Erica D. Smith and J. Calvin Cunningham III, North Carolina Democratic contenders for the 2020 U.S. Senate nomination to unseat Republican Thom Tillis
North Carolina’s junior Republican senator, Thom Tillis (“a man with the backbone of a squid and a zealous supporter of President Definitely No Quid Pro Quo”), has the dubious honor of entering his re-election campaign with the Senate’s lowest approval rating, according to Morning Consult: 33% approval versus 38% disapproval, crowning him national Democrats’ single best opportunity to flip a Senate seat in 2020. So naturally the Democratic primary to choose his likely successor is shaping up to be an intense battle of national interest.
Among the five state Democrats wrestling for the honor, only two have a real shot at the title: three-term State Senator Erica D. Smith, and corporate attorney J. Calvin Cunningham III (who goes by ‘Cal’ when he’s politicking rather than lawyering).
Smith (age 50) grew up picking cucumbers on her family’s small farm in Northampton County, NC, working her way into the state’s prestigious public School of Science and Mathematics, and earned an engineering degree from one of the nation’s largest and most respected HBCUs, plus a divinity degree from yet another (she is an ordained clergywoman in her local Missionary Baptist church). Following a first career in defense engineering at Boeing in Seattle, she returned to the Tar Heel State to take a $50,000 pay cut, becoming a high school science and math teacher in the state’s underserved ‘black belt.’ Moved by then State Senator Thom Tillis’s devastating cuts to public education, Smith ran for and won a seat on the county school board, followed by three terms in the State Senate, where she has championed public education, rural economic development, gun control, economic justice (submitting bills to raise the minimum wage to $15, ban the box, end wage theft, and more), LGBTQ rights, and women’s rights (authoring bills to ratify the ERA and assure unfettered reproductive healthcare for incarcerated women).
Cunningham (age 46) was “born in a trailer” according to his campaign bio, and graduated from the elite private Forsyth Country Day School. He attended Vanderbilt and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was a member of two secret societies, earned a masters degree from the London School of Economics and a law degree from the University of North Carolina. After very brief stints with two private law firms, in 2000 he was elected North Carolina’s youngest state senator, serving a single two-year term before declining to run for re-election. In 2002 he was commissioned into the Army Reserve Judge Advocate General Corps, served briefly at Fort Bragg as a Special Asst. US Attorney, and was mobilized in 2007 with the XVIII Airborne to serve as a military attorney in Iraq (where he earned a Bronze Star for “innovative prosecution”), and later in Afghanistan. Today he is vice president and general counsel at WasteZero Inc., a manufacturer and vendor of specialty plastic trash bags.
What’s past is prologue: cunningham’s failed 2010 us senate bid
To understand the intense controversy behind this year’s Smith/Cunningham matchup, we must first look back at Cunningham’s failed 2010 U.S. Senate bid for Republican Richard Burr’s seat.
After Cunningham rejected a run for Burr’s seat, widely respected Secretary of State Elaine Marshall (the first woman ever to win statewide office in NC) threw her hat in the ring. Concerned that Marshall’s relatively mild progressive views could lose her, and thus the party, the election, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (chaired by Chuck Schumer) aggressively recruited the telegenic and politically ambiguous Cunningham to run against her, promising him lavish funding and support. Cunningham accepted the offer, which promised to make him the first senator to have served in the Iraq theatre. News of his decision leaked while Marshall was attending the funeral of her dead husband.
Completely cut off from deep-pocketed Democratic donors by the DSCC’s open opposition, Marshall ran a woefully under-funded but nevertheless scrappy and well-organized primary campaign, beating the largely unknown Cunningham by 9 points. But in falling just short of a 40% share of the vote, she left the door open for Cunningham to demand a runoff election.
And that he did, despite widespread Democratic pleas for him to gracefully bow out. The state’s progressive INDY Week newspaper observed that “Cunningham would've been better advised to accept the voters' decision and not call for a runoff, allowing Marshall to get started on what will now be for either candidate an uphill challenge to Burr.” Instead, Cunningham’s decision left Marshall (who won the runoff by a decisive 20 point margin) with less than $200,000 at the bottom of her war chest, versus incumbent Richard Burr’s $5 million bankroll.
Whether petulantly or pragmatically, the DSCC refused to come to its own nominee’s aid in the general. Marshall lost to Burr in November by 12 points.
Look out kid, It's somethin' you did. God knows when But you're doin’ it again
Fast-forward to 2019, when proudly progressive and colorful Erica Smith announced her Senate bid against Thom Tillis. Again alarmed, the DSCC (once again under the thumb of Schumer) began beating the bushes for a telegenic and compliant opponent. Schumer advised prospects that he was looking for a candidate who would forego campaigning in favor of sitting in “a windowless basement,” dialing for dollars while DSCC and friends did the campaign’s heavy lifting by blanketing the airwaves with attack ads against Tillis. Schumer was seeking the most flavorless and colorless candidate he could find — a simple syrup for his signature campaign cocktail.
Working his way down his list of the state’s Democratic notables, Schumer re-visited Cal Cunningham, who had already declared his candidacy for North Carolina’s largely ceremonial lieutenant-governorship. Apparently an eager Cal convinced Schumer that he was tanned, rested, ready and — most of all — obedient, and the rest is history. While his senate campaign website now trumpets “I’m not taking a penny from corporate PACs!” he is guzzling six- or seven-figure sums from Schumer’s senate colleagues’ leadership PACs (corporate donations once removed) and raking in endorsements from progressive organizations which have quietly let it be known they aren’t willing to defy Schumer’s wishes on this one.
Once again Cunningham, heavily armed with privilege, faces yet another scrappy progressive female opponent cut off by the DSCC from major donors and endorsers alike. And, predictably, we already see him playing it safe from that comfortable perch, as in a recent TV interview where he refused to give a direct answer to the thrice-repeated question of whether Trump should be impeached, offering instead six variations on the obviously well-rehearsed phrase, “deeply troubling.” It was a response reminiscent of his 2010 triangulations, which moved INDY Week to endorse Elaine Marshall, observing “Cunningham, by contrast, often sounds a little too rehearsed, a little too calculating or hesitant.”
In contrast, Erica Smith addressed a cheering crowd in Raleigh, NC to demand Trump’s impeachment in no uncertain terms.
They got the guns but...we got the numbers
So how does Erica Smith win, with Cunningham and Schumer cutting off her campaign’s oxygen supply just as they did to Elaine Marshall in 2010? One answer would be: go ask Elaine Marshall that. After all, she spanked Cunningham in 2010 — twice — with heart, discipline, and more than merely photogenic voter appeal. But however it’s done, Erica Smith seems to be doing it so far this year. She’s beating everyone, Democrat or Republican, in every poll of this race:
- Emerson: 46% to 39% versus Tillis (this poll was taken before Cunningham entered the race)
- Meredith: 34% to 33% versus Tillis (Tillis beats Cunningham by an equally slim hair in this same poll)
- Fox News: 18% to 13% versus Cunningham
If she can accomplish this on half-rations, just imagine what she could do with the likes of J. Calvin Cunningham III’s bloated Chuck Bucks.
how not to work across the aisle: cunningham’s 2012 ‘751 south’ Deal
Should Cunningham win the nomination, he’d best be prepared with some handy responses to the Russian bots that will undoubtedly use his involvement in an eight year-old scandal to attempt to sour progressives on him in November.
2011’s 751 South Project was a real estate mogul’s proposal to develop 167 acres just outside the Durham NC city limits with thousands of offices, shops, townhomes and single-family houses a short distance from the region’s drinking water source, chronically runoff-imperiled Lake Jordan. It faced stiff opposition from liberal Durhamites concerned about “runoff , impervious surfaces, environmental, sprawl, congestion, and population-density issues. Foes were especially incensed that a Super PAC, the Durham Partnership for Progress, was established [by the project’s developers] to back county commission candidates who were favorable to the development.”
In what was thought at the time to be a death-blow to the project, in 2012 the Durham City Council denied the developers a connection to the city’s overworked water and sewer systems.
But as if out of nowhere, an amendment was hastily tacked onto an otherwise unrelated bill in the state’s General Assembly, forcing Durham against its will to provide sewer and water hookups to the out-of-town development. Republican State Rep. Tim Moore later admitted that he added the amendment as a favor to the developers’ attorney (and Moore’s old college pal), J. Calvin Cunningham III, who had also represented the developers in a 2011 lawsuit. The Intercept reports that Cunningham received hefty payments from the developers from 2012 to 2014 and from 2016 to 2018 (shortly before he declared his candidacy). Records indicate that the developers’ controversial influence-buying PAC received mail and compliance services at the address of Cunningham’s chief political consultant during his unsuccessful 2010 bid for the U.S. Senate.
While no accusations of wrongdoing have been leveled against Cunningham, his highly ethically challenged behind-the-scenes involvement in the notorious 751 South affair calls into question the sincerity of his current campaign promise “to do more to protect North Carolina’s environment and natural resources.” Though, to be fair, he could hardly do less.
Cunningham should also be prepared to find a way to live down his past own-goals, suffered in the less fraught world of 2010, that would today powerfully anger many progressives.
Take, for example, his televised 2010 admission that he worked with ICE to detain or deport undocumented immigrants:
“When I was at Fort Bragg in 2005 as a federal prosecutor, every day people would show up at the gates with false identification. They were looking for work. They also weren’t here legally. We had a very hard time getting Immigration and Customs Enforcement involved, had a very hard time sewing together a proper law enforcement response.”
Or his false assertion in that same televised debate that:
“Taxpayers right now are paying their fair share, and folks who are here illegally and without documentation are not.”
[In fact, about 6 million undocumented immigrants file individual income tax returns each year, and up to 75 percent pay federal, state, and local taxes, while paying about $7 billion per year into Social Security without hope of ever collecting benefits]
Or:
“Congress has got to live by the pay-as-you-go rule.”
Or:
“We must protect North Carolina’s unique ‘right to work’ laws.”
Or, better still, perhaps Cunningham should just gracefully bow out while there’s still time, and let an inspiring and straight-shooting woman of color get the job done, potently mobilizing North Carolina’s majority-Democratic voters (47% of whom are African American) to turn Thom Tillis out of office and help flip the White House with this purple state’s Electoral College votes.
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over while hoping for a different result. Tell Chuck Schumer and Cal Cunningham to stop the insanity: make your donation to support Erica Smith’s campaign today.
And please do it now. Primary early voting is right around the corner (beginning Feb. 13), and election day is March 3rd.
