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A lot of things are happening right now, which is why it may have been easy to miss that the North Carolina Senate race has been hit by not one but two October surprises. Sen. Thom Tillis tested positive for the coronavirus, and his Democratic challenger, Cal Cunningham, admitted to exchanging romantic texts with a woman who was not his wife. Politics in North Carolina is high-stakes because both parties have come to see this state as essential to political dominance—and the races there are getting tighter. For Republicans, their path to Electoral College victory runs through North Carolina. For Democrats, winning Tillis’ seat could flip the Senate. On Tuesday’s episode of What Next, I spoke with Michael Bitzer, a professor of politics and history at Catawba College who’s lived in North Carolina for nearly 20 years, about the highly consequential showdown taking place in his state. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Mary Harris: When did you know that 2020 would be a year when this North Carolina Senate race would really be front and center?
Michael Bitzer: I think it goes back to 2019 and an op-ed that Thom Tillis printed in the Washington Post criticizing the president and his management style. Very quickly after that, he changed his tune, moving aggressively into being a full-throated defender of the president. What we are seeing is a concern by the Tillis campaign: Are we bear-hugging the president too much? Have we not established our credentials with the conservative base of the Republican Party?
Tillis was speaker of the statehouse when Republicans took over after the 2010 election. He oftentimes would come across as a suburban-style Republican, fairly more moderate politics, not the hardcore conservatism of rural Republicans in this state. He’s never been able to quite solidify that base. Tillis will attest that he is one of the president’s key supporters in the Senate. I’m not sure that message has been convincing enough that the base of the party is fully behind him.
Tillis is facing a Democratic opponent, Cal Cunningham. Can you introduce us to who he is?
Cal Cunningham is moderate, a centrist. He presents himself not as a member of the AOC or Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren wing of the party, but a kind of [Gov.] Roy Cooper moderate Democrat. That plays well in this state. Cunningham’s a Democrat from a small town, Lexington, North Carolina, famous for its barbecue, which the entire state is proud of and very divided over, not just in terms of its politics, but the actual barbecue.
My understanding is that the biggest controversy Cunningham got into before the sexting was over what he called “barbecue” and whether it was barbecue or not.
There are fighting words in the South. If you use barbecue as a verb rather than as a noun, there will be bitterness on all sides. But yes, that that was the infamous barbecuegate. And then, lo and behold, Friday we get the text scandal.
A lot of his campaign commercials speak to his hometown upbringing, his service in the military, his willingness as a state senator to fight for the little man in American politics. But this dynamic, when it came to his campaign acknowledging his, shall we say, PG-rated texts, has kind of infiltrated that character portrayal. Yes, he owned up to it, and yes, he apologized for it. I think the lingering question on a lot of North Carolina voters’ minds at this point is, are there, shall we say, R-rated texts we should be anticipating? We don’t know. And there may not be.
Do you think this scandal will matter to voters?
Partisanship is one hell of a drug. At this point, I am of an opinion that voters take with a grain of salt the issues and controversies and perhaps failings of their candidates, but when push comes to shove, it’s all about the D’s and the R’s. That’s what drives voter behavior.
I think, simply, the dynamics of the news cycle nowadays, it feels like every day we are getting an avalanche of new controversies. And tomorrow we’ll get another avalanche. And the day after that, we’ll get another avalanche, and the avalanches just cover up the previous avalanches. At some point, people either tune in or log off, or they think, I’ll wait for the next news cycle, because that will happen probably in an hour.
And a complicating factor here is that North Carolinians are already voting, right?
What we know right now is that over 350,000 North Carolinians have already decided, I’m done with this election. Here’s my absentee or by-mail ballot. It’s been accepted. I’ve banked my vote, and I am done.
How does that compare with previous years?
It’s exponentially higher than anything that we have seen. We right now are close to 1.2 million registered voters requesting absentee or by-mail ballots.
That’s like 20 percent of your voters.
Exactly. And to give you some context, four years ago, we had a little over 230,000 North Carolinians request absentee and by-mail ballots. So we are talking about a sixfold increase at this point in time, and we’ve still got three weeks before the request deadline. Then we start in-person early voting on Oct. 15. That has been a traditional dominant factor: In 2016, two-thirds of ballots came before Election Day. I’ve heard estimates that we could be looking at 80 percent of all ballots cast in the state coming before Nov. 3.
So far this year, voters registered as Democrats have a narrow edge in absentee and mail-in ballots. But it’s hard to know if that will continue for the next few weeks. And one thing that seems to be a relative constant this year is a lot of the people voting absentee now haven’t done it before.
The issue is a lot of these voters are first-time absentee or by-mail voters, and they are getting hung up on some of the requirements, particularly the witness certification process that’s holding up some of their ballots. This is particularly true among Black voters, who historically are in-person voters.
Is that something that can be corrected?
In North Carolina, if your ballot is deemed deficient, it is not rejected. It can be cured. It’s also important to note that if a voter has a deficient ballot, it does not preclude them from casting a vote in person. The issue right now is we have several lawsuits challenging the process by which to accept absentee and by-mail ballots. In fact, recently, the state Board of Elections announced a new policy directive saying that if your county gets a deficient ballot, set it aside and wait for the courts to tell you what to do. In my mind, that’s a real disservice to voters, because previously they would be able to track their ballot, know if it was deficient, and know what the issue was. Then, typically, a new ballot would be sent to that voter to correct the issue. That’s not happening right now as far as I know. That’s a real concern for a pretty good number of North Carolinians.
One thing that’s interesting about this race between Tillis and Cunningham is that it’s been fairly stable up until this point. Cunningham has been in the lead. Do you want to venture any guesses about what happens next?
I’ve learned too much from 2020 and North Carolina politics to make any predictions this year. If you look at the RealClearPolitics average of this particular race, Cunningham has a 5- or 6-point lead. This is going to be a tight election, as is the presidential race at the top of the ticket. Besides Georgia, North Carolina is pretty much the closest battleground state, more so than Florida at this point.
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