I had to hand it to both candidates: For a couple of guys who have never held elected office, they were remarkably adept at sticking to their campaign messages.
Mark Harris, the Republican nominee for Congress in North Carolina’s 9th District, seemed to approach his October 17 debate with Democrat Dan McCready with the single goal of convincing the audience that a vote for his opponent was a vote, in his words, “to put Nancy Pelosi in charge of the U.S. government.”
Harris invoked the House minority leader at least half a dozen times. I say “at least” because I was having difficulty hearing Harris above the hissing and groaning of the McCready supporters I was sitting among at the McGlohon Theater in uptown Charlotte.
Harris claimed that McCready, a former Marine and solar energy entrepreneur, hadn’t definitively stated whether he’d vote against Pelosi for House speaker or come clean about the hundreds of thousands of dollars he’s received from political action committees linked to Pelosi.
McCready, meanwhile, has consistently avoided taking firm positions on everything from health care and immigration to whether he’d support impeaching President Trump. At times, it’s even hard to pin him down on which party he belongs to. McCready almost never mentions that he’s running as a Democrat. That’s probably a smart move in a district that Trump won by double digits and that hasn’t elected a Democrat since 1962.
But Democrats think this may be the year that changes. Democrats need a net gain of 23 House seats to win control of the House of Representatives, and to do will have to flip several conservative-leaning districts like this one.
McCready’s evasiveness prompted the Charlotte Observer to publish a story asking, “What exactly would voters get in Dan McCready? Don’t ask him.” The Observer endorsed the Democrat anyway in the belief that the district’s conservative profile will ensure that McCready delivers on his promises of bipartisanship.
“I think that Dan either doesn’t know what he fully believes or is trying to shade what he believes from the voters,” Harris told me in an interview at a Charlotte megachurch in late September. “He’s trying to portray [himself] much more as a moderate conservative than the moderate, liberal democrat that he actually is.”
Harris insists that McCready would be “just a pawn” to the Democrats’ progressive leadership and the out-of-district donors who have funded a majority of his campaign.
Harris, a former pastor, ousted incumbent Robert Pittenger in the Republican primary. He questions the science behind man-made climate change and vows to “finish the job” President Trump has started, including by supporting a wall on the southern border. Harris is a fiscal hawk who credits his opposition to the $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill in March for his defeat of Pittenger (who voted for the budget-busting bill).
McCready (whose campaign declined requests for an interview) has repeatedly criticized Harris for wanting to cut entitlements and abolish the Department of Education. At the debate, he mentioned a sermon Harris once delivered questioning whether women should pursue professional careers. Harris, McCready said, “puts his own extreme ideology over everything else.”
Eric Heberlig, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte, notes that McCready’s Marine background could appeal to the military families who reside in Cumberland County close to Fort Bragg, the world’s largest military installation.
North Carolina Democratic political consultant Dan McCorkle said McCready’s biography looks “eerily similar” to that of Conor Lamb, the Pennsylvania Democrat and military veteran who in March won a special election in a Pennsylvania district Trump won by 20 points. “[McCready] has three kids and two dogs. He was an Eagle Scout and deployed to Iraq. And the dude is raising a ton of money,” McCorkle told me.
According to Federal Election Commission reports, McCready outraised Harris $4.3 million to $1.6 million through September 30. That doesn’t include the hundreds of thousands of dollars that have poured in from outside groups, mostly to McCready’s benefit.
President Trump held a rally for Harris in September, and Vice President Pence and his wife, Karen, held separate campaign events for him in October. At press time, Trump was scheduled to hold another rally for Harris, on October 26.
The race has been polling within the margin of error for months and may be decided by how well McCready performs among unaffiliated voters in Fayetteville, Lumberton and other rural, outlying parts of the district. A related question is whether traditionally Democratic voters in those areas return to the Democratic Party after voting for Republicans in 2016.
Harris and McCready have spent much of the campaign arguing that one other’s political tribal loyalty will compel them to support policies too extreme for the district’s voters. But it may be a different sort of tribalism that will ultimately determine the winner.
Both campaigns have targeted the 50,000-member Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina with a steady stream of direct appeals and personal appearances. Though they’ve historically voted for Democrats, the church-going, socially conservative Lumbee have trended Republican in recent elections.
In 2016 they helped Donald Trump become the first Republican to win Robeson County since 1972. They also helped a Republican candidate win the county’s state senate seat for the first time since Reconstruction.
The most important issue for the Lumbee is winning official recognition by the federal government, which would allow hundreds of millions of dollars to flow into the county through subsidized education and health care and a coveted casino license.
Harris and McCready have both vowed to do “everything” in their power to achieve federal recognition. But Harris seems to be more realistic about it, calling federal recognition “maybe…in the realm of possibility.”
Mark Locklear, a Lumbee Tribe member who has supported candidates from both parties, said he knows some Democrats will vote for Harris out of frustration with the party’s leftward drift on cultural issues. “It’s a big issue in my community,” Locklear said of the Democrats’ preoccupation with LGBT rights. “It’s very big.”
But he noted that McCready seems to have had more of a presence in the Lumbee community than Harris. “Showing up is important within the Native American community,” Locklear said.
He showed me two mailers he’d recently received from the McCready campaign. One featured a photo of the candidate speaking with Locklear’s sister-in-law in front of her church. “I’m not hearing Harris’ name as much as I do McCready’s,” Locklear said.
As I was about to file this column, I received a text from Locklear with a photo of McCready that he said was “going viral within my community.”
The photo shows a smiling McCready flanked by former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick and several prominent residents, including Locklear’s stepson, Phillip. The picture was taken at the homecoming football game for the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, a majority-Native American university.
“McCready continues to turn heads within the Native American community,” Locklear wrote.
