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North Carolina Republicans to Pick Candidate for Congress in Fraud-Tainted District

By Alan Blinder
May 14, 2019

North Carolina Republicans have controlled the state’s Ninth Congressional District since 1963. In November, the long streak appeared unbroken, and the party celebrated, relieved by a narrow 905-vote victory over the Democratic candidate.

But on Tuesday, Republican voters will return to the polls to pick someone to represent the party in a do-over election after last year’s seeming success collapsed in the wake of fraud accusations.

Some Republicans expect that Tuesday’s vote — part of a protracted process to resolve the final unsettled race of the midterms — will help them begin to escape the taint of wrongdoing that came to symbolize last year’s campaign for Congress in the Ninth District.

Republican after Republican qualified for this year’s race, which polling suggests is close, including State Senator Dan Bishop, who played a substantial role in North Carolina’s caustic battle a few years ago over bathroom access for transgender people, and Stony Rushing, the Union County commissioner who has won the support of Mark Harris, the Republican candidate whose campaign supported the illicit effort that prompted the new election.

If none of the 10 candidates wins at least 30 percent of the vote, the second-place finisher may request a second round of voting in September, ahead of a general election in November. If any candidate musters at least 30 percent on Tuesday, the general election will move to September.

The Democratic candidate will be Dan McCready, a former Marine who was his party’s candidate last fall.

Still, the campaign, lengthy as it has become, may end before a swirl of state and federal inquiries that have already led to charges against L. McCrae Dowless Jr., a contractor who oversaw an impropriety-ridden effort on behalf of Mr. Harris’s campaign.

North Carolina regulators ordered a new election after they concluded in February that Mr. Dowless’s operatives — who acknowledged they had illegally collected and filled in absentee ballots — had compromised the vote. Mr. Harris appeared to have won the election by 905 votes, and although the state authorities did not explicitly conclude that there had been enough misconduct to tip the outcome in the Republican’s direction, they found that improprieties had been sufficiently widespread to undermine the balloting’s integrity.

Republicans initially resisted calls for a new election, which began within weeks of the midterm vote. But after days of damning testimony before the State Board of Elections, during which Mr. Harris appeared to mislead regulators, party officials conceded that another campaign was inevitable.

State regulators quickly agreed and essentially reset the district’s 2018 election by reopening candidate qualifying and ordering primary and general elections. The Ninth District includes a sliver of Charlotte and runs eastward to rural areas like Bladen County, where the most well-documented misconduct took place.

Three of the district’s most prominent Republicans — Mr. Harris, former Gov. Pat McCrory and former Representative Robert M. Pittenger — declined to run in the new election. But the Republican field still quickly filled, and Democrats again coalesced around Mr. McCready.

In addition to Mr. Bishop and Mr. Rushing, candidates included Matthew Ridenhour, a former commissioner in Mecklenburg County, and Leigh Brown, a real estate agent. Along with registered Republicans, unaffiliated voters may cast ballots on Tuesday.

The winner, whether this week or in September, will take on a candidate who has been among the most celebrated in Democratic congressional politics in recent years. Although Republicans have held the House seat in the Ninth since the Kennedy administration, Mr. McCready proved a skilled candidate last year. During the drama before the regulators in Raleigh, he largely kept out of sight, leaving the most pointed of jabs to lawyers and Democratic campaign operatives.

Yet it was always clear that if the state ordered another vote, Mr. McCready would run again. The question was whether Mr. Harris would. By the end of February, Mr. Harris, who has not been charged with a crime and has denied wrongdoing, cited health reasons and said he would skip another campaign.

Mr. Dowless, who has been indicted in connection with voter-turnout efforts in the 2016 general election and the 2018 primary, has remained a subject of official investigation and public curiosity. On the first day of early voting, local news outlets reported, Mr. Dowless went to cast his ballot in Bladen County.

He was first in line.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/14/us/politics/north-carolina-republican-primary.html