DURHAM, N.C. — If Thom Tillis hoped his second debate with Sen. Kay Hagan would provide an opportunity to zoom out from fraught local topics like education policy to national issues, he did not get his wish.
Democrats see a path to re-election for Hagan, one of the most vulnerable incumbents in this midterm election cycle, by maintaining focus on the unpopular state legislature of which Tillis is House speaker.
Tillis, meanwhile, has sought to tie Hagan to an unpopular Congress and President Obama, whose approval ratings are at record lows for his presidency.
On Tuesday, Hagan was the more successful of the two, armed with a more multidimensional argument.
“He’s sending our teachers to Texas, our filmmakers to Georgia, and our medical dollars to 28 other states,” Hagan said of Tillis.
“Speaker Tillis wants to make this race about the president,” she added at another juncture. “This race is about who will best represent North Carolina in the U.S. Senate”
Hagan was confident and in control for the hour-long discussion moderated by George Stephanopoulos of ABC, exhibiting a confident nonchalance and often taking the reins of moderating herself.
When Stephanopoulos asked Tillis on what issues he would break with Republican leaders, Tillis twice dodged the question.
“You going to ask him your question again?” Hagan responded.
“It’s against the rules,” Stephanopoulos laughed. “You can.”
As she has during the campaign, Hagan focused her most violent firepower on education policy, saying Tillis “gutted our education system” by pushing for a state budget that she said did not sufficiently increase salaries for teachers.
Tillis’s campaign and third-party allies have put significant money behind ads to push back against against this line of attack by Hagan and Democrats, but the battle has largely been fought on Democrats’ turf.
“It’s not a winning issue” for Tillis, explained one Republican strategist with ties to North Carolina.
But it’s not yet obvious what is the winning issue, or winning issues, for Tillis, and the debate Tuesday did not offer much clarity.
Many people expected that the Affordable Care Act might have been that issue this year. But there is some concern among Republicans that health care messaging has reached saturation among North Carolina voters, and that worries about the federal law have subsided as it has gone into effect.
On Tuesday, Hagan turned the issue on Tillis when she attacked him for his role in the state rejecting Medicaid expansion.
“We understood that was bait coming to advance a failed policy,” Tillis responded.
In a bid to light a new spark among voters, Tillis’s campaign has recently honed in on national security issues, especially the spread of ISIS in Iraq and Syria, and accused Hagan of not doing enough to urge action by the president.
“They’re coming up with a strategy to solve a problem they largely created,” Tillis said during the debate Tuesday of Obama and Hagan, calling it a “strategy of peace through weakness.”
On Tuesday, Tillis continued to hammer Hagan on her absences during some Senate committee hearings on ISIS and Ebola. After the debate, Hagan confirmed to reporters that she was absent in one case for a political fundraiser.
At the core of Tillis’s argument has been the charge that Hagan has been “ineffective” during her first term and has supported Obama during a period when he has been unpopular nationwide and in North Carolina.
“A vote for Sen. Hagan is a vote for president Obama’s failed policies,” Tillis said.
At every possible juncture during the debate, Tillis reminded the audience that Hagan “voted with the president 96 percent of the time.”
Tillis will have his work cut out for him to make that case to voters by Election Day: He has trailed Hagan in recent public polling by margins of roughly four points.
