The middle-aged couple standing in their front yard putting a fresh coat of paint on their two-story colonial doesn’t seem all that interested in chatting, but the congressman approaches them anyway.
It’s a warm spring Saturday, and I’m tagging along with Robert Pittenger for an afternoon of door-knocking. The three-term congressman is canvassing Republican voters in one of the swankier sections of southeast Charlotte, on the western edge of North Carolina’s 9th District.
Pittenger walks up to the couple and, after some small talk, is asked, “Are you going to sort them out in Washington?” I expect a clichéd response—something like, “That’s why I need your support.” But Pittenger is feeling sanguine. Since his current term began, the Dow Jones average is up 30 percent and North Carolina’s jobless rate is down nearly a point, to 4.5 percent, just above the national rate of 4.1 percent. According to Pittenger’s math, the tax cuts Republicans passed in December will give the average North Carolinian a $2,100 rebate. Bank of America, headquartered a few miles away, celebrated the lowering of the corporate tax rate by issuing $1,000 bonuses to 145,000 of its employees.
So instead of a pat response, Pittenger says, “We already did.” That’s the distilled version of the pitch Pittenger is making to his Republican constituents. He’s arguing that only 15 months into the Trump era, America is well on its way to becoming great again. It’s a straightforward argument to make in a district Donald Trump won by 12 points in 2016 and in a state where, according to a January poll, 87 percent of Republicans view the president favorably.
Pittenger is trying to fend off challenger Mark Harris in the May 8 primary. A conservative Charlotte pastor, Harris came within 134 votes of defeating him in 2016. Pittenger and Harris have spent most of the primary campaign engaged in a tedious argument over exactly when each switched his allegiance from another Republican candidate to Trump during the 2016 primaries.
Regardless of when their loyalty to Trump began, both candidates say he is doing a stellar job as president. “Trump has met and exceeded what my expectations and hopes would have been for his presidency,” Harris told me in an interview at his home in Charlotte.
Pittenger, meanwhile, has been one of Trump’s top congressional advocates and defenders. He has called Trump’s leadership “extraordinary,” defended the president’s use of the term “shithole countries,” and dismissed allegations of collusion between Trump and Russia as tabloid fodder. In a January op-ed, Pittenger compared Trump to Winston Churchill, Ronald Reagan, and “a diamond with many rough edges.” Trump “is the real thing, not a fake cubic zirconia,” Pittenger wrote. His campaign literature touts his “96% record of voting with President Trump!”
Asked whether he is troubled by the controversies surrounding the Trump administration, Pittenger says no. Stormy Daniels, the Russia investigation, the record-setting White House staff turnover—they’re all a distraction, he says. “The bottom line is the economy, regulation, courts—even if you don’t like [Trump] and disagree with him on policy, he’s been good for the country.”
Harris and Pittenger differ most on fiscal policy. Harris is a fiscal hawk who counts Freedom Caucus chairman Mark Meadows among his political heroes. Pittenger has no patience for what he views as the rigidity of the Freedom Caucus. In mid-March, Pittenger voted for the $1.3 billion spending bill, touting its record-setting military spending. Harris, who has never held elective office, opposed the bill, calling it “the polar opposite of good government and conservative values.”
Pittenger’s full embrace of Trump will help him in the rural parts of the 9th District where he performed poorly in the 2016 Republican primary and where Trump remains especially popular. “We have not seen Trump’s support die down at all,” said Phillip Stephens, chairman of the Robeson County Republican party. Trump won Robeson County by 5 points in 2016 after Barack Obama won it by 17 in 2012.
Pittenger finished third in Robeson in 2016 and in six of the other seven counties that make up the district. His sole win came in the densely populated section of Mecklenburg County included in the 9th District. Though he was first elected to the House in 2012, Pittenger struggled in part because court-ordered redistricting in February 2016 gave him just four months to get to know the new district before the primary.
Pittenger has spent the last two years getting better acquainted with his constituents. Last year, facing anger over Obamacare repeal negotiations, many lawmakers avoided town hall meetings with voters. Pittenger held nine of them, calmly facing down hostile crowds even as he defended Trump.
Pittenger has secured hundreds of millions of dollars in relief for parts of the district still recovering from Hurricane Matthew, which caused massive flooding in October 2016. And he lobbied to have language inserted in the 2018 budget that will help businesses in persistently poor areas become eligible for agriculture grants. Lumberton business leader Bo Biggs said the new funds are “crucial” for revitalizing an area “pummeled by the loss of tobacco and textile industries.”
A March poll gave Pittenger a 32-point lead, although Harris can take some comfort in the poll’s small sample size and the 6 in 10 likely primary voters who hadn’t yet formed an opinion of him.
The tougher test for Pittenger may come in the general election, in which he would likely face Democrat Dan McCready, a 34-year-old solar energy financier and former Marine. McCready avoids bashing Trump and downplays his party affiliation—“I am a Marine and an American before I’m a Democrat,” he often says.
With his military background and centrist instincts, McCready reminds some local politicos of Conor Lamb, the Democrat who in March won a special election in a Pennsylvania district Trump won by 20 points. Though untested as a candidate, McCready has been a formidable fundraiser. He outraised Pittenger and Harris combined in 2017, according to FEC reports.
Pittenger’s fate may ultimately hinge on two questions: Can he motivate enough Trump voters to show up to the polls for an election in which the president is not on the ballot? And can he do so without alienating the district’s many unaffiliated voters, whom polling shows have an unfavorable view of the president?
The answers to these questions may provide the best evidence yet of the durability of Trumpism.
