GOP Sen. Thom Tillis would have lost his 2020 reelection bid in North Carolina if it weren’t for revelations of an extramarital affair by his highly touted Democratic opponent, the senator’s pollster said.
Cal Cunningham, a former state senator and Army veteran, led Tillis for much of the race. Senate Democrats considered North Carolina key to their efforts in winning back the Senate majority the party lost in 2014. Combined with high hopes about Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden flipping North Carolina from President Donald Trump, the Senate contest until early October was a marquee race for Cunningham and Tillis, a former state House speaker who, in 2014, beat a sitting Democratic senator.
About a month before Election Day, Cunningham, responding to news reports, acknowledged that he sent sexually suggestive texts to a woman who was not his wife. That led to more stories about additional texts that revealed the couple had an intimate encounter as recently as that July, in the midst of Cunningham’s hard-fought Senate campaign.
In the campaign’s final weeks, Cunningham went into virtual hiding, sticking to tightly controlled virtual calls with supporters and unannounced appearances where it would be more difficult for reporters to pepper him with questions.
“Lots of politicians have had affairs,” said Glen Bolger, a top Republican pollster, who advised the Tillis campaign. But two things particularly worked against Cunningham, Bolger said in an interview on Pro Politics with Zac McCrary.
“One is, it connected him to John Edwards — young, smart, lawyer, handsome. Not the family man you think he is,” said Bolger, a partner and co-founder of Public Opinion Strategies. “And then secondly, his whole story, essentially, was a lie.”
Asked by the podcast host if Tillis likely would have lost if Cunningham’s affair hadn’t been exposed, Bolger said, “Oh, I think so. I’m not taking anything away from Sen. Tillis or the campaign we run,” Bolger told McCrary, a Democratic pollster and partner at ALG Research.
But the Tillis campaign focused on the affair based on data in polling cross-tabs, raw numbers pollsters use to detect trends and from which to build out campaign strategies. The issue had resonance, polling showed.
“Even though we hadn’t take the lead, we cut into it. And what we found very clear evidence of was that the more people knew about it, the more likely they were to turn against Cunningham.”
That ended making the difference in the win by Tillis over Cunningham, 48.7% to 46.9%.
“I do believe if that hadn’t happened, Cunningham would have won,” Bolger said.
For Democrats, the lost opportunity of the North Carolina Senate race has resonance today. Democrats did go on to win a Senate majority by the narrowest possible margin. A pair of wins in Georgia Senate runoffs on Jan. 6 left the Senate divided 50-50, with Vice President Kamala Harris on standby to break ties in Democrats’ favor.
But a win in North Carolina would have provided more breathing room for the Democratic Senate majority, the ability to pass legislation of which rests daily with the whims of West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, representing a state that gave Trump his second strongest win in 2020, or, really, any other Democratic senator who threatens to oppose a Democratic priority bill, effectively making each member a kingmaker or spoiler if they choose to defy party leadership.
