After his “Olympic gold flip-flop” that jeopardized funding for North Carolina military projects and wound up pleasing no one, Senator Thom Tillis has been losing support and credibility among North Carolina Republicans. Tillis flip-flopped his way to a primary challenger this week in conservative businessman Garland Tucker, whose campaign is already slamming Tillis as a “typical Washington politician.”
Here’s what North Carolinians are watching about Tillis’ troubles and the GOP Senate primary battle that’s brewing:
“…facing mounting pressure, he flip-flopped, essentially, and decided to vote in favor of the President, basically not voting to block that emergency declaration from going into effect. And so that whole series of events led to some questions within North Carolina Republican establishment questioning whether or not he was, one, conservative enough, if he backed the President enough. These all spelled, and kind of increased that murmur of the conversation about whether he should be primaried in the 2020 election.”
“A recent Morning Consult poll shows 53 percent of Republican voters in North Carolina approve of Tillis’ job performance. That’s the second-lowest approval rating among all Republican Senators up for reelection in 2020.”
“Tillis received quite a bit of backlash a few weeks ago when he initially opposed President Trump’s national emergency declaration over border security, before ultimately changing his mind and voting for it.”
“Critics of Tillis were unhappy when Tillis initially said he’d oppose President Donald Trump’s declaration of a national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border, and then ultimately voted for it. They say Tillis is ripe for a competitive primary.”
“I think that Thom Tillis made a huge mistake, for one thing, when he didn’t follow through on his threat to go after President Trump on the whole issue of the emergency declaration, and so he didn’t really do himself any favors at all.”
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