On Monday, the North Carolina State Board of Elections set the schedule for the special election for the 9th Congressional District, a contest that’s being held because the original race was marred by election fraud intended to help Republican Mark Harris. The candidate filing deadline will be on March 15, and party primaries will take place May 14.
North Carolina requires a primary runoff for contests where no one takes at least 30 percent of the vote. The runoffs would take place on Sept. 10, and the general election would be Nov. 5. However, if no such runoffs are required, the general would be held on Sept. 10.
Note that this special election is taking place on a different schedule than the contest for the 3rd District. Board director Kim Strach said this is because the state wants to make sure election officials have time to deploy staff to Bladen and Robeson counties, which were at the center of the election fraud scandal last fall. (In the 3rd, primaries are set for April, with the general election in September unless there are no runoffs, in which case it would take place in July.)
Democrat Dan McCready, a Marine veteran and businessman, is running again, and he’s unlikely to face any serious opposition in the primary. However, the GOP will probably face a crowded contest for the nomination in this suburban Charlotte district. Two Republicans, former Charlotte City Councilor Kenny Smith and Union County party chair Dan Barry, both recently announced that they would not run, but more are on the way.
WBTV reports that state Sen. Dan Bishop is in and will self-fund $250,000, though Bishop has not yet announced he’s running. Bishop is best known as the author of House Bill 2 in 2016, also known as the anti-LGBT “bathroom bill.” The law, which required anyone using bathrooms at schools or public facilities to use the restroom associated with the gender on their birth certificate, caused a national backlash and led a number of businesses to cancel planned expansions into North Carolina, and it also contributed to GOP Gov. Pat McCrory’s 2016 defeat. Bishop’s career survived, though, and last year, he was re-elected 53-47 in a seat that Trump carried 50-47.
The only notable declared Republican candidate so far is Union County Commissioner Stony Rushing, who has the endorsement of 2018 nominee Mark Harris. It’s unlikely that national Republicans will want to nominate someone who can be tied to Harris, but Rushing may have his own issues. On Sunday, Rushing posted to Facebook that that he’d “[h]ad a very nice reporter from Washington ask me about my sexual history today. I made a deal with him and I will make it to others in the media.”
The deal, according to Rushing, is that he’d “give an exclusive interview about my sexual history from loss of virginity to today to the reporter who can get Dan McCready to answer these three questions.” Those questions were about McCready’s support for abortion rights, the Green New Deal, and something difficult to parse about an alleged tip regarding the board’s election fraud investigation.
So, what led Rushing to put forward this bizarre challenge? In a jaw-dropping story in Popular Information, Judd Legum (formerly of ThinkProgress) writes that in 2015, Rushing filed a complaint on behalf of his pre-teen daughter, accusing a woman named Tracy Wesolek of stalking her and requesting a no-contact order. Rushing provided few details, though, and in court, he admitted that he’d had an affair with Wesolek. (Rushing is married to another woman.)
Rushing also had little evidence to support his accusations that Wesolek had stalked his daughter, something he admitted after insisting on taking the matter to trial. The judge soon dismissed the case. Wesolek’s attorney told Legum that he believed Rushing went to court in the first place because he wanted “political cover” for the affair and sought to depict Wesolek as a “psycho stalker.”
In an interview with Legum, Rushing said he’d sought the no-contact order because Wesolek was “saying things about my daughter.” He did not elaborate and instead claimed that the judge had ordered him not to talk about it, which Legum says is false. Rushing also refused to say if he had an affair with Wesolek but would give Popular Information an exclusive interview about “everyone I had sex with from virginity to today” if they’d ask McCready, Rushing’s would-be Democratic foe, his list of questions. Legum says that Rushing then ended the interview and immediately posted his challenge to Facebook.
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