The One That Got Away?

The sitting Democrat, Kay Hagan, holds only a tenuous lead, unlike more secure purple-state incumbent Democrats in Virginia and New Hampshire. Tar Heel State Democrats are cautiously optimistic that she’s winning, but the influx of money—more than $13 million so far from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and Harry Reid’s super-PAC, plus nearly $10 million from her own campaign—betrays a sense of desperation. Despite leading in 13 straight polls, Hagan, 61, hasn’t polled above 50 percent the entire year and has been stuck in the mid-forties for months. There’s a real fear that she’s already maxed out her support.

True, Hagan’s Republican opponent, Thom Tillis, hasn’t pulled ahead, as have fellow GOP challengers in, for instance, Arkansas and Alaska. Tillis, the 54-year-old speaker of the state house of representatives, has been behind in every poll since August, which has Republicans fretting. What looked like a winnable seat in a potential wave year could be slipping away. “It’s probably easier to win Colorado than North Carolina,” says John Hood, president of the conservative John Locke Foundation in Raleigh.

Tying Hagan to Barack Obama ought to be good politics for Tillis. In a recent poll from NBC News and Marist College, Obama’s approval rating in North Carolina is 39 percent. Half of respondents say they have a negative opinion of the president, and 48 percent disapprove of Obamacare. Sixty-seven percent say the country is on the wrong track. Things aren’t much better for Obama in another new poll from USA Today and Suffolk University, showing 53 percent of North Carolina’s likely voters disapprove of the president’s job performance, while 50 percent say Obamacare has been a “generally bad idea.”

But disenchantment with Obama isn’t quite translating into support for Tillis. The Marist poll found Hagan leading Tillis 44 percent to 40 percent, while Suffolk found Hagan ahead 47 percent to 45 percent. (Libertarian candidate Sean Haugh polled 7 percent and 4 percent, respectively, though Democrats and Republicans alike say they expect his share to drop enough to make him a nonfactor.) Suffolk found that Tillis is winning just 78 percent of those who disapprove of Obama. Hagan, on the other hand, wins 91 percent of those who approve of the president.

Rob Christensen, the chief political writer at the Raleigh News & Observer, says the problem with Tillis’s strategy is that Obama has been “thoroughly debated” in North Carolina, particularly since the state was one of the most hotly contested in 2012 (Romney won it by just under 100,000 votes). “The Obama issue has lost a little bit of its air,” says Christensen. So while Tillis has struggled to make the race a referendum on Obama, Hagan and the Democrats have been making it a referendum on Speaker Tillis and the Republican-controlled state legislature. 

“It’s a reversal of the candidates’ positions,” says Hood. “Tillis feels like the incumbent, Hagan is the challenger.”

Democrats have argued that, since the GOP took over the legislature in 2011, Tillis and his colleagues have overreached, cutting important government spending while giving the wealthy tax cuts. In particular, Hagan claims Tillis and the Republicans cut education spending by half a billion dollars. Tillis says that’s false. “Senator Hagan’s talking about a cut in the rate of growth,” he tells me. “We increased education spending by a billion dollars.”

But since Labor Day, the Hagan campaign has flooded North Carolina TV with ads featuring teachers and parents—all women—talking directly to the camera about the “cuts.” The ads reinforced the idea that the Republicans in the legislature were shortchanging schools. In one spot, a young teacher from Cary named Megan says because of budget cuts, her school can’t even afford to buy her a textbook. “When I’m asked who’s responsible for these education cuts, it’s Thom Tillis and his legislature,” she says. 

“She’s trying to use false ads to divert North Carolinians,” Tillis says of Hagan. Consider them diverted. Not long after Hagan’s ad blitz began, Tillis’s poll numbers sank, though they’ve started to recover.

“Tillis is trying to answer something in three months that has been going on for three years,” says Carter Wrenn, longtime political aide to the late Republican senator Jesse Helms. Republicans, Wrenn says, never mounted a defense of their policies while Democratic discontent grew. “The anger factor is working for the Democrats,” says Christensen.

Unless, of course, it doesn’t. Hagan isn’t claiming victory yet, and with good reason. For one thing, she’s still an incumbent Democrat in a bad year for her party. Christensen says there’s not much passion for Hagan among grassroots liberals. The state Democratic party is frequently described as a “mess,” so much so that Hagan and Democrats in Washington are funneling their resources and efforts through the Wake County (Raleigh) party committee. To win, Hagan will need 20 percent of those who cast votes to be African-American, but as one Democratic consultant says, “I don’t see it.” Even history is against Hagan. North Carolina hasn’t reelected a Democratic senator since Sam Ervin in 1968. 

And then there are the events of the past year—from the disastrous Obamacare rollout to the rising threat of Islamic terrorism in the Middle East—that mean the debate over Obama hasn’t quite ended in North Carolina. Tillis regularly deploys the statistic that Hagan votes with Obama 96 percent of the time and cast the “deciding vote” on Obamacare. He points to Obama policies like sequestration (which hurts North Carolina’s large military population) and immigration reform (Tillis opposes the Gang of Eight bill supported by the White House) and argues Hagan has shown no independence on those issues. 

In the final weeks, Tillis sees national security as a way to reach undecideds. His campaign’s latest ads target Obama’s “jayvee” comments about the Islamic State terrorist group, linking them to the fact that Hagan has missed half of all Armed Services Committee hearings this year. One of the hearings Hagan skipped in February discussed the “growing threat” of ISIS. Hagan admitted last week that she attended a fundraiser the same day.

“While ISIS grew, Obama did nothing,” says one ad’s voiceover. “Senator Hagan did cocktails.”

Will the shadow of Obama’s failures be enough to put Tillis over the top? Or have Hagan and the Democrats successfully changed the subject to Tillis’s Republican overreach? The ambiguity of the race played out in an exchange during the October 7 debate. Tillis pressed Hagan to prove her independence from the president. “Which of the policies, out of the 96 percent that you supported, do you regret?” Tillis asked. 

“You know, Speaker Tillis,” Hagan shot back, “your idea of effectiveness is hurting the people of North Carolina every day.” 

Michael Warren is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard.