North Carolina Rep. Mark Meadows, a Republican who chaired the nihilistic House Freedom Caucus from 2017 until October of this year, announced Thursday that he would not seek re-election to his conservative 11th Congressional District.
Meadows’ announcement comes one day before the state’s candidate filing deadline, so his potential successors have only until noon local time on Friday to decide whether to run for his seat. However, not everyone who wants to enter this race may be able to. Wake County Board of Elections member Gerry Cohen points out that state law prohibits candidates from running for multiple posts at once, and anyone who filed to seek a different office can no longer take their name off the ballot because the deadline to do so passed on Tuesday.
The GOP primary will take place March 3, and there would be a May runoff if no one takes at least 30% of the vote. Whoever wins the Republican nomination for Meadows’ constituency, which includes Appalachian North Carolina in the western portion of the state, will be the heavy favorite to keep it red. The state’s new court-ordered map did move the 11th District a bit to the left from 63-34 Trump to 57-40 Trump, but it’s still a heavy lift for Democrats. However, Daily Kos Elections data shows that Republican Pat McCrory carried the seat by a modest 52-45 margin as he was very narrowly losing the 2016 gubernatorial race, so a strong Democratic nominee may be able to make things interesting.
Redistricting also made this a considerably more compact seat. Asheville, which is one of the few pockets of Democratic strength left in western North Carolina, was awkwardly split under the old map between the 10th and 11th Districts, so much so that a Gerrymander 5K was held in 2017 by the League of Women Voters where runners jogged along the border between the two seats. (Jeremy Markovich wrote in Politico, “As a race, the Gerrymander 5K was unsatisfying. We had to run on the sidewalks; one poor woman nearly decapitated herself when she ran right into the guywire of a telephone pole.”) The new 11th District contains all of Asheville, but it’s still outweighed by the surrounding red counties.
Meadows’ decision to retire so soon before the deadline came as a surprise, but his departure wasn’t a complete bolt out of the blue. Over the last year there have been rumors that Meadows was in line for a post in the Trump administration, and he said Thursday, “Without getting into any specifics, I’ve had ongoing conversations with the president about helping with his team in a closer environment.” Meadows added, “And I felt like it would be disingenuous to file and then resign at some point in the future and leave my district searching for a nominee.”
Meadows worked in real estate and as chair of the Macon County GOP before running for office, and he also served on the State Board for Economic Development in Western North Carolina. Meadows got his chance to run for Congress in 2011 after the GOP state legislature targeted Democratic Rep. Heath Shuler by removing Asheville from his district. Shuler, who was one of the more conservative members of the Democratic caucus, initially said he’d still seek re-election, and Meadows was one of several Republicans running to take him on.
In February of 2012, though, Shuler decided to retire, and there was little question that the GOP would pick up his seat. Meadows self-funded much of his race and ran a campaign where he promoted himself as a "Christian conservative businessman," saying in his opening ad, “I'm driven by a moral obligation to stop Barack Obama's assault on our values, to protect marriage between one man and one woman.”
Meadows took 38% of the vote in the eight-way GOP primary, which was just a little below the 40% he needed to win the nomination outright at the time. During the second round Meadows repeatedly said it was time to send Obama “back home to Kenya or wherever it is,” but unsurprisingly, primary voters didn’t hold this against him. Meadows defeated fellow businessman Vance Patterson 76-24 to claim the nomination, and he won the general election 57-43 against former Shuler chief-of-staff Hayden Rogers. Meadows never had trouble getting re-elected afterwards even after redistricting moved some of Asheville back into the 11th District in 2016.
Meadows quickly stood out in Congress in 2013 when he helped persuade his colleagues to shut down the government in an unsuccessful attempt to dismantle Obamacare. Meadows co-founded the far-right House Freedom Caucus in 2015, and in July of that year he also made news when he introduced a resolution to force a new vote for speaker, an action Meadows took on Speaker John Boehner’s birthday. The vote wasn’t ever held, but it helped showcase the conservative anger with Boehner, who later said he was already planning to resign later that year. In 2017, the now-former speaker said of Meadows, “He’s an idiot. I can’t tell you what makes him tick.”
Meadows took over as Freedom Caucus chair in 2017 as Trump was entering the White House, and he quickly established himself as a power player in DC. Meadows initially opposed the initial GOP bill to repeal Obamacare because it didn’t go far enough, which played a key role in temporarily killing the legislation. Meadows soon supported a new version of the legislation that went on to pass the House, though it died in the Senate. Despite his early battles with Trump on healthcare, Meadows soon stood out as a loyal and influential administration ally.
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