Durham, N.C.
“All these people are saying I’m costing Kay Hagan or Thom Tillis the election,” Sean Haugh told me as he sipped a glass of Duck-Rabbit beer on Tuesday night. “It’s like it’s somehow my fault that they’re terrible candidates.”
Haugh (pronounced “haw”), the Libertarian candidate in North Carolina’s Senate race, has drawn an increasing amount of attention this summer and fall as the quirky pizza deliveryman and craft beer aficionado who could potentially determine control of the U.S. Senate. Since the end of September, Democratic senator Kay Hagan’s lead over Republican Thom Tillis has dwindled in the RealClearPolitics polling average from nearly 5 points to just 1 point. That slim margin makes it ever more plausible that Haugh, who’s now garnering 5 percent in the RCP polling average, could play a decisive role in the North Carolina Senate race, and hence control of the Senate.
Will Haugh’s support fade away and give Tillis the edge on Election Day? Or will he scoop up enough of the remaining undecided voters to seal Hagan’s victory? At this point, it’s anyone’s guess, but on the ground in North Carolina there’s no sign of a surge in support for Haugh.
“This is great,” said one of the Durham County Libertarians when a waitress had to move their regular meeting at a local bar to a back room in order to accommodate a larger-than-usual crowd on Tuesday night. “There are so many people here.” By my count, 13 people were gathered. That included Haugh, his campaign manager, two members of the foreign press (one from Austria and one from Poland), and me. A more heavily-publicized event the night before didn’t do much better: Haugh told me “24 or 25” people ponied up $30 each to spend the evening drinking beer and talking politics with him.
But judging Haugh’s support based on turnout at public events might misunderstand and underestimate the Sean Haugh phenomenon. Haugh has become well known for his virtual campaign, which consists of a series of YouTube videos in which he drinks craft beer and discusses libertarian politics. The typical video gets just 1,000 to 2,000 views, but the shtick has helped him get a lot more attention in the mainstream media, including a profile in the Washington Post and appearances on national cable news networks.
Media attention probably doesn’t explain the Libertarian’s above-average support in the polls either: Haugh was getting 10 percent to 11 percent in the polls before the media began paying attention to him and only a few hundred people had seen his videos. What really seems to be driving support for Haugh is disapproval of national Democrats, like Kay Hagan and Barack Obama, as well as the GOP-controlled North Carolina legislature, where Thom Tillis is the speaker of the House of Representatives.
A recent NBC News/Marist poll showed that voters overwhelmingly disapprove of President Obama’s job performance (40 percent approve and 55 percent disapprove), and only 41 percent have a favorable impression of Kay Hagan. But just 40 percent have a favorable impression of Tillis. So the race is deadlocked. According to Marist, Tillis and Hagan were tied at 43 percent, with Haugh taking 7 percent, and 6 percent of voters undecided. Earlier this month, the American Future Fund released a TV ad designed to push some Hagan supporters or Hagan-leaning undecided voters tried into the Haugh camp. In the cheesy spot, milennials awkwardly chant “Get Haugh, get high!” and “More weed, less war: Vote Sean Haugh!”
“It’s kind of absurd,” Haugh said of the ad on Tuesday night. “It’s like they took me and put me into Google Translate and translated me into another language and then back to English. So it’s kind of off-key, but I keep coming back to the fact that they are accurately representing my message and giving people all kinds of positive reasons to vote for me and to vote Libertarian.”
But the real problem with the ad for Republicans is that the “more weed, less war” message is just as likely to move a typical Rand Paul Republican over to Haugh as it is to move a Hagan supporter to Haugh. If Republicans wanted to push Haugh supporters over to Tillis, they might be better off focusing on the issues where Haugh is to the left of Rand and Ron Paul.
Haugh says his top priority is to “stop all war.” He opposes bombing ISIS and even says Ron Paul made a “huge mistake” by voting to authorize war against al Qaeda and the Taliban after 9/11.
On fiscal policy, Haugh says that we need to stop spending money we don’t have and theoretically wants to transition out of entitlement programs in the distant future. But he supports Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion and is critical of education “cuts” carried out by the North Carolina legislature.
“The teachers didn’t get a raise for five years,” Haugh said. “I don’t think this is something that either side can be proud of. I think Hagan is vulnerable because when she was serving in the general assembly, in order to balance the budget she cut a lot of areas of education.”
Asked if he thought it was a mistake to reject additional federal funding to expand Medicaid under Obamacare, Haugh replied, “I do.”
“The rejection of the Medicaid expansion dollars—which on the surface you could kind of make a libertarian case for—but the end users have suffered. It’s ended up in closing the rural hospitals,” Haugh said. “They made a political issue out of it and forgot about who they served. Republicans are happy to throw grandma out into the street.”
Although Ron and Rand Paul are pro-life, Haugh believes it should be legal for any reason at any point in pregnancy until birth.
“No,” Haugh replied when asked if he supports any limits on abortion. “No, I really don’t. There’s very little that happens in terms of late-term abortions. That’s really something that government needs to stay out of entirely.” As he told MSNBC’s Chris Matthews earlier this year, his position is exactly the same as Kay Hagan’s. Haugh, who supports the legalization of all drugs, said he would have stayed in the race even if Greg Brannon, the libertarian who challenged Tillis in the GOP primary, had won the nomination because of Brannon’s social conservatism.
Asked to name his favorite Supreme Court justice, Haugh replied, “I like Ruth Bader Ginsburg just because I like her personally. She’s sort of reached that old curmudgeonly age where she doesn’t give a damn what you think about her or anything else.”
“I don’t really have a strong view on who I prefer ideologically. Although I do kind of admire Justice Kennedy for being the swing voter,” he added. Haugh also expressed admiration for senators Angus King of Maine and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, two “independent” senators who caucus with Democrats.
It’s not clear just how many of Haugh’s supporters could be pried away from him if they knew just how far left he leaned. According to the Marist poll, about one-third of Haugh’s supporters identify as conservative, while two-thirds say they are moderate or liberal. Some are backing for Haugh for ideological reasons, but others are simply rejecting Hagan, Tillis, and politics as usual. While Democrats and Republicans are spending a whopping $103 million on the race, Haugh is spending less than $10,000 on his campaign.
According to Haugh, the political advertising has become simply unbearable. Haugh doesn’t own a TV, “which is awesome,” he said, but the radio ads are just as bad. “You want to lose my vote? Advertise on my sports talk radio station.”
Haugh doesn’t like to take himself too seriously, but if there’s one thing he’s serious about—besides his sports talk radio—it’s his beer. After Haugh ordered his beverage on Tuesday night, he bit into a lemon wedge, which prompted me to ask if that’s how one is supposed to drink Duck-Rabbit beer. “I just use this as a breath freshener. I do not fruit my beer,” Haugh replied, almost offended. “I had Chinese food earlier, and sometimes after I have Chinese food, I get Chinese food breath.”
Haugh nursed the same glass of beer the entire night as he conversed with his fellow libertarians and reporters. When I offered to buy him another one or a pizza, he declined.
“I take my ethical standards a bit higher than what’s required,” he replied. “Nobody can buy me anything.” Say what you will about Sean Haugh’s politics, but you can’t say he’s in it for the money, or even the beer.
