals find themselves before making the trifling, seemingly inconsequential purchase that leads to a life-altering fortune: the gas station. Filling up his tank on January 31, he spotted an LED sign advertising the North Carolina Lottery's prize for its Cash 5 online game, which was climbing toward $800,000. He decided to go home and buy a ticket, using numbers he’d played on lottery games for years—a specific combination incorporating his children's birthdays and his wedding anniversary.
The following night, he received an email from the state lottery telling him he'd won the jackpot. Carefully examining the message, he maintained a healthy dose of skepticism. But after calling his wife over to help him determine the credibility of the email, it gradually dawned on them both that McConkey had, in fact, won the $750,000 jackpot. The stunning turn of events reached a climax the next morning when McConkey drove to a lottery center to claim his prize. In a private, secured room, lottery officials handed him a jumbo-sized check for $757,577. “I am still really in shock,” he told the North Carolina Lottery upon accepting his prize. “It's pretty wild.”
Campaigning against the overdose crisis
According to McConkey, one of the chief motivating forces behind his congressional campaign is combating the drug overdose scourge that continues to plague America. Should he win, he hopes to use his seat in Congress to stem the surging tide of fentanyl overdoses that take tens of thousands of American lives every year, including many of his own patients in emergency medicine. “As an emergency physician,” he told The Daily Mail, “I am the one that looks at these parents in the face and tells them that their son or daughter has died.”
McConkey has vowed to use part of his lottery windfall to fund the final weeks of his campaign and, hopefully, put himself in a position to effectively combat America's opioid crisis and ensure that fewer parents have to face those devastating conversations.
North Carolina Lottery's Cash 5
The North Carolina Education Lottery's Cash 5 is a rolling jackpot game in which players have the chance to win every night of the week. To play, individuals simply select five numbers from 1 to 43. Each play is $1, and each slip allows for five sets of numbers. Every Cash 5 jackpot starts at $100,000 and keeps climbing until someone matches every number.
