Opinion

SETH EFFRON: 2022 Senate primary will be battle for N.C. GOP's identity

Saturday, June 12, 2021 -- Will North Carolina be another stage where Donald Trump, like on "The Apprentice," determines who gets a place in the organization and who gets fired? What does it take to be a loyal Republican in North Carolina in 2022? Will a contentious primary leave the victor - whether Trump anointed or not - better or worse positioned against the Democrats (where a contentious primary is also in the offing)? Do the campaigns of 1972 or 1986 offer any clues?

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Trump declares Ted Budd as North Carolina's next senator in endorsement
EDITOR'S NOTE: Seth Effron is opinion editor for the Capitol Broadcasting Company.

What is the identity of the North Carolina Republican Party? What does it stand for? Who does it stand by?

Those questions always loom large for political parties – and not just for the state’s Republicans.

But the 2022 Republican primary that will pick its candidate for the U.S. Senate to replace Richard Burr represents a landmark moment that the state GOP hasn’t seen since 1972. Fifty years ago it was fiscal conservativism vs. ideological conservativism. Now it is about strength of loyalty to Donald Trump.

The 1972 Nixon landslide represented a major watershed with Republicans Jesse Helms to the U.S. Senate and James Holshouser to governor riding his coattails to statewide victories. But Helms and Holshouser were very different kinds of Republicans. Those differences survived an uneasy truce over the next 40 years.

The differences over those decades were less about specifics than prominence. Broadly, one camp was “fiscal” Republicans and the other were “ideological.” Both camps shared the same general views. The divisions were more about emphasis and political DNA.

Fiscal Republicans, generally, were lifelong GOP affiliates. Going back to the 1950s when Charles Jonas held the lone Republican seat in the state’s congressional delegation, and then a decade later when Jim Broyhill joined, these folks stressed fiscal issues as their political foundation. They focused most significantly on lower taxes, less government regulation of business and commerce and other similar issues. Future GOP members of Congress and, like Earl Ruth, Wilmer Mizell, Jim Martin (who later became governor), Howard Coble and Alex McMillan, are a part of that legacy.

Ideological Republicans, generally, focused on moral race-based issues. Jim Gardner of Rocky Mount who won a single term in Congress in 1966, may have been the first in this camp. But it is Helms’ election to the Senate in 1972 that marked the party’s strong shift. Helms had been a Democrat until 1970. He’d bring tens of thousands more like him into the state’s GOP until his death in 2008. Bill Cobey, Fred Heineman, Sue Myrick and David Funderburk who all served in the U.S. House – and of course the late U.S. Sen. John East – came out of the Helms mold.

Perhaps the most significant – and rare – open clash between the two camps came in the 1986 GOP Senate primary to fill the seat vacated by East. Gov. Martin prevailed upon Broyhill to give up his very safe House seat to become interim senator and campaign to keep the seat in GOP hands. But opposition arose from the ideological wing in the form of Funderburk – a Helms protégé who’d been ambassador to Romania. While Broyhill won the GOP primary handily, getting 69% of the vote, there were contentious and bitter moments. It didn’t give him a strong launching pad for the general election battle against the well-known former governor and popular Duke University President Terry Sanford. North Carolina reflected the Democratic trend nationally, and Sanford captured 52 percent of the general election vote for the victory.

Fast forward to 2021 – and the jockeying in the GOP among the potential candidates to succeed Burr – a lifelong Republican who very much comes from the Jonas, Broyhill, Martin lineage of the party, but was censured by the state party for failing to be sufficiently loyal to Trump.

The ideological wing has come to clearly dominate the party. Fiscal conservativism is taken for granted as a matter of faith but it is hot-button social issues – abortion, race, gender identity and the like that dominate the rhetoric and energy.

More than anything, the 2022 GOP Senate Primary will determine if the defining factor is loyalty to, and support from, the former president. And Trump didn’t take long in giving his seal of approval in the state’s GOP Senate campaign to three-term congressman Ted Budd. Budd, a Rural Hall gun store owner, was anointed when Trump endorsed him at the state GOP convention last week in Greenville. Curiously, Budd was the 2nd choice for the Senate nomination in an informal straw poll of the1,200 convention delegates (U.S. Rep. Mark Walker won the straw poll with 44% backing to Budd’s 29% and former Gov. Pat McCrory’s 18%).
It set the stage for what could be a contentious primary with McCrory left to claim that Trump “endorsed a Washington insider who has done more to oppose the Trump agenda than anyone in this race.” Mark Walker, the former Sixth District congressman got to his seat by defeating the son of the state’s most powerful Republican in his initial GOP primary in 2014. Having served three terms, Walker passed off Trump’s endorsement as “some bad information from his former chief of staff. And it wouldn’t be the first time. This is just going to make (winning) that much sweeter.” As is well evidenced, Trump does not take kindly to criticism – directly or in directly.

Will North Carolina be another stage where Donald Trump, like on “The Apprentice,” determines who gets a place in the organization and who gets fired?

What does it take to be a loyal Republican in North Carolina in 2022?

Will a contentious primary leave the victor – whether Trump anointed or not – better or worse positioned against the Democrats (where a contentious primary is also in the offing)? Do the campaigns of 1972 or 1986 offer any clues?

Stay tuned.

(Note: The column has been updated to correct Mark Walker's service in the House of Representatives. He served three terms and did not seek re-election in 2020)

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