Spanning Burr's political world
Published March 27, 2014
by Erik Spanberg, Charlotte Business Journal, March 26, 2014.
Expect a runoff this summer to decide which Republican candidate goes on to face incumbent U.S. Sen. Kay Hagan (D-N.C.). And expect that candidate to be Mecklenburg Republican Thom Tillis, the current state House speaker.
So says the senior senator from North Carolina, Richard Burr, who is also a Republican.
Hagan ranks among the most vulnerable senators seeking re-election in 2014. National pundits watching the race put North Carolina’s junior senator in a group of Democrats facing tough campaigns, including Mary Landrieu of Louisiana andMark Pryor of Arkansas.
During an interview in Charlotte, Burr told me Tillis has the best chance to win the 40 percent of the vote needed to avoid a runoff. But, he said, the GOP’s eight-person race makes that a tall order. None of the other candidates is capable of capturing 40 percent, the senator said.
The primary is May 6. If a runoff is required, it will be July 15. Davidson College hosts a debate among the Republican candidates on April 22.
“Thom has the ability to drive his turnout,” Burr told me. “But so does Mark (Harris) and Greg (Brannon). I look at this as a three-person race. I don’t see it as an eight-person race. I’m not sure that there’s any candidate that pulls (votes) away from Thom (because of similar philosophies).”
A poll released last week by Raleigh TV station WRAL found Tillis leading the Republican candidates, with 28 percent of the 2,100 people surveyed backing him. Brannon, an ob-gyn in Cary, finished second with 15 percent, followed by Heather Grant, a nurse practitioner from Wilkes County, at 11 percent.
Political action committees keep pouring money into the Hagan race. Americans for Prosperity, the conservative group backed by the Koch brothers, spent $5.5 million on anti-Hagan ads during the past few months, compared with $1.8 million by the Senate Majority PAC on behalf of Hagan, according to Kantar Media Intelligence/CMAG.
Hagan has distanced herself from President Barack Obama, skipping the president’s appearance in Raleigh in January, but she remains supportive of the federal health-care law.
“This was everything about the Affordable Care Act and the embrace and the effect it’s had on North Carolina — 473,000 people got their cancellation notice,” Burr said. “That right there is probably twice what you need to tip an election. So that’s a very targeted group, and it’s a group that’s easy to identify.”
Burr also discussed why he believes Medicaid expansion for 500,000 low-income and uninsured individuals in North Carolina would have created more problems than it solved. Republican Gov. Pat McCrory, with support from his GOP majorities in the state House and Senate, rejected the federal government’s expanded Medicaid coverage.
McCrory and other Republicans have said the 100 percent federal coverage of a Medicaid expansion for the first three years is not worth accepting because, in subsequent years, as much as 10 percent of the cost reverts to the states.
Hagan, elected in 2008 as Obama became the first Democratic presidential nominee to win North Carolina since 1976, faces a tough campaign no matter who she faces. An Elon University poll this month found Hagan with her highest disapproval rating — 49 percent — in the past year.
Other polls, including the left-leaning Public Policy Polling, point toward a close general election between Hagan and her challenger. Tillis, hurt by rivals’ criticism of his severance payments to staffers caught in sexual relationships with lobbyists and recent remarks against raising the minimum wage, lost some support of late, the polling firm found.
American Insights, a right-leaning firm, gives Hagan a slight advantage in the race. Second-term presidents almost invariably cost their party members in Senate and House races. Obama and the health-care law continue to suffer approval ratings well below 50 percent.
More surprise maneuvers by Vladimir Putin aside, Burr doubts international policy will play much of a role in the midterms.
“A lot of that depends on how Russia plays out— I never believed that Syria by itself was enough of a connection that the American people saw to be voting because of it. But Russia’s something that there’s a history on, and annexing a country is something that probably plays to Republican strength in the election. Not necessarily on performance of the administration with the issue, but it’s the over-65 population that readily remembers World War II. And there are so many similarities with aggression that will resonate with them.”
One might quibble that FDR, very much a Democrat, was president through most of World War II, or that Russia was an ally in that same war, but never mind.
No argument here on Burr’s belief that, when it comes to Hagan and the rest of the candidates this year, start with health care and the botched rollout last fall and go from there.
“It’s either because they like the Affordable Care Act or because they don’t. And when you look at intensity, it’s the don’t side that seems to have the intensity in this election cycle. Typically, people that receive something for a nominal or no fee aren’t too motivated to go out and spend two hours going to the polls.”
Asked about Burr’s statement about federal health-care recipients being less-motivated to vote, Chris Fitzsimon of the left-leaning N.C. Policy Watch told me, “That’s offensive, and it reminds me of the 47 percent comment by Mitt Romney. I was hoping Senator Burr would be above that kind of politics.”
Last year, as McCrory and his Republican allies in the state legislature carried out an ambitious agenda that included reduced unemployment benefits, voter ID and lower taxes in the corporate sector and for the wealthy, thousands of teachers, students, pastors and other critics started a series of protest marches at the state Capitol known as Moral Mondays. After the General Assembly session ended last summer, the protests migrated to other parts of the state, including Charlotte.
Hagan’s campaign would face a better-funded and better-known candidate in Tillis, but the House speaker also provides an obvious counterpunch to the critiques of Hagan and other Democrats who supported the president on health care.
“If it’s Tillis, it’s ready-made,” Catawba College political science professor Michael Bitzertold me Tuesday. His point: As House speaker, Tillis would run on the record of the legislature and, in the minds of Democrats, the demise of progressivism — a lament voiced by the left-leaning voices of The New York Times and MSNBC, among others.
Tillis could find himself tied to the Duke Energy coal-ash spill, too. A federal investigation started this month, exploring, among other aspects, whether state regulators were too lax in their oversight of the Charlotte-based utility.
As a close ally of the governor, Tillis likely faces campaign ads highlighting reduced budgets for the state environmental department and persistent calls for less-burdensome regulation as part of a mandate to be more customer-friendly to the corporations of North Carolina.
Beyond the Hagan race, U.S. House districts have been so gerrymandered that, in Burr’s opinion, just 28 of the 435 seats are competitive. Both parties express disdain for the so-called safe districts dominating politics.
Until, that is, they are in positions of power, typically at the state level, to engineer favorable districts to their advantage. Republicans took control of North Carolina in 2010, just in time to redraw the maps and regain the majority (9-4) in 2012. Until then, Democrats held a 7-6 majority in the N.C. congressional delegation.
Burr intends to run in 2016 for a third term, but he may not be in the Senate beyond that.
“At the end of this, I will have had 22 years in Washington. At some point, I think people would look at me and say, ‘It’s time to give somebody else a shot.’ ”
As for the other race in two years — who replaces Obama in the White House — Burr said “what’s yet to be discovered on Benghazi” is part of the political baggage that could quash the potential candidacy of former Secretary of State and ex-First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton.
He declined to name a Republican favorite to become the nominee in 2016. And what about a surprise bid by Democrat Joe Biden?
“I could be hopeful and wishful,” Burr said of Biden. “Everybody’s got an Uncle Joe, and I love him to death. But if you just take his comments in Poland(last) week, when he said, ‘When I was chairman of the committee, I fought for Poland’s inclusion into NATO’ ... I think it’s those kinds of things that really do destroy campaigns before they get started.”
