National security appears to be here to stay as a driving issue in the North Carolina Senate race.
Following a few days of revelations about Sen. Kay Hagan’s absence from a classified hearing to attend a political fundraiser, her Republican opponent Thom Tillis firmly latched on to the issue during a debate Thursday.
“The highest priority has to be, when you have the threat of ISIS, you show up for work,” Tillis said. “When I go to Washington, there are certain meetings I won’t miss.”
His renewed focus on the story indicates that Tillis is honing in on national security as a defining issue in the final weeks before Election Day.
The question of whether Hagan had missed a hearing to attend a political fundraiser for her re-election campaign popped up Tuesday after another debate.
“There was one,” Hagan responded.
“It was scheduled early in the day, and then that hearing had to be postponed later that day,” she elaborated. “So yes, I did miss that one.”
It wasn’t just any Armed Services hearing, but a classified one — generally regarded as more important than public hearings, although a senator can request a private classified briefing if he is not able to attend. Hagan and her campaign have not said whether she requested to be briefed later.
In the debate Thursday, Hagan insisted in response to Tillis that she is “well-briefed on all of these issues.”
“Speaker Tillis is spineless in this area,” she said, pointing to his failure to propose an alternative approach to confronting the Islamic State.
“Spineless?” Tillis said, pivoting back to Hagan’s attendance. “Let’s talk about shameless.”
The focus by Tillis and his campaign on Hagan’s attendance record is reflective of a larger strategy to undermine her on issues of national security, including the U.S. response to the Islamic State and the Ebola pandemic.
Hagan, meanwhile, has attempted to keep the focus on Tillis’ record as speaker of the state House, and in particular on a budget for education he supported, which critics say did not appropriate sufficient pay for public schoolteachers.
The televised debate Thursday, held in Wilmington, N.C., was the third between Hagan and Tillis, and the first to include Libertarian Sean Haugh, with whom Tillis explicitly agreed on many points.
