Tillis’ Tough Friday: Labeled “D.C.’s Most Vulnerable Republican” As Report Reveals His Campaign Copied Strategy Memo From Failed Gubernatorial Race

Tillis Called “Epitome of a Weather Vane” As He Attempts “to Get Voters to Like Him”

It’s been a tough Friday for vulnerable Republican Senator Thom Tillis. First, a blistering Daily Beast column eviscerated Tillis for trying to reinvent himself in a desperate attempt to save his struggling re-election campaign. The piece noted Tillis was called out for being the “epitome of a weather vane” as he “went full Trump” but is now “keeping his head down” as Trump’s poll numbers plummet. Then, a new Daily Beast report revealed that Tillis’ campaign “literally lift[ed] Ed Gillespie’s strategy memo” in an attempt to make “an optimistic case” for the Senator who faces an increasingly difficult re-election.  

Today is just the latest in a string of bad days for Tillis: a recent series of reports detailed just how worried North Carolina Republicans are about Tillis’ reelection bid. Tillis already faced a tough reelection – three major nonpartisan election analysts have shifted the race to “Toss-Up” as polls show that the race is increasingly competitive. Local North Carolina Republican Party leaders are also worried Tillis will suffer “collateral damage” from his close friend and colleague Senator Richard Burr’s stock trading scandal and that the growing scandal “could take down Tillis.” 

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

Daily Beast (Opinion): Thom Tillis Went Full Trump. Now He’s D.C.’s Most Vulnerable Republican

By Eleanor Clift

June 12, 2020

Key Points: 

• “[Tillis is] trying to reinvent himself right before an election by focusing on his humble roots but he has consistently voted against policies that would help folks move up the economic ladder, move up the education ladder,” says Morgan Jackson, a political strategist in Raleigh. “It’s not just where you came from, it’s what you do with it.”

• Control of the U.S. Senate is at stake, and Tillis is one of the most vulnerable senators. He’s perhaps best known for getting lots of money from big pharma, big oil, big banks and payday lenders, and for pushing their preferred policies. A Morning Consult poll last year had him with the lowest approval rating of any senator, at 34 percent.

• His biographical ads are a belated attempt to get voters to like him. But which voters? He’s had a troubled relationship with President Trump, and was twice booed at a Trump rally, most recently in March of this year. 

• He had to go full Trump to win his primary on Super Tuesday, and now he’s trying to boost rural turnout by convincing those voters that he’s one of them. 

• As Trump’s numbers tank, Tillis is keeping his head down, not taking sides between the governor and the president over holding the GOP Convention in Charlotte, even praising Democratic Governor Roy Cooper for his go-slow approach to opening up the economy. But Tillis can’t escape from his past—or from his present—as an anti-Obamacare Republican who bragged that he “stopped Medicaid cold” when he was speaker of the North Carolina legislature.

•  “When he talks about humble roots and where he comes from, he’s taken more money from the pharmaceutical industry than any other member of Congress,” Morgan Jackson told The Daily Beast, repeating “than any other member of Congress,” and pointing out the implications of that financial backing for where his interests might lie, for example, on lowering the cost of prescription drugs, a major issue for voters, or treating opioid addiction.

• As an up-and-coming Republican before Trump, Tillis boasted he was a RINO, recasting the label as Republicans In Need of Outcomes. His outcomes generally favor the well-heeled and corporate interests. Only 7 percent of his first quarter campaign contributions this year came from small donations. He worked to get “struggling” pharmaceutical companies access to taxpayer funds in the CARES Act program, which was meant for small businesses. 

• When oil prices dropped, Tillis wrote a letter to the administration urging there be no “oil and gas bias” when distributing economic relief funds. After a White House summit with the industry on April 3, Tillis received over $60,000 in corporate PAC checks from companies that had attended the summit. 

• Payday lenders have been a pet project of Tillis’ going back to his days as a state lawmaker. As speaker of the North Carolina House in 2013, he received more than $30,000 from the industry, the most of any legislator in the state. Once in Washington, he continued his alliance with this industry which is always under fire because of its usurious interest rates. In a March 10 Senate Banking committee hearing, Tillis fended off allegations that payday lenders might prey on people hard hit by the coronavirus. “As a kid who grew up on 90-day notes with my dad,” Tillis warned against “overreach” or “painting with a broad brush” an industry he regards as a lifeline. Within days of the hearing, he had received more than $20,000 from four major payday lenders. 

• A day after a group of 24 bipartisan attorney generals, including North Carolina AG Josh Stein, wrote a letter opposing a new “Rent-A-Bank” rule that would benefit payday lenders, Tillis received $12,500 from the industry and consumer finance companies confident he will fight their battles in Washington. 

• When the big banks were sued by small business owners for prioritizing their corporate clients in granting government relief funds, Tillis took in more than $43,000 from the corporate PACs of the banks named in the lawsuit—Bank Of America, JPMorgan Chase, U.S. Bank, and Wells Fargo—saying he didn’t see any evidence they were favoring big business over small business.

• “This guy is pretty much the epitome of a weather vane,” says Tom Mills, founder and publisher of PoliticsNC.com, a website of commentary and analysis.

• He wasn’t much of a presence in Washington until he wrote an op-ed in February 2019 that appeared in The Washington Post saying he supported Trump’s border control policies but opposed the president’s national emergency declaration as a way to get money for his wall. Trump trashed Tillis on Twitter and vowed to recruit someone to run against him in the GOP primary. 

• In March 2019, 12 Senate Republicans joined the Democrats to block Trump’s emergency declaration. Tillis wasn’t one of them. It was a major capitulation and one of the few things that voters know for sure about Tillis. It would have diverted millions in projects replacing aging infrastructure on the state’s military bases. Politifacts declared it a “Full Flop” on its Flip-O-Meter. 

Read the full column here.

The Daily Beast: Thom Tillis’ Campaign Literally Lifts Ed Gillespie’s Strategy Memo

By Sam Brodey

June 12, 2020

Key Points:

• Sen. Thom Tillis’ (R-N.C.) campaign spokesman acknowledged on Friday that he had copied large portions of a general election strategy memo from a similar document he had put together while working on Ed Gillespie’s 2017 bid to be governor of Virginia.

• The memo, which was released this past March, laid out an optimistic case for Tillis’ chances of re-election in North Carolina following former state senator Cal Cunningham’s emergence from the Democratic primary. But many of the arguments used the same language as a June 2017 memo that Gillespie’s campaign sent out after now-Gov. Ralph Northam emerged from his primary campaign.

• Tillis’ campaign memo also features multiple sections that are identical to Gillespie’s, right down to the same turns of phrase and political cliches. According to their respective memos, both candidates “begin the general election right where they want to be… firmly in the center-right” and boast “an army of supporters who are ready to win in November and who are ready to work to make that happen.” And for each candidate’s Democratic opponents, their “primary victory was a costly one… both financially and politically.”

• Nevertheless, the use of the Gillespie memo as a boilerplate for the Tillis campaign’s own election outlook invites some unfavorable analogies. A longtime GOP operative, Gillespie ended up being caught between an increasingly liberal electorate and an increasingly Trump-loving base. He ultimately chose to focus on the latter, closing the campaign by warning about MS-13 gangs taking over Virginia. That embrace of Trumpism resulted in a general election loss of nine points—the worst showing for a Republican candidate for governor in Virginia in 30 years.

• A similar political landscape now faces Tillis: Democrats are more optimistic about their chances in North Carolina, and the senator’s bid for a second term is likely to be one of the hardest-fought Senate races in the country this November. 

• Though Tillis managed to scare off a serious primary challenge from the right, he’s faced criticism after announcing he’d vote to block the president’s controversial move to use emergency funds to construct the border wall—a position Tillis later reversed under fire. Since then, North Carolina Republicans have questioned why Tillis hasn’t more vocally defended his colleague, Sen. Richard Burr, who is under federal investigation over his stock trading activity amid the coronavirus outbreak.   

Read the full report here.

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