On Thursday, Republican state Rep. Holly Grange announced that she would challenge Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper. Grange’s nascent campaign has been a source of tension for North Carolina Republicans for a while. PoliticsNC wrote back in April about rumors that GOP Sen. Thom Tillis' team was trying to recruit her to try and prevent Lt. Gov. Dan Forest, who recently confirmed he would run, from taking the GOP nod.
While Forest has much of the party establishment on his side, his far-right social conservative rhetoric may end up being a big liability for the entire 2020 GOP statewide ticket, including Tillis. However, Forest’s intra-party detractors are holding out hope that Grange is a more electable option.
Rep. Mark Meadows, the head of the nihilist House Freedom Caucus and a Forest supporter, made it clear this week that he believed Tillis was out to get his man. Meadows declared, “What will do more damage to Sen. Tillis is his encouragement of trying to get someone to run against Dan Forest and his active involvement, or his so-called active involvement, in that.” Meadows continued, “That will do more to create concern among Republican primary voters than perhaps any race right now.”
Tillis said in response, “I haven’t gotten into that race, probably won’t.” However, the senator didn’t explicitly deny that he had something to do with Grange running. Instead, he declared, “I’ve got my own primary. There’s a lot of people saying that I’m recruiting other people, which is a silly concept when I’m going to have one of the most expensive races in U.S. history just for my own re-election.”
The National Journal profiled Grange just before she announced, and she indeed cuts a bit of a different profile than Forest. Grange, who is an attorney and a U.S. Army veteran, was elected to office for the first time in 2016. Forest only won his first race four years before Grange, but he comes from a prominent North Carolina political family: His mother is Sue Myrick, a former mayor of Charlotte who later served in the U.S. House for 18 years.
Perhaps more importantly, Grange also could be a less hardline alternative to Forest. The lieutenant governor is an ardent supporter of the anti-LGBTQ "bathroom bill" HB2, which sparked a backlash and boycott threats by major businesses and thus helped cost GOP Gov. Pat McCrory re-election in 2016 against Cooper.
Forest has shown no interest in reigning himself in, either. Last month, he made headlines for delivering a hate-fueled sermon in which he warned, "[N]o other nation, my friends, has ever survived the diversity and multiculturalism that America faces today, because of a lack of assimilation, because of this division, and because of this identity politics."
By contrast, Grange voted for a compromise that partially repealed that legislation in 2017, and her position on the issue would likely play better in suburban areas like hers that saw Republicans take heavy losses in 2018 thanks to the state GOP's unpopularity there—indeed, Grange won re-election just 53-47 in a Wilmington-area seat Trump carried 56-41 two years before. However, Grange is hardly a progressive herself. Her announcement video highlighted her opposition to abortion rights and called for “tougher state immigration laws, no matter how loud the liberals whine about it.”
No other notable Republicans have publicly expressed interest in running for governor in months, but there’s still time for another candidate to emerge ahead of the Dec. 20 filing deadline. McCrory, the Republican who lost to Cooper in 2016, expressed interest in a comeback bid as recently as February, but he’s said little since then about any 2020 plans. McCrory, who now hosts a conservative radio show, did promise a “big announcement” for his listeners at the start of this month, and he revealed that he would launch … a podcast.
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