In Triangle-area congressional runoff, Republicans Daughtry and Knott fight over Democratic ties
Kelly Daughtry, Brad Knott and their politically connected families are spending millions of dollars to woo voters in North Carolina's 13th Congressional District, where a runoff in the GOP primary will be held on May 14.
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Sandra Dement just wants candidates to explain how they’ll fix the nation’s biggest problems. Her top issue? The economy.
“Gas is up. Groceries are up. Any kind of goods, any kinds of services, everything has gone up,” Dement, a 60-year-old Louisburg resident, said as she ate lunch at the Hometown Cafe in Franklinton. “And for me, I’m on disability. I’m on a limited budget … so I’ve got to make it work once a month.”
North Carolina voters view the economy and health care as the top issues heading into the 2024 general election season, according to a WRAL News poll released last month.
And yet when Dement and her neighbors turn on their televisions in the conservative 13th Congressional District, they see nonstop ads with candidates talking about other things. They also see a lot of mud-slinging and finger-pointing.
“I don’t like that,” Dement said. “I wish they would focus on the issues instead of trying to beat the other person down.”
Dement is among the dozens of customers who regularly pass through the Hometown Cafe on any given day. It’s a popular spot for workers who want to start their day with a biscuit or pop in for a hot lunch, or for retirees who want to sip coffee and talk about the state of things.
It’s smack in the middle of the 13th district, where Republicans Kelly Daughtry and Brad Knott are battling for GOP votes ahead of a May 14 primary runoff.
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On a drizzly weekday morning, it’s hard to find anyone besides Dement who plans to vote or who has even heard of the candidates. Many have tuned out the race. And few seem concerned with the main issues the candidates are sparring over: immigration and conservative bona fides.
Dement is an unaffiliated voter who supported Democrat Barack Obama before pivoting to Republican Donald Trump. She voted in the GOP’s primaries on March 5, when none of the party's 13th district candidates received enough votes to win. She voted that day — “I think it was for Kelly Daughtry,” she said — but hasn’t decided who she’ll support in the runoff.
She says she wants to hear about solutions to the issues that matter most to her, not accusations.
Instead, the race to represent more than 700,000 Triangle-area residents in Congress has become about which candidate is the most conservative, with Knott and Daughtry accusing each other of holding secret liberal beliefs.
By focusing on the issue most important specifically to Republicans — immigration was tops among likely Trump voters, according to the WRAL News poll — while pumping up their conservative credentials, each is targeting the party’s base to win the nomination. It’s an age-old strategy in primaries, which have notoriously low turnouts and tend to see participation from only the most engaged voters.
Voters in the district who are upset with the current discourse — or perhaps disengaged by it — can blame gerrymandering, incumbent U.S. Rep. Wiley Nickel has said. State lawmakers redrew North Carolina’s election maps last year, giving Republicans an advantage in Nickel’s district and others.
In 2022, the 13th district was mostly confined to the southeastern regions of the Triangle in Wake, Johnston and Harnett Counties. In the 2024 election, it curls around left-leaning Wake County like a fish hook. It starts in Caswell County and stretches eastward across the state’s northern border before dropping into Franklin, Johnston and Harnett counties. It then turns west again, capturing the south extremes of Wake County before ending southwest of the Triangle in Lee County.
Frank Pierce is the Democratic nominee. Nickel isn’t seeking reelection because he sees little chance for any Democrat to win. He has lamented that whoever wins the GOP primary will be beholden to Trump, and the two Republican candidates are aligning themselves with the former president.
Knott was endorsed by Trump on April 5. His website touts a banner proclaiming “BRAD BACKS TRUMP!” “Strengthening law enforcement, securing the border and punishing people who are here illegally, especially if they commit crimes,” Knott said of his priorities in a WRAL interview last month. “We can build support on a bipartisan basis.”
Daughtry, meanwhile, has aired a television ad that says she and Trump are two sides of the same coin. “I'll vote to secure the border, send illegals back, crush cartels and protect families in every corner of the country,” she pledged in a recent social media post.
Daughtry and Knott share several similarities, beyond their platforms. Both are successful attorneys—Daughtry in private practice and Knott as a former federal prosecutor—and both have family members who are involved in North Carolina politics.
The candidates and their politically connected families have spent millions of dollars on their respective campaigns, helping Daughtry and Knott emerge from a crowded Republican field in the March 5 primary. They received the most votes, but no candidate received the 30% support needed to secure their party’s nomination.
How they got here
Daughtry, 54, is a family law attorney whose father, Leo Daughtry, represented Johnston County in the legislature for nearly 30 years. She earned some name recognition by running for the seat in 2022. She came up short in the GOP primary to Bo Hines, who benefited from support from Washington-based political groups and then lost to Nickel in the general election.
She is expected to spend more on the runoff, campaigning on her roots in the district and targeting rural voters. Her campaign ads show her driving down country roads in a pickup truck and then standing in front of a courthouse, citing work for farmers in the courtroom. Daughtry was part of a legal team that years ago sued an insecticide maker, Bayer Crop Science, for selling a product that killed crops in North Carolina.
While Daughtry is casting herself as the voice of rural voters, Knott is campaigning as the best candidate to tackle the issues of the day, namely immigration and crime.
Trump endorsed Budd’s run for U.S. Senate in 2022. Budd endorsed Knott and helped him get a meeting with Trump in Florida, helping Knott secure the former president’s endorsement. Republican political insiders say Knott likely needed the endorsement to compete with Daughtry, who has more money and, until recently, had significantly more ads than Knott on air.
With lesser-known candidates, “the impact of the Trump endorsement can be 20 points or more,” McLennan said in an email. “So, assuming that Daughtry’s poll numbers are accurate, it is possible that the Trump endorsement could swing the election to Knott.”
Attacked for ties to Democrats
Daughtry and Knott have donned barn coats for television ads where they campaign as political outsiders — a message tailored to connect with voters in the district’s more rural counties, particularly those further from Triangle’s core that weren’t in the district two years ago.
Daughtry and Knott also make it clear they’re only courting the type of conservative who would be repulsed by their opponent’s ties to Democrats.
Knott has criticized Daughtry for donating to Democratic candidates in recent years. She gave $250 to Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Cheri Beasley in 2021 and $500 to Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein’s reelection campaign in 2020. Stein is now running for governor against Republican Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson.
“It is not shocking [that] failed campaigns are pushing tired old talking points because they are losing,” said Aimee Mulligan, spokesperson for the Daughtry campaign.
Knott is also attacking Daughtry for a September 2012 Facebook post in which she said she planned to vote for Obama. Daughtry’s campaign said she voted for Mitt Romney that year and for Trump every year since.
Knott has said that missing the GOP primaries and voting from the wrong address were oversights. He says he forgot to change his address because his home is only about three miles away from his parents’ house, where he lived as an adult.
Daughtry’s campaign is also attacking Knott for working as a federal prosecutor under the Obama and Biden administrations, referring to Knott in ads as “Biden’s lawyer.” Knott’s campaign says those attacks are misleading because they suggest that his job was political in nature. While U.S. attorneys are typically nominated by presidents and approved by the senate, assistant U.S. attorneys are not.
Low turnout expected
Republicans and some unaffiliated voters are allowed to vote in the GOP’s May 14 runoff. Unaffiliated voters can participate only if they didn’t vote in another party’s primary on March 5.
Voter turnout tends to drop for runoff races, as it did in North Carolina’s most recent congressional runoff in 2020. In the state’s 11th Congressional District race that year, turnout dipped from 31% in the March primary to 12% in the GOP runoff.
At the Hometown Cafe in Franklinton, the idea of returning to the ballot box for a special election wasn’t appealing to many customers.The voting process takes time and energy that many people just aren’t willing to give up for candidates they’re not enthusiastic about.
Dement plans to vote on May 14. She says she sees voting as her civic duty — especially as a woman.
“It’s always worth it,” she said. “It took a lot of struggle and a lot of sacrifice for us to get to vote.”
She said that Trump’s endorsement of Knott is persuasive. But she’s still undecided.
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