Tillis should be glad it's not 1978

Published June 1, 2014

by Jerry Shinn, former Editorial writer, published in Charlotte Observer, May 31, 2014.

There were several similarities and one crucial difference between the recent N.C. Republican U.S. Senate primary and a Democratic primary for the same office 36 years earlier. The difference shaped a quarter century of the state’s political history.

Both primaries were for the nomination to challenge a first-term incumbent senator. Both featured a large field of candidates that included one who was widely regarded as the favorite. In each primary, the favorite ran far ahead of the pack.

There the similarities ended.

On May 6, N.C. House Speaker Thom Tillis finished first in a field of eight Republican candidates with almost 46 percent of the votes cast, enough to win the nomination to run against Democratic incumbent Kay Hagan in the November election.

In the 1978 Democratic primary, Charlotte banker Luther H. Hodges Jr., the favorite among eight candidates, led the field with more than 40 percent of the votes. At the time, however, if a front-runner had less than 50 percent, the candidate who finished second could call for a runoff. In second place that spring was state Insurance Commissioner John Ingram.

Many people thought a second primary would be a waste of time and money. Ingram had only 27 percent of the total in the first primary, trailing Hodges by more than 100,000 votes. Most people assumed that if Ingram did demand a runoff, Hodges would win handily.

Ingram’s decision to ask for a runoff was widely viewed as another example of his quixotic behavior. As insurance commissioner, he had a reputation for being erratic and irrational, more about posturing and slogans than substance and results.

Hodges’ resume and rather formal campaigning style may have made him an easy target for Ingram’s free-swinging populist rhetoric against big banks and big business. But Hodges had an impeccable political pedigree and an untarnished reputation.

His father, after a very successful business career, had served as lieutenant governor and governor in the 1950s and as secretary of commerce in the administration of President John F. Kennedy.

By the early 1970s, Luther Hodges Jr. was one of the bright and ambitious young bankers putting North Carolina National Bank on a trajectory to become, by the end of the century, one of the two or three largest banks in the nation. He said his father once told him he should achieve business success and then devote himself to public service. In 1978, at age 41, he was chairman of the board of his bank, and he decided to follow that advice.

In the second primary, held the Tuesday after Memorial Day, 30 percent fewer voters came to the polls than in the first. Most of those who stayed home – or on vacation – apparently were Hodges supporters who assumed their candidate would win easily.

In a shocking upset, Ingram won the runoff and the nomination. The outcome demonstrated how the 50 percent requirement could deny victory to a candidate who was the clear choice of most of his party’s voters. If totals from both the first and second primaries were combined, Hodges would still have won by a large margin.

I believed then, and still do, that if Hodges had won the nomination, he would have defeated Jesse Helms and taken a seat in the U.S. Senate and would have served with distinction as a moderately conservative Southern Democrat.

Tillis faced lower bar

Helms, completing his first term, did not enjoy the kind of institutional status he later achieved.

Hodges would have competed successfully with Helms for traditional Republican votes and would have run strong among Democrats. In contrast, business-oriented voters of both parties and the moderate conservatives who were the heart of the state’s Democratic Party were not comfortable with John Ingram.

Helms easily defeated Ingram and went on to serve four more terms before retiring in 2001. He died in 2008.

Hodges served in the administration of President Jimmy Carter and then returned to banking in Washington, D.C. Today he is a registered Republican, retired and living in North Carolina.

As more African-Americans ran for political office in North Carolina, their advocates complained that the 50 percent requirement in primaries was an obstacle, perhaps deliberately, to their success. In 1989 the General Assembly changed the law and voted to allow a primary candidate with 40-plus percent of the votes to claim his party’s nomination without a runoff.

Thus Thom Tillis is the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate. That’s probably as it should be. But he was the choice of only 46 percent of Republican voters. Who knows what might happen if he had to survive a second primary?

Jerry Shinn is a former Observer editorial page editor and associate editor.

http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2014/05/31/4943322/rep-tillis-glad-its-not-1978.html#.U4sY9sZ4Ids